Who's that?
05.05.06 2:00 PM


By Kawigi
TopCoder Member

Time for the "Who looks the most/least like their member photo" contest! I'm just taking a sampling of people I've met here and a chance to meet.

SnapDragon is recognizable from his member photo, although contrary to popular belief, he is not green. He actually isn't nearly as pale as he looks in his profile. Also, he doesn't normally look so annoyed. I think there was an earlier period in TopCoder history where members tried to look intimidating in their photos (why?), and SnapDragon is a fine manifestation of this.



Petr was thinner than I thought he would be, and andrewzta was less thin than I thought he would be. I think it made a bigger difference with Petr, I suspect I wouldn't have recognized him on the street.

bladerunner was easy to recognize, mainly because he's the only person with the hairdo from his profile picture. Everyone will be glad to know that he isn't always making that face, though. It goes back to that intimidation era. misof on the other hand, has somewhat wilder hair than I imagined, probably partly because it's hard to tell one way or the other in his photo. Part of that might be from the background TopCoder puts on all the pictures, I think maybe some of his stray hair got cut off.

traugust looks exactly like his member photo, or close enough that I had no doubt at all who he is. It helps that he has about that much smile most of the time, and unlike other long-haired competitors (who pretty much all wear their hair back), he took his picture with his hair back, the way he normally wears it. \



Conversely, Eryx took me a minute to recognize (it wasn't THAT hard, though). The fact that he keeps his hair in a ponytail was part of it, but it's also that he's usually got this grin on his face that you don't see on his profile photo.

tomek can often be found in the same place as Eryx, the difference is that while Eryx stays quiet and hunched over a little, tomek stands tall and is quite talkative. As far as matching tomek to his picture, it's clear he's the same guy in the picture, but he could use an update. tomek has matured and filled out a little since he started TopCoder. Are you listening, tomek?



Neither Egor nor Yarin's profile pictures do them justice at all. I wouldn't have even recognized Egor without his name-badge thing; he doesn't look like he's falling asleep at the end of a bad hair day in real life. As for Yarin, who could probably just about be voted "most likely TopCoder to appear on the cover of Teen Beat", there's something about his member photo that just isn't right - it looks like he hasn't slept in about a day and a half, and he's looking down slightly, which makes the top part of his head look a bit too large (perhaps he desired that it look like his brain is trying to expand outside of his skull or something).



mathijs doesn't look unlike his member photo, but not particularly like it either. I give him a 5 for matching.

tomal, cyfra and pparys are three people I would actually recognize on the street from their TopCoder photos, but that street would most likely be Las Vegas Boulevard or somewhere in Poland.





bus was also fairly recognizable, but I don't think the picture in his profile is much more than a couple months old. w_ also has the advantage of a recent picture, and looks just as much like misof as one would guess from looking at it. BjarkeDahlEbert actually also has bus 's hairdo now, rather than what's in his photo, and I didn't recognize him at first.

gevak was also pretty recognizable.

marek.cygan gets about a 7 in my opinion, because while he does look like his picture, he definitely looked less like his picture than his picture did (I know, I'm a tough judge).

I had an easy time recognizing antimatter, but not so much because of his TopCoder picture as from the picture at the bottom of this page. Unfortunately, his member photo suffers from the intimidation era as well. Also, like I've said about others, he doesn't wear his hair down like in his member photo, and he also has longer hair than his member photo (despite what he says).



Krzysan was someone I didn't really recognize at all when I first met them, perhaps it's that he's a little less pale. Perhaps he's also a bit taller than I imagined him. Perhaps it's that intimidation era again. Note to self: don't try to pronounce his handle.



John Dethridge is a good candidate for second most likely to be on the cover of Teen Beat, and just based on his build, he'd be one of my first picks for any contact sport. It's not that he's big or built or anything, he just has a good, healthy, athletic sort of look. His member photo isn't particularly flattering, but it's not bad either. John - you should consider getting something less squinty and maybe with the rest of a smile.



