"Desktop" Diary #7

Trivial Pursuit Edition!

My play Trivial Pursuit opens next week at PAGEANT. Tickets for Thursday 9/19 and Friday 9/20 at 8PM are sold out, but a special late show on 9/20 has been added. Get them before they’re gone! If you cannot come in person, consider supporting the production by purchasing a Trivial Pursuit Postcard set. It’s like your own miniature version of the play!

I owe you guys a Desktop Diary. Actually, I am backlogged and need to respond to April’s Desktop Dump in addition to August’s. As always, I continue to save things to my desktop at a rapid pace. 

In honor of Trivial Pursuit premiering next week, I wanted to slow down, Desktop Diary style, and take a look at some of the images that are incorporated into the performance. During the course of the play, the characters create a collaborative vision board out of roughly 400 images scattered over the ground. These pictures are beautiful, aspirational, ugly, boring, and distorted. Some of them may even look familiar, spotted while scrolling Pinterest or emptying your spam inbox. Maybe you’ve even saved some of these yourself.

Because my performers (Maya Man, Mackenzie Thomas, Maya Martinez) and I have spent so much time looking at these pictures during our rehearsals, we have developed a fondness for specific images. Mackenzie told me the above photo is one of her favorites. It was uploaded by the Flickr user Sidney Collins in 2007 and is titled “More Octopus Toys.” The caption underneath reads, “What can I say…I’m obsessed!” Growing up, my best friend Naomi and I would film a SNL style show on her MiniDV camera in her basement called “Omi’s Basement Live.” Our audience was entirely made up of stuffed animals, we would pan the camera to them and cheer. 

Throughout the performance, the characters read dialogue that is printed on the back of each image before placing it on the vision board. Because of this, no two performances are alike. Often, I randomly assign text to images, hoping to stumble upon eloquent pairings. Some text fragments are more abstract, while others require intervention due to their specificity. This is one of the few images that has very specific dialogue attached to it. “Does anyone know where this top is from?”

When sourcing photos, I often like to save things from advertisements or e-commerce platforms to interrupt the flow of visually pleasing images one might find on a traditional vision board. This poorly edited picture of Remy, the rat from Ratatouille, sitting atop what looks to be another Pixar character’s head is from an Amazon product listing for a headband. FOTN Women Cartoon Remy Headwear Cute Mouse Headband Hairpin Halloween Costume Cosplay is $14.99, with 4.8 stars and 8 reviews. One reviewer starts off by saying, “I have been seeing a lot of people online with these lately.”

Has anyone else noticed an uptick in stock images circulating online amongst aesthetically minded users? It’s almost as if the watermark makes it more desirable by signaling a more lo-fi and detached attitude. This goes hand-in-hand with my theory that we’re all suffering from beautiful image fatigue. I suppose it’s not so dissimilar from what DISimages was doing a decade ago. I made a promotional flyer for Trivial Pursuit that featured a fake Getty Images overlay but never ended up posting it because I saw someone else do it a few days later.

Believe it or not, this picture of a package of free range chicken breasts was pulled off of Pinterest. You’d be surprised what you can pin on there once you train the algorithm enough. It seems as if many of these isolated images of grocery items and banal household objects are pinned for roleplaying purposes or incorporated into Pinterest’s collaging app Shuffles. Maya Martinez often picks this one up during rehearsal. The back reads, “I want to peel it so far back, I don’t recognize it anymore.”

I used to spend a fair amount of time exploring the avatar-based social media app IMVU. I have a large collection of screenshots from those virtual walks, but my favorites are the ones that don’t feature my avatar. There’s a certain flatness to the 3D user-generated content that feels both outmoded and contemporary. Artist, IMVU expert, and friend of the blog Lizzie Klein’s Virtual Memorials features screenshots taken in memorial rooms for specific individuals and roleplaying groups. Maybe take a look!

As I’ve been selecting images to write about, I can’t help but pull them associatively. Two rats in one blog post! It’s a Photo Booth picture from 2011 of my beloved rat Sarah Michelle Gellar. She wasn’t a chef but we did share a lot of food together. I purchased the underwear I’m wearing in the photo for $1 at my hometown’s Urban Outfitters. In high school, my friends and I would hang out there like it was in a coffee shop. The words “mind blowing” are printed on the butt.

What do you think “gentle affection” smells like? Maya Man mentioned that she was the most drawn to this image. I could see it living inside of her Bows in art 🎀 Are.na channel. This Victoria’s Secret laundry detergent, along with the scents “lavish laundry” and “soften it up,” have been discontinued for a while now. However, you can purchase a bottle for nearly $100 on eBay. I tried to hunt down a scent profile, but they don’t make Fragrantica pages for laundry detergents. I was able to find a TikTok user who recalled it “smelling amazing” but couldn’t quite conjure up the notes.

Saving this picture led me to the account of DeviantArt user The-WonderSlug. They specialize in photoshopping giant women towering over buildings and natural landscapes. The girls smile as they accidentally wreak havoc on the cities below them. They grab airplanes out of the sky, stomp on cars in parking lots, and do sexy poses in the sand crushing hundreds of beach-goers. “Girls day at the beach for these two titanic beauties. For the city at their feet and all its inhabitants, it is quite another matter.”