It takes me awhile to pick a new avatar. Even when I see art I like, I have to consider how well it would work cropped to NeoGAF sizes. That's no easy feat, really.
The hardest part, I think, is what the small size does to image quality and clarity. I had to make 8 separate versions of my current avatar until it no longer bothered me with either blurriness or aliasing. To finally solve an aliasing issue on the hand that bothered me (and likely only I would have noticed), I had to point resize (nearest neighbor scaling) it from 400x480 to 4000x4800 and apply a 25-pixel radius Gaussian blur to soften it nicely, and then finally resize it down to 100x120 with Cubic interpolation (Lanczos is sharper, but it ended up too jaggy.)
The aliasing on her collar area still bothers me, but it doesn't really matter from proper viewing distances. If you can see the aliasing on her collar, you are sitting too close to your monitor and are likely damaging your eyes. Consider it a helping guide.