To create your personal avatar, you must fill the pixels in with the right colours. Some are skin (please ensure that these are tonally related to create highlights and shadows), others are background (these must be transparent in order for your avatar to interact with its environment). The other pixels may be any colour you choose.

You choose magenta.

In fact, magenta chooses you. If you were to refer to yourself, you’d say “she”, so a shade of pink must be the right choice. But it can’t be that kind of pink, oh my god. Not the flaccid hue of a squirming, tender baby or a lost, bashful worm wriggling through the wet grass, or a soft Valentine’s Day teddy bear given to a hopeful girl at the cinema by a boy with clean fingernails.

No, the pink that you choose (that chooses you) is screaming for attention; it is brash. It’s female but it might scare you, and it doesn’t care. It’s exclamation marks and asserted weirdness for the sake of weirdness. It’s fun fur, preteen punk, Rizzo from Grease (just look at those double Zs in her name!) and it laughs out loud.

You (the avatar) have now chosen. You may no longer change your selection. Please remain seated while your avatar is created.

Josie Thaddeus-Johns is an arts and culture writer based in Berlin.