We were in 6th form when Alex found the face. He was happy to share it and we all took turns wearing it. At first, the new features made my skin ache, with its tighter cheekbones and small nose. I soon grew to love the feeling of being someone else – there’s a thrill to playing about with your identity when you’re a teenager. Sometimes we’d go to the pub and swap it between rounds. I still sometimes see the face in town, and long to say hello, but I don’t know for sure if it’s one of the old gang.

Background

I’m away on my holidays this week, so this is an old drabble, published in 2021 by Microfiction Monday. There’s also an AI-generated video someone made (without my knowledge) in May 2024: “Experience the narrative come alive through the AI-generated voice of Frederick Surrey from ElevenLabs, set against a backdrop of stunning visuals sourced from cottonbro studio”. I don’t think this is too much of a problem, since it only has 12 views and 1 like.

On Substack

I’ve been planning to move from Substack for some time, as they’ve increasingly added algorithmic social features to their platform. There are also growth hacks tricking people into subscribing to mails. I like seeing a larger number of subscribers, but I’ve also seen the number of people supposedly reading/opening the mails collapse. I’d rather have ten enthusiastic readers than ten thousand people receiving the email and never looking at it.

Alongside this, Substack has been caught up on controversy about publishing explicitly Nazi content. This has made me uncomfortable, but that was balanced by my discomfort about censorship. However, the incident last week where Substack actively promoted Nazi content is something else. I don’t really want to be on a platform that can make this sort of ‘mistake’ - toxic content should be treated as toxic.

Moving off Substack removes a lot of convenient features, and involves a certain amount of faff that I have little time for recently. But I will be moving before much longer.