Desktop Diary #4

some things I saved to my desktop (video edition)

Hello from my new laptop! I’m coming to you from a gorgeous 2023 Macbook Pro, my first one since 2011. I retired it in 2019 and swapped it out for a Lenovo Legion gaming PC because I wanted power and lots of it. It’s heavy, 19-inches, and the keys light up and change colors when I type. Blogging from this 13-inch, lightweight Macbook feels like I’m playing pretend. I’m one of the girls in the office on Selling Sunset. The camera pans over to me and we see my laptop’s screen behind me, idling on the Google homepage. 

A new computer means another desktop full of potential. Will I be more organized this time? Will I chaotically drag and drop or control click and save with precision? A week into my laptop’s life and the desktop has six images, three folders, one screenshot, and one screen recording. 

For this blog post, I want to discuss some of the contents of my most recent Desktop Dump, which was compiled right before the end of 2023. It’s one of my more video-heavy dumps. In preparation for a past screening, I had been searching through my Photo Booth archives to see if there was anything I wanted to use, dragging interesting clips I came across onto my desktop in the process. To incorporate a video into a Desktop Dump, I first have to upload it to YouTube before embedding it onto the webpage. There are 42 videos in total, taken from 2015 to 2023. 

This was shot over the summer right before attending Weezer’s “Indie Rock Road Trip” tour date at Forest Hills Stadium. Being an “I’m into the new stuff, too” Weezer fan is a huge cross to bear, but I wear it proudly. Here, I’m doing karaoke to their song “Susanne,” though the audio is so distorted that you can only hear the backing track playing through the computer and none of my voice. Sometimes this happens with old external webcams, of which I have many. A friend recently sent me a 2011 post from a Livejournal community called ediotz, which is a predecessor to the influencer snark forums of today. This particular post is dedicated to discussing me and my Tumblr and has 236 comments. Electricsparks comments, “ewwww she's so fucking gross and her musical taste is shit. how are there still people who listen to weezer.” (2023)

The title says it all. I’m imitating Sue De Beer’s iconic 1997 video Making Out With Myself. In the original video, the artist splices two videos together: one where she is sitting still, blinking and staring ahead; another where she is active, slowly embracing herself and working up to a kiss. My version uses the mirror effect on Photo Booth. I have to keep looking back at the camera to make sure I am performing the kiss correctly and not accidentally swallowing my image. (2018)

It’s summer 2016: Selena Gomez is blasting; I’m eating a full tray of nachos in bed; my bangs are dangerously short. I wore that white button-up shirt yesterday and I’ve eaten a tray of nachos alone in my apartment in the past month. (2016)

For every video I post, there are a handful of unseen clips that were taken before I “got the shot.” I often think about YouTubers and other professional content creators and how many bits of footage, bad takes, and “off” performances they have rotting on a hard drive somewhere. There’s a clip of YouTuber bestdressed—who unceremoniously left the platform at the end of 2020 and judging from her Instagram comments it seems her followers are still upset about it—that shows a behind-the-scenes glimpse of her typical filming process. In it, she’s driving in her car, repeating the same sentence over and over again until she gets it just right. It’s unintentionally one of the most compelling artifacts of contemporary online performance. (2017)

This was taken during the peak beauty influencer era (2015/2016) and my ass was influenced! I had recently purchased an extremely unflattering orange-y brown liquid lipstick for $19.90 in the shade “Miami Heat”—a collaboration between Kathleenlights and Ofra Cosmetics. If you were paying attention to beauty products around this time, then you’ll recognize that the compact I’m holding comes from the infamous and now defunct highlighter brand Becca Cosmetics. I’m wearing the shade “Champagne Pop”—a collaboration with Jaclyn Hill—which will live on as one of the most historically significant influencer collabs. That little highlighter compact, which would shatter into a million pieces the second you accidentally dropped it on the ground, laid the groundwork for the type of influencer marketing we see today. I pop a little bit of the gold dust onto the tip of my nose and it shines like a beautiful light bulb as I dance to Carly Rae Jepsen. (2016)

Someone in the comments referred to this video of me mouthing the words to “Big Trucks” by Pedro the Lion as “longform TikTok, basically.” We’ve come full circle. (2019)