What Do Donald Glover, Glaciers, and the Apple Watch Have in Common? I’m Not Sure Either
The first page that comes up when I open my web browser seemed like as good of a place as any to begin my digital dérive. When you open Google Chrome, the first thing you can see is direct links to your eight most frequented websites. Months ago, in a failed effort to heighten my productivity, I hid every link in my top eight I thought would distract me from school work. So, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix were all exiled leaving only links to Canvas, MyZou, both of my email accounts, Google Maps, IMDb, and a few other random school related sites. So, I wasn’t feeling super inspired. Without putting too much thought into it, I clicked on IMDb. I though, maybe there would be a trailer for some indie movie I won’t shut up about six months from now. All there was was a trailer for a TV show called The Romanoffs, which was disappointingly not about the Russian family of monarchs, so I saw no reason to investigate it any further. I found a list of best transformations of actors for TV roles showing what they look like in “real life”, followed by a photo of them on the show. The list was interrupted every two or three photos by an advertisement, usually for a car, which was annoying at first, but funnier when I thought about Donald Glover playing an actual Toyota in some sort of weird Atlanta/Transformers crossover, and then creepy when I remembered this was the actual transformation in question:
By the end of that list, I’d had my fill of pointless celebrity content and the same three ads over and over, so I decided to venture into the great outdoors, sort of, or over to my one of my favorite places to kill time on the internet: Google Maps. I’ve spent a lot of time dropping somewhere on street view in places around the world that I both have and haven’t been to. Today, I went to one of the top places I’d like to travel to: Glacier National Park. I zoomed in on the map until I found something that looked interesting: Going-To-The-Sun Mountain, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. I put on some good folk music on Spotify and looked around some of the 360 photos of the area before venturing down Going-To-The-Sun road awhile.
This is about where my internet started to fail me. On the bright side, I got in a good round of that dinosaur game on Chrome. Once my connection was restored, I left the expansive, but slow to load world of Google Maps for the fast-paced hellscape that is Twitter, where I finished my digital dérive. Today, all anyone could seem to talk about was Apple Watches and DC movies. I tried to find a good meme mixed in with the news, but all I really ended up with was middle-aged men complaining, as is per usual on Twitter. So, my digital dérive ended on a bit of a low note, but at least along the way I saw some good views and got to wish the Chrome dinosaur a late happy birthday.
