There's a cartoon of me, doing whatever I'm doing
A stick figure that mirrors my live status, with my real face cropped straight out of one photo so the two can never drift apart.
Right under the hero on my homepage there's a little stick figure. It's me. Not a mascot of me — it does whatever I'm actually doing right now. If I'm at the gym, it's lifting. If I'm asleep, it's flat out under a moon. If I'm doomscrolling, it's hunched over a phone, and you can walk up and slap the phone out of its hands.
The status is the same live signal that drives the line under my name. One poller feeds both, so the sentence and the drawing can never say different things. But the part I'm proud of is the face.
The head is a real photo
The figure's body is four ink strokes. Its head is not a drawing. It's my actual portrait — the same photo at the top of the page — circle-cropped live and dropped onto the stick body. There is no separate cartoon-head asset anywhere in the project.
That was a deliberate choice, and it's the reason the whole thing holds together. The moment you draw a caricature head, you've created a second face that has to be kept in sync with the real one. Change your photo and the cartoon is now someone else. By cropping the same file both places use, the hero picture and the caricature are physically the same image. They can't drift, because there's nothing to drift from.
Six poses, no loose ends
Every status resolves to exactly one of six poses: standing, sitting, lifting, lying down, bowed in prayer, hunched at a phone. The mapping is exhaustive on purpose. When I add a new status, the code won't compile until I've told it which pose that status draws as. You can't ship a status the figure doesn't know how to be.
The punchline is a swap
When you interact with the figure, the photo head is briefly swapped for an emoji — a reaction face. Slap the phone, it looks shocked. That swap is the joke: the rest of the time it's unsettlingly a real face on a stick body, and then for a beat it's a cartoon reacting to you.
Each pose owns its own actions, and one of them has a rule. While it's praying you can't attack it. The only action available is to say ameen. Everything else on the stage is fair game to poke. That one isn't.
It's a stick figure. It cost almost nothing to draw. But because the head is the truth and the status is live, it feels like a tiny window into an actual person's day, which is far more than the ink deserves.