Digital Derive
This exercise was particularly fun for me. I’m so used to google ads knowing what I’m interested in, and being algorithmically placed at sites that I normally visit. There were many unusual bits of information that I learned through this experience, that I otherwise would have probably never looked for. I found what reasonable prices (or what seems to be the standard of reasonable in the market) for a heart transplant are. I didn’t spend too much time on that website because it got me feeling uncomfortable to know that human organs are interchangeable. It’s really cool that it can save somebody’s life, and I’m a registered organ donor, but I don’t think I want to do any more research on heart transplants. Soon after leaving that website, I actually got going on this tangent of looking up different languages to say the word yellow in, and I learned to say it in 5 different languages
- spanish — amarillo
- french — jaune
- italian — giallo
- latin — flavo (my personal flavo-rite)
- portuguese — amarelo
I eventually got bored with the color yellow, and I decided to search three random words, “portrayal evil pancake,” which led me down a winding road of memes, parody songs, and other weird images and websites.
One of my favorite websites from this search was this article on popmatters.com, about Tori Amos reinventing a song called pancake. This same stream of search words introduced me to the beautiful world of pancake art. I love that. These people literally craft beautiful images on pancakes using food coloring — how perfect. I was amazed at some of the buttery images. It made me really happy to see people creating art with food. It’s like my two favorite things mixed together! Yum.
Here is chewbacca, I love it. I continued to look at different pancake art posts and videos for the next twenty minutes, and it was absolutely exhilarating.
I decided to switch my search up and type in a bunch of nonsense words, “blasphemy benign rendezvous pompei.” This search led me to a really cool article from forbes about newly discovered graffiti from pompeii and how it might be the key to actually settling the debate on when the tragedy actually occurred. This was very intriguing to me, as i’ve always been fascinated with the rise and fall of the ancient city.
All in all, this experience was very wholesome and fun for me. I got to experience things that I otherwise wouldn’t, and that was quite cool. After this, I think i will start to explore the vast seas of the net a little more and become a pioneer of finding interesting facts and weird websites.
