Desktop Diary #11

some things I saved to my desktop

Tickets are now on sale for the screening I curated at the Roxy Cinema New York on January 25. GOOD MODELING PICTURE features videos by Conner O’Malley, Dahlia Bloomstone, Molly Soda, Trevor Shimizu, Daniela Rodriguez, and Laurel Nakadate. I will be screening my 2025 piece Meeee, if you missed it the first time it screened in New York, at Alyssa Davis Gallery.

I started my year off by going dancing at 9 a.m. on New Years Day. Just me in my heat tech and a bunch of strangers who were still in the midst of acting out their “last night was a movie” plotlines (I was witnessing relationships being forever changed in real time), dancing to Armand Van Helden’s “Professional Widow” remix together. Despite getting a full night’s sleep beforehand, by the time I left the club that afternoon I felt like I had stayed up all night.

You could say I’m a January lover. The days are getting longer, it’s my birthday month, and if you can’t beat the winter, you must embrace it. I hit the ground running the first week of the year and uploaded 282 files for my latest Desktop Dump. Despite this ritual, which I’ve been performing for nearly six years, I’m unable to maintain a clean desktop for very long (if at all). As I was working on uploading the dump, I somehow collected 115 new files.

My 2026 resolutions are more psychological in nature, but I did set one concrete goal for myself that I’ve dubbed “365 Days of Video Art.” I’ll be watching a piece of video art a day (sometimes more than one) for the entirety of the year. Back in April, I had mentioned my attempt to watch every video on UbuWeb, which was a nice idea but too unwieldy to accomplish. My approach to 365 Days has been a little slapdash, but I’ve created a loose syllabus to reference, though I’ve mostly been going where my heart desires. I’m keeping a spreadsheet to log everything I watch, down to where and how I watched it. I just added a new column today, it’s serious. If paid subscribers are interested, I would be open to sharing some of my favorites each month. Forget AI, 2026 is gonna be HUGE for video art.

I’m not sure what this says about me, but my TikTok algorithm continuously serves me slideshows of rockabilly women compiled by younger users. The text overlaid on top of the videos always reads something like, “Me the second I turn 30.” While rockabilly and burlesque (see above) subcultures are technically different, they share a venn diagram. I put on red lipstick for the first time in a while a few days ago, I’m teetering on the edge.

Just like my “shopping ban” from last month (which went terribly; I bought a wallet I had saved on Poshmark for months and when it arrived I was shocked at how I could’ve ever wanted it) I need to place a year-long ban on going through old blog entries. I’m not ready to write a personal essay about what it meant to have my entire life up for feedback starting at the age of 14 (back when that felt more optional) but give me five to ten years. I will however continue to upload images from that time to haircutsfolder; this one is “doing numbers,” which means it has more than ten notes on Tumblr.

In 2009, my friends and I went on an impromptu road trip and decided to drive south from our hometown of Bloomington, Indiana until we felt like turning around. We made it as far as Nashville. On the way down, we stopped at a roadside attraction called Dinosaur World in Cave City, Kentucky. I distinctly remember us being the only people there. Surprisingly, the park is still operating, boasting features like Uncle Rex’s Gem Mine and Aunt Cera’s Fossil Dig. There are also locations in Florida and Texas.

Kind of surprised no one is doing shopping cart photoshoots. Feels like that’s totally up for grabs for a national grocery store chain, a designer brand, or even an alt-adjacent influencer (email me mollysoda@gmail.com). Are they just harder to steal now? I will fly back to the Midwest to do this.

Since December 7, 2025, I’ve been chasing the high of watching Bringing Up Baby for the first time. The fast-paced, quippy banter, the absurd binds they get themselves into, Katharine Hepburn’s desperate attempts to keep hanging out with Cary Grant…I can’t get enough. I’ve been walking around the house playing ”I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” out of my phone speakers on repeat. This has sent me into some sort of screwball comedy spiral, so much so that I’m reading Stanley Cavell’s 1981 book, Pursuits of Happiness, which analyzes these films through the lens of the remarriage trope (often the central stars start off divorced and end up marrying again). While the term screwball might have wider connotations now, historically speaking, screwball comedies were a popular style (if not the first examples) of romantic comedy in the 1930s and 40s during the early part of the Hays code. Perfect for Gilmore Girls fans or anyone who watches TikToks at 2x speed.

Emo Ariel has started making a lot of sense to me lately. I’m not sure where I was during the time when everyone was doing emo/goth edits of Disney characters, but it feels important. Over the summer, some of my students taught me about the Elsa from Frozen edits that were happening in the 2010s. Were these happening at the same time? I need a Gen Z internet historian to chime in.

You know you’re deep in the throes of winter when you’re standing at the bus stop fantasizing about a 45 degree day. That’s spring time.

I filmed my annual Steadier Footing video right before the end of the year. For 12 years, I have been singing along to a webcam video of me singing the song “Steadier Footing” by Death Cab for Cutie. Each year, a new Molly in a new part of her home in front of a new desktop and a slightly different interface gets added to the mix. My accidental sound art, my funny little archive.

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