JongMan had to introduce himself to me, but I should have guessed who he was. The only people who might look remotely like him are antimatter natori, and he really doesn't look like either. His hair is longer now, though, and he wears it in a ponytail.

kalinov was someone I recognized immediately when I saw him. He looks a little difference, but I think he actually has his facial expressions frozen like that. His co-prefix kalmakka, however, was someone that took me a good while to recognize. It seems like he recently updated his picture, but he's still in the "intimidation" phase. Speaking of kalmakka, I like his new quote.

I'm not really sure how much grotmol looks like his picture, his picture has a bad glare, and I haven't seen him without sunglasses on here. When he got called up for the Wildcard today, he made some sort of motion that I can only assume was some attempt at creating a "The Fonz"-like cool moment, but he started to lose his balance, which made it look more like an accidental dance.



pawel12, lucab and jakubr all definitely look like their member photos, but they don't have pictures that are particularly familiar to me. *Nudge* Take some time in the forums, guys! gepa was also easy to pick out from his picture.



ploh and po both look very much like their pictures. reid was also easy to recognize, although maybe that's because I've met him before.

All 8 of the Design finalists look distinctly like their member photos, except for aubergineanode, whose photo doesn't really capture what he looks like at all, and AleaActaEst. Actually, I think real_vg almost looks more like AleaActaEst 's picture than AleaActaEst does.



As for the development finalists, I already mentioned traugust as someone who looked particularly like their picture. cnettel was another that was particularly easy to recognize, and sindu is unmistakable. The problem is that the rest of the development finalists all look like they're from China -- which is not a coincidence, sincethey actually are all from China. Since I haven't talked to any of them that much, I'm probably not a good judge of whether they look like their pictures.

In the end, among competitors, I think the prize for "looks most like their member photo" goes to Ruberik. If you looked at his picture and then walked around the room looking for him, you'd find him.

The prize for "looks least like their member photo" goes to natori. His complexion is more brown than gray, and he definitely doesn't have "200 pixels or 3 inches wide" written across his face with a sans-serif font like in his profile. Plus his hair is much longer. I have no idea where that picture is from.

As for the admin side of things, I thought it was pretty easy to spot TheFaxman, and OlexiyO was just slightly harder to recognize (see his old competitive handle, Olexiy for a picture).



jmpld40 was one of the easiest people to identify, except that she was usually a blur, running between stuff that needed to happen. The fact that I recognized mbnd96, though, is something I attribute to some kind of prophecy. She has somewhat less hair and one less hat than in her member photo, and I think if I hadn't met her before at some point in time, I'd be wondering who she was for the whole event. That would be a shame, too, because she won the Kawigi trivia challenge over the rest of the TopCoder team.



mess was another person who you knew when you saw him, and ivern and FogleBird weren't too hard to identify, either.

As for the extremes, the winner of the TC Admin "looks-the-most-like-their-photo" contest is definitely mike in my mind. All considering, he made it too easy to recognize himself. On the flip side, I have to give lars2520 the award for "looks-nothing-like-his-photo." Like OlexiyO, in order to get his member photo, you have to go use his old competition handle, which was lbackstrom.



The final category to consider is spectators (and bloggers, of course, since we make up most of the spectators). When I got in, it took me just a couple second to identify dplass, and when omgrace came in, I also had an easy time recognizing her. But then again, when there is such a limited group of females in the room, that becomes easier. It also helps that she has an obsession with taking pictures of herself. Most of those pictures look more like her than her TopCoder picture.

Rustyoldman's last picture update is a very good likeness as well, and it was nice having him as our spectator team.

For extremes, it looks like I have to tag myself with "looks-least-like-his-photo" - lots of people have said I don't really look like it. I, of course, think I look just like me, but I am in severe need of a haircut, and I think that makes it harder to identify me with my clean-cut, clean-shaven profile picture. On the other side is davidyang, who really looks just like that. If we were doing sports, after picking John Dethridge to be on my team, I'd pick davidyang, because he's got a good blocker/center kind of build.