In my many, many years of being chronically online, I’ve come across a number of weird websites, YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, browser games, cool art, and more in my perusions through the web. In an attempt to clean out my bookmarks folder, I’ll try to take a proper look at each one (it’s finally useful to have kept all of these for this sole specific purpose). For today, I’ll start with just two rather philosophic entries, but philosophic in the sense that it's also extremely melancholic.

The first one I present is The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I’ve known about this for around a decade now, likely having learned about it through this Vsauce video, also a great watch. The concept is as named: a catalog of “obscure sorrows”, or lacrimae rerum: the "tears of things", per the website. My thoughts upon seeing such a website immediately turn to how many foreign languages have single words to describe very specific feelings or scenarios, like the German word schadenfreude (pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune) and the Japanese itadakimasu (“I humbly receive, most commonly uttered to give thanks before a meal). I won’t engage in any difficult dialectical dialect discussions here, but I will say that our expression of complex emotions or scenarios in English takes at least a few words, which is why I appreciate The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’ ability to condense vast concepts into these singular words. My favorite of these is “sonder”, whose full definition I’ve screen-capped below.

I’ve been familiar with “sonder” for many years, and it’s become a staple of my thoughts whenever I’m in a big crowd or driving on a busy road. All the words have definitions like these, vague but purposefully so, in a way that captures emotion and vibes rather than anything textbook. I encourage you, dear reader, to take a trip through these sorrows, and become enamored by how much they might verbalize thoughts that you’ve had before.

My second entry is the 1967 short story by Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. This might be familiar to you; you could’ve read it in class or on your own, but what I came to show you today is specifically this YouTube video; everyone say thank you to Hector Salamanca Gaming for uploading it! It’s an audiobook of the short story, read by the author Harlan Ellison himself. I was aware of the short story years ago, and actually, I’d bookmarked a PDF of the exact story to read later, but upon checking just now, it’s been removed. But, I was finally tempted to put everything aside and listen to it when Jacob Geller started describing it in his video, Returnal is a Hell of Our Own Creation. While his context for mentioning this story has to do with his comparison to the 2021 video game Returnal, I listened to the story through the audiobook video separately. I’m also aware that there’s a video game version, but its characters and execution are a little bit different, yet it offers a similar experience, if it’s an experience you’d rather play than listen to or read. Either way, it’s a dark and depressing story, sci-fi in genre but thoroughly human in nature, with cold and cruel robots and immortality contained within the same vein as flesh and blood sex and violence. I won’t spoil anything about the video, it’s a short listen as is, but I implore you to listen to how interestingly the author tells his tale. It’s not a “good” narration in the traditional sense, nor even a “good” story, but the way the author’s vision for how he wants the story told oozes and fights its way out of his mouth, much like the cover art below. But, I think it fits the tone quite perfectly, and I hope you’ll gain something, anything from listening to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

I hope you’ll tune in next time for more random bits and bobs from around the internet 👍.