I am obliged to say that if you'd like to read a serialised book about trailer parks and magic that is absolutely not a romance, then step right this way, please.

My best friend shared a post I've seen a bunch of times, that delights me every time. It's a collections of screenshots of times people had an unexpected viewing experience, through their own actions, technical errors, or misunderstanding. And every time I see it I am reminded of one of the most on-brand, funny things to happen to me.

What's particularly brutal about this is it WAS documented, back when I posted often on social media, some near decade ago. Some things are funnier with a time stamp. But I gutted my Twitter and kept only the js file of downloaded tweets. Which one can find things in, it's just a hassle.

But finding the exact wording of this was, for me, worth it.

  ],
  "favorite_count" : "7",
  "id_str" : "911754914002485248",
  "truncated" : false,
  "retweet_count" : "0",
  "id" : "911754914002485248",
  "created_at" : "Sun Sep 24 00:51:25 +0000 2017",
  "favorited" : false,
  "full_text" : "So, I'm halfway through Gangs of New York and I thiiiink I was wrong about it being a musical?",
  "lang" : "en"
}

Here it is, mocked up and easier to read.

Image description: Fake tweet using the same information as the quote above, so it looks like it was posted September 24, 2017 and says: "So, I'm halfway through Gangs of New York and I thiiiink I was wrong about it being a musical?" End ID.

I am being earnest here, I fully expected it to be a musical. "What a long lead up to the first song," I thought, until I realised my bathwater¹ was getting cold and here I was, songless still. Whenever I remember this incident I mention it to my best friend, who always says some version of "It should have been!"

Image description: An anonymised screenshot, three texts from me, one to me, ranging from 2020 to this year. In chronological order: "Newsies has to be why your brain thinks Gangs of New Yor..." (12/11/20) "Literally what world to I live in. Newsies was popular, gangs of..." (04/11/22) "Inverse Gangs of New York." (06/01/22) "The post you shared reminds me of how I got halfway throu..." (07/06/26) End ID.

It should have been!!

Anyway, it is so strange, when I was poking through this wretched file, trying to find silly thing I said, how MUCH I used to post.

When I left LiveJournal I exported a bunch of my posts (though possibly not all?) to my blog, where they now live, many missing context like video, even though I think most of the time I was linking from my Flickr. I can see the cadence there, lots of little posts and pictures as one felt like sharing.

It's slippery, how easy it is to think of how things once were and wouldn't it be nice if they were again like that--because it never was like that for everyone. Missing the days when folks posted on LiveJournal can be as rosy in the rearview as pretending being a great athlete in high school were the best days of your life. Better, I think, to acknowledge the world is different, we are different, than once things were and instead realise that you can’t recapture certain moments but you can work out muscles you’ve let grow weak, I guess.

It's part of that thing where you see the amount of stuff you did in your twenties and think "why can't I do as much now?" and well maybe your life is more full in different ways now. Often though, you ARE doing as much but you're not seeing it because you're living in it at the moment and that makes you unaware of the volume of it. Kids and family and volunteering and going back to school, or fixing your home or the kind of long term projects you now have a more practised patience for. Hell, finally mastering "relaxing, actually," is a thing that takes time and is worth doing.

Besides, in the end, however much I used to post, I'm still of an age where I wasn't born with my fingers on a keyboard (well, if we don't count electric typewriters). I got my first smart phone in my thirties! I'm an outlier!! You know what I'm actually nostalgic for? The weird places I used to scam internet access. We didn't have internet at home while I lived there (we did have a PC! it was for Games and Documents), so in high school I looked up scans of Eastman and Laird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics on the computer in the newspaper classroom when I got tired of trying to understand how you applied for college. I wrote a scathing email demanding DC begin sending me the Batman subscription issues I had sent them a check for, after months of waiting. I did X-Men rp chat on MSN after putting the kids I babysat to sleep, the house's internet access a bonus on top of the $20 for watching four children all evening.

Dorm roommate computers I read webcomics like Lilane Bi-Dyke² and Unicorn Jelly and the somehow still kicking Cat and Girl. Staying at the computer labs late enough to annoy the campus security guards, who had to keep checking the building if I was still hanging out there. And, eventually, this thing:

Image description: A photo of a CRT screen monitor on a janky wooden desk, drawers pulled out and upside down to create a space for a mouse and a keyboard. Papers are strewn around the monitor, a water heater is visible in a nook to the left of the photo, by where a person would sit. End ID.

