why have avatars and profile pictures as different things?

pretty self explanatory

Why not?

I think profile picture was supposed to be a real picture of your self or somthing.

Originally Posted by The_Silent

I think profile picture was supposed to be a real picture of your self or somthing.

Never.

Avatars are shown when posting, and Profile Pictures are meant to be a part of your actual profile link.

Profile Pictures, in the case of the jury, was used to show how awesome we were by using the seal of awesome as the picture, until we all got cool matching sigs.

As far as pointless pictures to identify users goes, why not?

Avatars and profile pictures are for the insecure and weak of mind! I'd get rid of my dumb custom title too, if I could, but it won't parse with just a space. :< I only use avatars in the event that some awesome 64x64 icon just doesn't look right in a signature. That pretty black space under your name can sometimes be useful for aesthetic purposes.

It's a matter of preference, but I feel that any relevant info to you should be present in a signature. Avatars/profile pictures serve no real purpose other than to identify who is posting, and we all can (hopefully) read English so why not just read the poster's name? Anyways, as I said above, sometimes they do look pretty. Most of the time they look retarded, though; people have no sense of style these days.

Originally Posted by Rising_Dusk

Avatars and profile pictures are for the insecure and weak of mind!

Pardon?
Isn't it ones free opinion to put an avatar/profile picture into his/her profile?
I can't imagine that being somewhat psychological..

Of course, it's not like I used an exclamation mark to suggest sarcasm or something.

Just don't post your own face. There, you don't displease me anymore.

Originally Posted by Rising_Dusk

Of course, it's not like I used an exclamation mark to suggest sarcasm or something.

Which is hard to notice over the internet.
Well in that case, I fail

It's a second image field attached to your profile.

But why it's at the left when you go to a user profile, while the avatar is over on the right?
Alas, I do not know.

As I already said, the avatar is meant to be displayed as a part of your post, while the profile picture is very self-explanatory: the main picture of your profile, and it's also displayed larger than the Avatar. Example

Woot I'm an example :D

But yeah. I mainly use the profile picture to put in a second avatar, because I'm indecisive like that.