Chair Avatars
This is a display area for my spare chairs - my various Twitter avatars.
Why Chairs?
Chairs symbolize social interaction. They invite you to sit down and stay a while; take a load off. You're probably sitting right now. We sit down to digest news. We sit to think. We sit to be social. You might say chairs are the first social media. Okay, you wouldn't but let's pretend.
Some beautiful chairs are painful to sit on (talkin' to you Frank Lloyd Wright, and owners of Indian restaurants everywhere). Many comfy chairs can look quite ugly. Chairs can fit with all situations - from thrones to bean-bags. Lawn chairs say "relax, enjoy the weather." Kitchen chairs say "have a bite." Dentists' chairs say "sit down and scream a while."
As an early user of Twitter in '07, I began to explore a dynamic avatar idea – it was always easy to identify my feed based on the avatar's subject matter, but the actual image changed often. If you followed me and my meanderings, I hope you found the conversation fun and/or thoughtful. Pull up a chair.
The avatar history is captured below...
Nov 17, 2022
Chairs Up, Moving On
Since my arrival on Twitter in 2007, I've had a dynamic avatar that shared my enjoyment of diverse chair designs. They're a part of our daily life that most people don't think about very much. I hope my sharing of a variety of models from famous designers of the past 150 yrs has been enjoyable to for Twitter followers and the occasional person who dug a little further to come here to this blog-type thing. 
With the demise of Twitter seeming likely for a while now, I've been cultivating an alternative presence on Mastodon for a couple of years. As of November 2022 I find that most of my online social media attention is there now, and Twitter seems to be self destructing under poor new management.
My avatar on Masto reflects my enthusiasm for a nicely-designed coffee mug, about which I'm somewhat opinionated as well. Not sure what I'll do about that yet. But meanwhile I've elected to leave my "chairvatar" history behind me.
I hope you'll connect on Mastodon and the greater "Fediverse" ecosystem of which it is a part, if or when you migrate over there. I will pop into Twitter occasionally out of a morbid interest in how these last weeks or months play out for the site. I might do a posted series of these selected chair favourites on Mastodon - so watch that space for some re-runs.
For now, I share this as my final chair presentation. I haven't identified the specific model that is popped up on top of the table in this image. Descriptively it is a combination plywood and solid birch ladder-back dining or classroom chair. It has bent plywood legs in the style of Finn designer Alvar Aalto, so may well be one of his designs. Aalto was active in the 1920s – '60s and was influenced by greats like Thonet, Saarinen and the Eames duo. I'll update this note if I discover the designer.
Thanks for visiting. Find me at mastodon.social/@ottaross. Hope to seat you around some time.