You can go to the Flickr page and read the annotations, a charming Flickr habit that I've sadly fallen out of doing. I posted a weekly webcomic from there, blogged, made friends, all of that good stuff. In this walk in closet, on a computer that eventually died spectacularly, filled with dust and a moth.

Actually, Chase used a word yesterday I liked. Not "nostalgic" but "wistful." Not to be valedictorian speech here but the dictionary definition of "wistful" is "full of yearning or desire tinged with melancholy." And that's it. Its not nostalgia. I know that for all the wonder of the world wide web spilling from the buzzy screen I also had a tooth rotting out and we eventually had to move from that $650 a month apartment to something cheaper so we could save. Oh, woah, Etymonline just laid this down for me:

1610s, perhaps but not certainly meaning "closely attentive" (in a verse line about songs that "should charm the sweet dale and wistfull hill."). The meaning "longingly pensive, musing" is attested by 1714.

and then:

Middle English wistful meant "bountiful, well-supplied," from Old English wist "provisions."

I'm the kind of person who keeps photo albums and clippings and wristbands from amusement parks and fairs. I like to have a token to serve as a launch point for memory. I think that's why I had to dig through that mess of an archive file to find a tweet that still strikes me as funny.

To be well-supplied with memories is to have a bountiful resource of knowing what you like and what you don't, what you survived and what you nearly didn't. Things to be attentive to, even if you long for them with a bit of melancholy.

You know what, I'm going to continue my plea for folks to read middle grade type books. Revisit old faves, read the series that you weren't the right age for when they came out, check out the new stuff! They're fast, they're fun, their stories have things to give no matter what your age. Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.

• I was not quite the right age for K.A. Applegate's Animorphs when they first came out. I would have been thirteen and was probably at that time seeing how much Arthur C. Clarke I could read before I got sick of it. Animorphs would have done me better. There are many ways to describe Animorphs but the phrase "beloved child soldier series" used on a recent episode of Dropout's Um, Actually could be the quickest summation. It's funny! It's sad! It has amazingly gross transformation scenes! It makes you think about animals! I don't know, browse my Tumblr archives for the animorph tag for vibes.
• The Boy at the End of the World by Greg Van Eekhout is an adventurous story with dark edges that is simple and straightforward with fun characters and tough lessons for both the protagonist and the reader. It's a middle grade post apocalyptic story and it does a great job being that.

Have some small places and moments I've grabbed a snap of.

Image description: A photo of two small palms in plastic planters sittng at the edge of a sidewalk. The street beyond them and the trees around them are not the kind of place palms live. End ID.

Image description: A photo of the tiniest islet in the middle of a softly choppy lake, the tops of trees jutting up from the water around it. A treeline marks the far side of the lake, beyond the islet, and the edge of the muddy driftwood bank shows at the bottom of the image. End ID.

Image description: A photo of a soft blue twilight sky, only the tops of roofs and some trees visible as the sky softens from blue to soft white up past overlapping power lines. A full moon seems to rest on the right side of one cable, balanced on the left by the small shape of a snuggled-in crow. End ID.

A couple of little games here and some lovely things to ponder.

• The feeling of a particular lucky moment permeates This Is Just Another Carnaval Love Story by Jana Bianchi over at the most recent Uncanny.
• I saw someone mention LinkedIn's games when talking about their daily plays and I thought I might point out that if that concept also grosses you out but you'd like a place with many free games, Merriam Webster has a whole game page with loads of fun word and trivia games (through Britannica?!). Loop isn't even words, it's linking concepts that sometimes pun. You can make an account to keep your scores but also you can just mess around and play the archives without one.
• Speaking of daily players, a dedicated slice of the family discord has been hitting up Anthropeum, and most of us are middling at it but one person is KILLING it, my god. Last Starfighter level of natural skills here. Anyway it's a very fun game that it doesn't feel terrible to be bad at because you're also learning and seeing cool things like this simply amazing tunic from Peru (c. 1450-1500).
• I'm frankly shocked that I have not shared the very fascinating Studying the Past and Predicting the Future Using Rat Nests from NPS, it's about how important little fossils can be to understanding an area and how generations of accumulated rat pee in middens can preserve them. It's a similar thing to using bearded vulture nests as a source for historical remains, it's like archives, but the archives are animal trash.
• This early version of The Tiny Toy Theatre Imagination Kit by bibliomancer is delightful. Paper dolls!! Play in the browser!

If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.