Past Times

I’ve been settling in at Bluesky, as Twitter seems to be doing everything it can to embrace becoming a hate mob. I’m getting a little better about the reflexive actions I used to take. There’s this muscle memory when it comes to always opening a specific app, or the address I type in when I open a new tab in a web browser. I don’t know what I’m looking for when I go to Twitter these days… but after the last 24 hours, I’m pretty sure the main goal is trying to find the best angle to get a clear view of the car wreck, which really isn’t that productive.

With that in mind, someone I recently started following decided to engage in an ice breaker and asked “you are handed a banana. how do you respond?” One of the replies was “iii am aa banana” which was followed by “My spoon is too big” and I was somehow transported back to a college dorm room where someone was showing me Don Hertzfeldt’s short film Rejected for the first time.

I love the beginning of this film. It’s so delightfully odd and weirdly quotable in that way things used to be when I was a teenager. It’s the sort of thing you could just interject into conversation among a group of friends, and it’s like starting a game of pinball or something, where these non sequiturs sort of pile up as the ball zings around the table. I think something about it came up when we were at ConVergence this summer, and seeing it referenced again “so soon” after made me hungry to seek out the real thing and re-live it. And then I remembered how weirdly bloody it gets in the middle. This was the first time I’d actually sort of admired the visuals from that, where every stroke from a red marker was vivid on my flat screen TV, something I probably couldn’t appreciate before (also maybe because a little ball of fluff kept crying “my anus is bleeding!” while all their friends just keep saying “Yay!” over and over again). It gets strangely dark at the end, but it’s still fascinating.

Before the days of YouTube, an AVI file of the film existed on my perpetually-too-small computer hard drive, until it was burned to a CD (I didn’t have a DVD burner), and then I just sort of forgot that it existed; like every other thing I’ve put away for safe keeping. I have a lot of bits and bobs on CDs. I have no faith any of them are remotely readable, and even if they were, I’d probably be at a loss to explain why I felt I needed to keep them. The nice thing about digital hoarding these days is everything can just be plopped on an external hard drive and sit there comfortably, not taking up much space, just waiting for the day I decide to take a stroll down memory lane (assuming the hardware doesn’t fail).

As I was thinking about that film this morning, I found myself sort of transported to another time, where I’m sitting in my family’s den and my parents are discussing some (seemingly) obscure piece of media. My dad is trying to describe it and jog my mom’s memory enough that she can fill in the gaps. I was trying to imagine describing this thing to someone decades younger than me, who had never seen it before. It kind of defies explanation. I think I would always sort of stumble at showing it to anyone else. It starts off zany and devolves into something gruesome and I find it strange to insist someone “has to watch it!” when maybe they’ll just think it’s gross and that I’m weird for suggesting it.

I’m starting to wonder if instead of re-releasing old movies, my generation’s thing is going to be reliving compilations of early 2000s media, because we got to have some pretty good internet in its early days. I’ve been seeing a lot of it pop up lately, as others bemoan the very real fact that time has marched on. The Badger Song took Bluesky by storm over the weekend. I can only imagine what will show up next.