For mine and S’s anniversary I planned and booked a five-day, early-October trip to San Francisco. (The rat and her girlfriend reside in upstate NY, for reference). I spent hours on this trip, and about twenty more on the itinerary I digitally collaged so I could have an actual physical gift to hand her before we left.
At least half of that time was spent on Pinterest collecting stuff I could use to collage. I built up a board of like 900 pins within a few days. It was perhaps a little overboard, but when Rat does something she really does it, okay? Especially when it’s for S.
So I’m spending all this time on the itinerary booklet. And maybe it’s ugly to you, maybe it’s not, I don’t really care. I was having fun making it and I knew S would appreciate it.
Anyway, I took an edible roughly an hour ago so just ride the story waves with me here. I make this itinerary booklet, and I spend all this time sourcing DEEP into Pinterest. I’m not just grabbing the top fifty images and calling it a day. Rat’s a cancer sun and a virgo rising. We don’t do that.
A couple weeks later, I’m looking on the wall at some of the collages S has made (I love her hobbies) and I notice, I shit you not, six or seven images in her physical collages that I had used in my itinerary pages.
It’s really not a big deal, obviously. Like not in any sense between her and I or with regard to the things we’ve made. But it did make my heart sink a bit and my stomach felt funny, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m still having a bit of trouble figuring out, if I’m being honest.
The internet has been so many things for me and has meant many different things to me. As a lesbian who grew up closeted in the middle of nowhere, it’s pretty much always been first and foremost a ticket to freedom. To self-expression and self-knowledge, self- and community- and world-understanding. To art, to learning. To interacting with other people without all the horrors of being in a physical body and having to pilot it properly or be judged on it.
It’s always been an oddly human place to me, but in a cerebral sense. Which has suited me.
But around 2015/2016 I kinda stopped using or relating to the internet in the same way, and from there it’s changed a few times over.
We know that when it was more human, it was because it was more personal. My Instagram feed was full of people I followed, and those people were my friends. They were people I had actually had conversations with, whose pets’ names I knew, who knew me too. And also like, Jennifer Beals. Who doesn’t follow Jennifer Beals.
But now the internet is something odd, something mostly ugly to me. It’s getting harder to find the human, or maybe I’ve just stalled in my disuse and been left behind on the stage, these bot-filled empty public arenas abandoned by the real people who have run to hide, split off across discord groups, private forums, group chats, whatever.
Idk. I used to love going to the internet to learn new things; to FIND new things to learn. It felt endless and awe-inspiring, like I had access to this magical place even my own parents hadn’t had at my age.
Now whether I search or just follow the algorithms in their complex plainness, it doesn’t seem to matter. I’m served the same stuff whose first purpose is nearly always money. And the worst part is that I get it. We get it! Everyone’s drowning. So the internet isn’t fun anymore partially because it’s a life raft. People can’t all dance and laugh as the ship sinks—we gotta pay our bills.
I’m now markedly edible-high and need to eat some cheese and crackers immediately.
I think all I want to say for now is that Rat’s Nest is part of my efforts to remake the internet as I use it into something more suited to me, and thus something a tiny bit more human. But also: Rat is a born collector. I learn of the existence of one interesting thing and suddenly there’s a non-zero chance I’m bidding on three eBay lots at two am (my grandma was a hoarder, the genes are present baby).
But in my (possibly our) defense: I don’t just like “stuff”. I love the research, the hunt, the learning, the archiving, the thinking, the questioning, the seeing with my own eyeballs and touching with my own two hands, etc. Maybe it’s just some leftover primal gene that demands I stock my shelves for whatever winter is coming (literal, philosophical, nuclear, who knows). Either way: I want my contributions here to be real, to be from and of the world, to be from and of me. I’d be happy if you joined.
How the Tiers Work:
1. The Scavenger (Free) Regular deep-dives and/or ramblerants into what goes on in the Rat’s Nest. What I’m finding, what I’m researching, what I’m learning about, what I’m wondering, what I’ve brought back to you all from out there. Also some high-res scans for your personal use, because you probably have good taste.
2. The Pack Rat ($5/month or $50/year) For people who want more than just the story and a preview. You’ll get curated monthly drops of asset packs from my finds, along with deeper stories regarding them (or maybe half-imagined messy gossip I piece together in my cinematic brain in absence of enough verifiable fact). These assets are professional-grade (600 DPI/Adobe RGB; TIFF/PNG/JPEG) and ready for you to use in your own design work or art. All asset packs will include a txt file with notes related to public domain status and research done to establish it. A majority of the content will be confirmed or presumed public domain. Note: These asset packs are delivered in rotating monthly folders; to access the full historical backlog, see the Founding Member tier.
++ Plus perhaps a bit more insight into behind the walls of my nest; a super-dive into something weird I’ve been learning about, a rant about estate sales and my paralyzing fear of death and nonexistence, the inevitable ode to my as-of-last-July dead dog I’ll be writing (which may, of course, merge with the previous). The usual.
3. The Hoarder/Founding Member ($150/year) This is for the ultimate collectors—my fellow rats. You get everything in the Pack Rat tier, PLUS exclusive access to The Nest Vault—a searchable database of every asset I’ve ever released, along with a master archive of all past asset packs (no monthly rotations, just everything at once).
And Look…
I’m definitely not the first person to scan an old book or a vintage postcard. But I promise that every scan in this nest was done with my own hands from a physical item I have held. The images and textures and details and stories are one of a kind, and are of and from the real world.
Legal Note: While I provide research and rationale for public domain status, users are ultimately responsible for verifying that their specific use complies with local laws.
