22-05-2025
May 22, 2025 at 2:29 PM EDT
'Recurring Screens.'
In poet Nora Claire Miller's short, moving essay, she draws a line from the very first screensaver (SCRNSAVE, 1983) to the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle, 1962) to her family's flight during the Holocaust (Austria, 1938). I particularly loved this bit about taking apart her grandmother's iMac:
I took the Strawberry apart thirty-nine times. (I kept count.) I didn't really know what I was doing. I cut my hands open on the logic board more than once. There's still dried blood on the hard drive. But despite my best efforts at modernization, the Strawberry has refused to accept any of my updates. It only wants to exist in 1999, to connect to an old internet that hardly exists anymore. These days it mostly runs screen savers. Warp is still my favorite.
