Rat Fights
This one is about how to find things, how to share things, and rat fights.
Where I used to work I would sometimes look over the searches people had input on the site. The idea was, it helped us determine keywords that we could be using or set up redirects for searches that were commonly misspelled or weird, or whatever.
There was a user who input over a half-dozen distinct dog breed names. I modified the search so that the next time they'd just bring up the results for "dogs." There was a user who had clearly control-pasted the blurb for their self-published novel, forgetting it had been in their clipboard. We ended up looking it up using the blurb, but I don't think any of us ever purchased it.
I do still look at search in my current job, but not the same way (though I do look at the failed search results for part of it weekly and listen, person who keeps searching for the same indie show on a no-name network, sorry but searching more is not going to spur me to create assets when Nielsen provides none). It's a lot of daily looking at what was big in search and then looking at why it might have received so many search hits. It's a fun little detective game to play for about fifteen minutes in the morning and then I get to share the info with people and be like "turns out the NYT crossword had a real puzzler" or "this documentary in another country spiked interest" or "guess what 2000 drama is now available on cable?" What they do with the information from there isn't my job, I'm just the ship brain sharing information on the planets we're passing by.
The world is so very different and yet unchanged in so many ways. Folks aren't using computers the ways they used to, search engines are often weird and bad and not reliable, but people do still watch the latest big show on their cable equivalent on a Thursday night and go "huh, for real?" then look something up. Or see a celebrity's name in some bit of news and end up navigating to a post about their dating history.
I just think that's lovely. And not only because the thing I've said for years, that the only way to ride the unending waves of whatever-the-heck goes on with search algos is to just be clear with what you are delivering and then deliver it and maybe a little more. I've already written so much about that in the past, I'm not going to revisit it, I just feel kind of justified.
What my little post-it, that I wrote to remind me about what I wanted to talk about, what it says is "Rat Fights."
Well specifically what it says is "Rat Fights" and under that, "ecards."
Often I am standing outside quite late at night and not wearing headphones, which is a great way to encounter your neighbourhood animals. In other neighbourhoods it is coyotes (we get coyotes here too, but not so much), but here it is a lot of opossums. They're angels, every one.
We had some very intense atmospheric river recently and the streets were flooding as they do, in their way that carries the water off to the concrete rivers so we don't get events like 1938--although they're now converting to things called "sponge infrastructure". I was out there enjoying it a bit and I watched an opossum shoot out across the stream of the gutter, over the drier belly of the street, and dive into the rushing deep of the opposite curb. I stood frozen, tense as if I were watching a disaster movie, as the little dude struggled against the current to drag themselves up the driveway as they were slowly pulled higher and higher up the curb cut. They made it, I honestly would have been devastated had they not.
Anyway, we get rodents. And at night, you see sometimes rats travelling the wires that cross the street, their own little highways. I cannot convey to you the sheer delight of seeing the shadow of a rat just cooking it down a wire, their silhouette thrown by amber streetlight, as if they were a tightrope girl. There are a lot of evergreen type trees (citrus, etc) that are well-populated with creatures, and if you're lucky, at night, there is a ratty dispute. There will be rustling, there will be indignant squeaks, more rustling.
I know its not squirrels because I've seen the rats, beautiful and small and soft brown, so unlike the big glossy roof rats we used to interact with up North. And squirrels chitter and crackle, they don't squeak cartoonishly in a way that causes you to picture them wrestling for a particularly choice branch bed.
Small delights.
Another one is remembering, far back in early high school (so the later '90s), I'd spend some of my computer lab time getting around the AOL blocker so I could send my friend ecards. She was the only person I knew with an email address--I didn't even have one myself. But we wrote what I realise now is Pinky and the Brain fanfiction in a spiral-bound notebook on our very long rural bus route. It was the late '90s so of course I was able to find Pinky and the Brain ecards.
I learned later that she was never able to open them, as she had an email but not the kind of internet connection or access that let her open the cards. See, if you were not around for ecards, or never used them the process was this:
- You visited a charming site and selected an image or card.
- You entered your email address (or fake address, if you were me at 14), and the recipient's address.
- You added your message and, as things got fancier, could customise the audio clip that played, or the colours.
- You sent off the card.
- The recipient would receive notice that they'd been sent a card in their email.
- They then had to click a link to go see the card itself on the original hosting site in question.
Recently I tried to find "retro" type ecard options, of which there are few. There are some very app-oriented things, which isn't the same. I can send gifs and stickers in a text, I don't need the middle man. For the classic ecard experience though, I can say that 123greetings looks the same as it ever did. Looking at the comments below some of these cards, seeing folks from 2010 repeat variations of "CUTE!!!..." it's a little window to a different internet.
Whew, one where 123Greetings "was listed as the fourth fastest gaining website in the world by ComScore MediaMetrix in March, 2008." Amazing.
There are rodents living out telenovelas in your neighbourhoods, and websites that are living pictures of a past. You just have to keep an eye out.
Some book recommendations very tenously related to anything:
Maybe you've been watching the anime of Delicious in Dungeon which is reaching the end of its first season as I type this. But the manga by Ryoko Kui (translated by Taylor Engel) is a delight. You have to be comfortable with meat and monstrosity, but there is so much friendship and love and curiosity in these pages. What's great is it is also available on Comics Plus via most library cards (ie: for FREE). For real, it's worth seeing what you can find for manga free from the library.
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto with Megan Backus as Translator is a dreamy window and a sharp full heart of a book full of loss and love and what we make of the two, mixed together with care.
I'm sure everyone knows about Piranesi by Susanna Clarke but speaking of dreamy! And loss and love. And broken messages. I think it was recommended to me with allusions to the minotaur and the labyrinth, vibe-wise, but it's rather more than that. See if your library has it, and if it's for you you'll know quickly.
Have some pictures that will give you "I'm a little ratty in a tree" vibes.
[ID: A photograph taken through a dense mass of leaves, which frame the entire image in dark green, catching only a little light at the rim at the open space in the centre, through which one sees distant palm trees. End ID.]
[ID: A photograph taken from beneath a densely flowering tree, looking up into the branches. Bright blue sky is visible in snippets between a tangle of grey-brown branches, vibrant green leaves, and masses of tiny pink flowers. End ID.]
[ID: A photograph with very limited depth of field. Delicate dark brown twigs that feather down narrow branches close to the viewer hold single drops of rain or dew at their tips. As the image fades into a blur behind them, there is an impression of sturdier mossy boughs and a grey sky.]
- This comic from Outsidewolves is great and is a real mood for folks of a certain age.
- I think about Anchorage by Samantha Mills over at Uncanny with some regularity. Then, when I went and played Pentiment and saw the anchoress I thought "oh, like this short story."
- A short list of other good places to research things that aren't google.. I've also seen recommended to set the time frame you're searching for before 2023, which does help strip out a lot of chatbot-generated content. I personally tend to set it to 2017 and earlier, depending on what I'm looking for.
- Pockets by Amal El–Mohtar, another from Uncanny, this one about messages and objects and invisible unknowable ties to others.
I'm donating eSims when I can, this guide was very helpful, though there are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders.