My first Facebook profile picture, uploaded on November 13th, 2008, was Snoopy doing a little tippy-tap dance. I don’t especially know why? I like Snoopy, who doesn’t, but I don’t have any deep emotional connection to him or to Peanuts more generally. Nor do I do a tippy-tap dance. Weirdly, googling “snoopy dance” gets me many images close to the one I used, but none that are identical. Looking at exact matches via Search With Image, it turns out you can get it as a temporary tattoo for only $6.49. Surely a small price to pay for (temporary) whimsy. It’s also the profile pic of this Stack Overflow user who’s clearly more attached to it than I was, as it’s apparently been their profile pic the whole 13 years and 6 months they’ve been on the site (or at least 13 years and 4 months.)
Back to my lack of conviction, about 5 months later I must have come to my senses, at which point I changed it to a John Howe painting of Gandalf walking through The Shire. You can get your own copy for a mere $855 on Etsy, which I always thought was for people who actually made the things they sell but apparently it’s also a place to sell vintage posters for probably more than what the artist was originally paid to paint it. (EDIT: Well, when I started writing this you could, but alas it appears to have sold.) The version I used was a jpg so low quality that until now I was unaware Gandalf was walking in the rain.
This profile pic lasted for about 9 months until it was replaced by an image of Calvin & Hobbes, once again uncharacteristically (of me, that is) dancing. Wherefore this need to perform dancing in my online presence? Who was I trying to convince? (This one won’t cost you an arm and a leg to procure, but it will cost this guy an arm or a leg.)
Once again seeing the error of my ways, less than two months later this image was replaced by one of Calvin, arms outstretched, brow furrowed, mouth agape, mid-rant. I tried to find the strip from whence it came but only found many other similar poses, including one where he’s in his winter gear and one with Susie doing the pose instead. I did find this Russian Python coder with the same pic though.
This lasted almost a year until, I think because everyone was changing their profile pictures to Pokémon and I still felt the need to try to “fit in,” I changed it to Lugia, the Legendary Bird Pokémon and star of Pokémon 2000 (I was, obviously, a Pokémon Silver kid). And yours for only $6.74 on eBay! Not the art (the one I used is the top image on that page) but the actual Pokémon. In the video game. About catching and training Pokémon. Yourself. Like, that’s the whole deal. That’s 40 games all about teaching children the value of working hard to achieve your dreams. But sure I guess just buy it at level 70 for less than the price of a plate of fries from the bar across the street.
Anyway, switched back to Exasperated Calvin 20 days later. That lasted until Halloween of 2011 when I did a one-day switch to a picture of Hobbes making a scary face. It’s from the last panel of the first strip in this list from Cracked, an organization that, if you can believe it, used to employ actual writers who did actual research and pop culture analysis instead of just making lists of whole-ass comic strips with such incisive commentary as “Milk Duds are the worst candy” and “Chilling.”
Back to EC the next day. On January 17th, 2012, I did a one-day switch to a different Calvin, this time jumping in the air while wearing pjs and shades. It’s the 5th Calvin from the strip linked to in this Reddit post, the replies to which helpfully explain the punchline for those unfamiliar with record players. I have a vague memory of playing around with the speed on my dad’s record player once or twice, but I was either told or read somewhere that that can be bad for the record so I stopped. I do technically own I think four LPs myself, though they’re back home so I haven’t seen them in years and might be forgetting or adding one: Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick, which my friend gave me and even printed out a facsimile of the original newspaper liner notes to include with it; Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery (this one I might be making up, but I seem to remember at least handling this LP at some point); a Kansas album, I think Point of Know Return but it might be Leftoverture (or both?); and an album from a comedian who did crimes and we don’t talk about him publicly any more, but I bet you can guess who. My dad’s record collection is obviously much more extensive (or was, hopefully he hasn’t gotten rid of them.)
