My user profile image has an extensive history having gone through various incarnations over the last couple decades. It all started with the blue hedgehog Sonic the Hedgehog who is the official mascot of the video game company Sega (or Service Games for those who predated my lifetime and can remember them from their early days in arcade). As long as I can remember, I have had a soft spot for the little speedy, spiny rodent and his games (well most of his games, anyway), vastly preferring his cockiness and cool factor over the frankly boring flat and generic personality of a certain Italian plumber in red overalls (sorry, not sorry; Sega does what Nintendon’t).
The folks from BrightHand most likely recognize my first profile image, which ties in with my TabletPCReview username “sonichedgehog360” which I have been wanting to change for some years on TabletPCReview for some years to better coincide with my current online persona. When I first envisioned this username, I was excited about the upcoming game Sonic the Hedgehog that came out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 of that console era. The thing was, the game itself was a tremendous flop, a game so horrendously bad that it canonized the term “the Sonic cycle” among fan circles (standing for the never-ending loop of hype and disappointment with many modern Sonic games, basically) that lives on to this day. Ah, what an emotional roller coaster that was. So I wanted to ditch that profile name and quick.
Around the same time, I was actively part of the forum on the now-defunct JunSenoue.com, a fan site dedicated to the music artist Jun Senoue who has contributed extensively to the soundtracks in the Adventure era and modern era Sonic the Hedgehog games. I was already a member of Head-Fi.org which goes without saying that I was an avid user of headphones at the time, so I eventually made the switch to the username Hifihedgehog that I use here to express my love of music enjoyment, Hi-Fi equipment, and the blue blur. The forum gang at Jun Senoue totally loved the new “me” so it has stuck ever since.
To coincide with the username “Hifhedgehog”, I switched profile images and I have circulated through various free profile images over the years which have depicted the blue rodent in all his glory crowned with a fashionable pair of headphones on his spiky blue noggin. I am not entirely certain of the total accuracy of the chronology in the ordering of the profile images that I now share below, but they are mostly in the order as memory serves me. My favorite of course is the very last one that directly proceeded the current one I now have been using.
Fast forwarding to the present, my current profile image was an actual commissioned work I had paid for nearly three years ago (okay, my fandom is really showing now) after posting a wanted ad in r/SonictheHedgehog on Reddit requesting a custom creation. It features the good ol’ blue dude with the 'tude sporting Beyerdynamic T1 audiophile headphones. The T1, come to find out, weren’t actually all that good, objectively or subjectively speaking, by the way, and I have long since sold them since I had wanted to try them out of curiosity given I had gotten a good used price for them and I had been clued into some positive reviews about them. Given the abandonment of those headphones, I have been meaning to get my profile image recommissioned but never got around to it.
Then again, I just found this really cool image online while casually searching right now through drawings of Sonic wearing headphones, so I might just switch to that.