After years of watching my wife customize her avatar via Yahoo! Japan’s chat interface, I’ve always found myself slightly envious that the Japanese Yahoo! offered such a thing. Her avatar is very, very accurate (or rather, she has accurately chosen which combinations of facial features and accessories and hair to most accurately serve as her “virtual” face to the world).
I don’t use YIM or AIM or much of anything else aside from the occasional visit to a few Linux-oriented IRC channels (of course, since I am constantly breaking stuff, erm… recompiling kernels)… so I cannot tell for sure if YIM (the American version) has gotten around to using these avatars within itself. But… Yahoo! America finally does have the avatars.
I’ve never realized how exactly addictive these little things are… customizing the various options and such.
And, it is a terrific way to kill an afternoon.
Here is an accurate (if I may say so) representation of myself, which will have to do as I am probably not likely to ever post my face on the net.
Not too shabby, eh? It’s accurate from head to toe (as I actually have dark brown-bordering-on-black hair cut in a Caesar-style with a flip, a dark grey turtleneck, an overly long off-white scarf, navy blue jeans, and the sneakers (well, they are actually black Converse All-Stars).
And there’s a generic sushi place a few miles down the road from me that kinda-sorta resembles pretty much any sushi place like the one pictured.
Close enough for gum’mint work, anyway. 