January 18th, 2012, is a STOP SOPA sign. Remember SOPA? Do you? Because I’ll be honest I only sort of do. But hey, apparently we stopped it. Paving the way for water-guzzling misinformation machines powered by the ground-up mulch of all recorded human knowledge and art. Don’t get me wrong, SOPA (which I now remember from reading the Wikipedia entry is the Stop Online Piracy Act, making “Stop SOPA” a slightly awkward construction when you think about it) definitely seems like it would have generally been horrible and probably destroyed the internet as we knew it (not to mention made it impossible for me to watch the entirety of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and spin-off Lou Grant) on YouTube.) But the internet’s being destroyed anyway, and regardless of how you feel about the ethics or legality of genAI slop you can’t deny that on a practical level it does rely in large part on ingesting pirated content (as has been admitted by every AI company saying that, if you make them pay for the content their models are trained on, their business will immediately collapse.) I’m not arguing we should have stopped stopping SOPA, just that, I guess, the internet was always doomed one way or the other. Between a whirlpool and a monster place.
Apparently at this point I figured out (or they’d finally made it so that) you could change your profile picture to one you’d already uploaded instead of having to reupload one every time, which I’m glad I didn’t know about before or it would have made putting this timeline together involve a lot more guesswork. Anyway, I’m assuming at this point I switched back to Exasperated Calvin, finished my senior year of high school, felt all sorts of ways about it, went to college, felt all sorts of ways about it, had my first serious relationship, felt all sorts of ways about it, got broken up with, felt all sorts of ways about it, and then on November 25th, 2014, having gone through all these formative experiences and learned much about the world and myself, finally decided to put away childish things and become the mature adult I was meant to be—by changing my profile pic to a different image of Calvin.
Instead of the pose of righteous indignation, this Calvin sits at a desk, paper in one hand, pencil in the other, arm slung casually over the back of the chair while looking at the audience, face neutral and inviting, mouth open as if in the middle of a conversation. In a surprising twist it was actually the first result of googling “Calvin sitting at desk” and it’s not even trying to sell you something, except, I guess, the ads that assault anyone foolish enough to visit a fandom.com wiki without an adblocker on.
This version of me lasted for a decade, and would be my go-to profile pic for any and all accounts I made during that time. And by this point you might be thinking, “Hey, isn’t Bill Watterson famously averse to his work being used in any way he doesn’t control and doesn’t this seem a little disrespectful?” Or maybe I’m projecting. And so a couple years ago when I wanted to figure out how to trace an image in Logo (which would eventually lead to the process described in “Experiments in Logo, Part 6“), I went ahead and traced my profile pic, creating a new vector-art version that felt a little more “me.” Because the two images are very difficult to tell apart at the size of a profile pic, I decided it would be funny to switch out the original for my vector-art trace without telling anyone. (I have a very low bar for what’s funny to me and only me.)
Finally, a few weeks ago I found myself up against a self-imposed deadline of having to report my creative productivity for the week on my secret accountability forum that is currently invite-only, and I had no creative productivity to report. So casting about for something to do I was browsing my files and I found the image at the top of this post. It’s my vector version of Calvin put through a tool that converts standard images into polygonal art (I think it was Polytomizator?) And I looked at this image and thought, “This is me.” And also, “Aha, I should write something about all my Facebook profile pics!” And so here we are.
Of course the irony is, since at this point I only use Facebook once a year to remind people I’m not dead, I’m probably not going to bother making this my Facebook profile pic, though I have switched it in on Bluesky and will add it to other platforms as I think to do so. Insofar as there was any point to any of this I think part of it was to kind of put a bow on my (the?) Facebook Era. For a long time my Facebook profile was me, on the Internet. Now it’s mostly just an archive of the mes I’ve been, and in some ways an index of some of the Internets the Internet has been/now is (not to be self-aggrandizing, this is probably true of anyone with a longstanding social media account.)
And, as the prime exemplar of enshittification, Facebook serves as a warning: don’t get too comfortable. Bluesky currently lets you view a timeline that is simply posts from the people you follow in reverse chronological order and nothing else. Looking at Facebook today you’d never believe that it used to be that too. But after years of deprecating features (remember Facebook Notes? Well they sure don’t want you to), filling your feed with 3 times as many ads as posts from people you actually know, and simply destroying the concept of time, the platform has become inimical to the kind of identity crafting it once facilitated. And I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Bluesky, a platform which became the go-to Twitter replacement basically by accident and whose devs are both openly antagonistic to their users and full-throated advocates of all things genAI, goes through the same type of platform decay and destroys everything that makes it a place and way to Be on the Internet.
The online you you are now on the site you use to be that you will eventually be killed without you having a say in the matter.
Certain of Eventual Failure 