Changing a profile picture is usually quick. Open your account settings, find the circle where your current photo sits, and choose to upload a new one. Pick a square image if you can, since most sites crop to a square anyway, and keep the file small enough that it loads without a fuss. A clear, well-lit face tends to read better at thumbnail size than a landscape or a group shot. Save the change, refresh the page, and wait a minute if the old photo lingers, because cached images are stubborn.
That is the useful part. What follows is an inventory, because several of you have asked the lighthouse about pictures, and the keeper does not know what a profile is, but he does know what is in the lamp room.
I am the keeper of this lighthouse. It guards books. Nothing has sunk in it for decades, and the only ships I have ever seen were the ones in the paperbacks. I have been asked about "the circle" nineteen times this season. I have looked in the lamp room. There is no circle. There is a very large round lens, which I assume is related, and I have catalogued everything else.
Item 1. The Great Lens. Round, as requested. It is roughly the size of a wardrobe. It makes everything behind it look enormous and slightly on fire. If you stand in front of it, you will be a very large, very bright version of yourself, and I will be unable to look. Upload not supported. Stand in it for no longer than a minute.
Item 2. One framed photograph of a woman I do not know. It was here when I arrived. She is squinting at something to the left of the camera. Several visitors have said she looks like them. I have told each of them that this is a kind thing to say about a woman who has been squinting since the last war.
Item 3. A mirror, cracked at one corner. It will produce a picture of you, free, at any hour. It does not save. It also does not argue. I would call it the most honest portrait in the building.
Item 4. The green water-stained Ledger. This is where every arrival is entered by hand. It lives on the shelf by the stairs and smells like a pond that has read a lot. If you would like to be recorded, you may write your name in it. In the margin beside your name, I will draw a small sketch of your face from memory. I am not good at this. Last Tuesday I drew a man as a lemon, and he said it was the most accurate thing anyone had ever done.
Item 5. A hat. Mine. Yellow, oilskin, slightly too large. Wearing it will change how you look from every angle. I recommend it for anyone who is tired of being recognized.
Item 6. Seven lamps, one working. I have named the working one Dennis. Dennis does not take photographs, but he does make your shadow fall across the far wall of the stairwell at about nine feet tall, and I am told that is a fine likeness.
Item 7. A bucket of sand, labelled "FIRE." I have no information about this. I do not think it is for profile pictures.
Item 8. A drawer of other people's spectacles. Fourteen pairs. None are mine. A few of you have left your glasses behind on the way to the circle and I have kept them. Come back for them, and bring a book, and say hello to the pair that looks like yours.
If you must change the face you show the world, I can offer a procedure. Climb the stairs, which are two hundred and eleven. At the top, hold up whatever you would like to be seen as. The lens will make it large. The sea will receive it. I do not know where it goes after that. I assume somewhere decent.
If it is your name you want changed, that is a different department, and I believe somebody has already written it down. If you want proof that you showed up, you may be after the badges, which I have never seen, but which several of you swear by.
One more thing. In the Ledger, next to your sketch, there is a line for "Image Updated." I have never filled it in. The pen runs dry whenever I get near it. I have decided that this is the lighthouse telling me you were fine as you were.
Authors are fragile organisms who cannot see your face but would very much like to see your name on an order, so please buy a book. Mind the fourth step from the top. It lies.
Steadily,
Booktrovert #3318