ELIMINATE confusion when changing your profile pic with this one WEIRD trick that scientists HATE

but equestrians love it

It’s confusing when someone changes their profile picture. I made a joke about how, to reduce confusion, there should be a feature that gradually morphs your old profile picture into your new one.

And then I figured, why not make it real?

animorPFP

I also added horse mode, where instead of directly morphing from your starting picture to your ending one, you turn into a horse in between.

For the last few weeks, as I’ve been building this out, my DMs have looked like this:

testing

The majority of my friends didn’t even question why I was sending pictures of them as a horse or morphed with others, they just accepted this was a thing I was really into at the time for some reason.

And so they sentenced other people to be horseified.

the people have demands

Why did you do this?

AnimorPFP is a cultural critique of the fragility of one’s online identity, the inherent impermanence in a digital ecosystem in which the inhabitants are intangible.

We increasingly live our lives online, where our presence is represented by a static image, carefully curated to control how we are perceived. Making it jarring for that identity, that single image that represents the totality of an individual, to switch unexpectedly. It’s striking, the lack of object permanence in the digital sphere, as if we are once again infants, confounded by peek-a-boo.

So we must ask: In this era of tech, in a life lived online, what does identity entail? What does it mane to exist online? If one’s digital persona is masked with horse, if one’s visage is more strongly and more often associated with horse than one’s own face, then what separates mankind from equine?

My thoughts on this matter are too profound to be illustrated by prose alone, so I have prepared a poem:

There once was a fella named Harold
He planned to change his PFP but was imperiled
For it defined his identity
Without it, he felt a non-entity
A neighsayer might even claim he was Gerald!

Although to be serious for a paragraph, there is a genuine point to be had about this era of social media, where instead of following friends, the majority of people we follow are strangers. Even more so, our front pages are filled with people we don’t even follow, the algorithm decides who we stay updated on. The “problem” that AnimporPFP solves didn’t meaningfully exist ten years ago, before the rise of the influencer and algorithmic feeds. Back when social media facilitated mutual engagement with friends more than parasocial relations.

(Albeit there were always anonymous or follower-based forums like Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter, but the quintessential social media was friends-based Facebook and old Instagram. Nowadays, essentially every major platform is grounded in serving you content from people you don’t know, and often don’t even follow.)

How does it work?

Why, with the beauty of mathematics, of course!

First, we need to understand what the faces in the start and end images look like, so we map facial features across 468 points (using MediaPipe Face Landmarker). Then, these points are used as references for dividing the face into a series of triangles (Delaunay triangulation). We compare the positions of the triangles in the start image to those in the end image, and as the slider moves along, the triangles warp to the end positions, while fading in the colors of the end image (via WebGL).

this image is from Google (not just the search engine, but also the developer toolkit)

Thanks to existing software, creating this was actually very easy. Except for horse mode, which was very difficult and 99% of the work. I know what you’re thinking, that is an incredibly useless feature in an already pointless project. And to that I say fuck you, I’m turning you into a horse.

I also asked Chat for some technical advice, and this is where you can really tell it was heavily trained on Reddit content, as it first explained to me why my own joke was funny. And lowkey roasted me in doing so. I’m not sure what it means by “overengineered,” I think this is a reasonable solution to a serious problem.

okay.

I’m just serving AnimorPFP on one of my personal sites, instead of buying a new domain, because to be frank guys, I have spent hundreds of dollars on domains and it’s getting quite ridiculous at this point.

You can try this super helpful tool out for yourself at animorpfp.rawandferal.com.

See you next time, whenever that may be.

Love,

danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)