A Cursed JPG

I am a millenial of a particular age. One of the habits I have is that I am prone to trying to save things. I used to save IRC logs when I was a kid, and it took me a long time to get around to putting that habit behind me when I realised I was saving redundant logs that other computer programs were saving. Discord is a resource I search regularly, checking back on when I brought up other topics with my friends, that kind of thing.

I am circling around the way this story makes me selfconscious.

This is also why I’m not sharing any visual examples.

Anyway, so I grew up with a habit of saving files. These days I try not to bookmark everything but there was a time when my bookmark folder was immensely overfilled, and then a lot of services I got used to would ask me to add likes or saves or hearts to things so I could find them later, which I did not like. I actually really liked usenet for this reason because you could go to a newsgroup, download a giant pile of posts, and make your responses to them while offline, then upload them all at once. On one level, I was familiar with an internet where every file is eight letters then a dot then three letters.

I like email.

Anyway, uh, yeah, so anyway, watermarks are great! I like when images have watermarks on them so I can find where they came from. That’s great for archiving because then the thing I’m archiving has the source for them when I want to go back and find them anew. And so I save things and they go in my download directory and then I come back and work out where they go and ultimately, I eventually delete them. I mean there’s nothing in that folder that’s too old —

Well, today there’s nothing in the folder that’s old, for reasons we’ll get into.

Anyway, have you ever looked at how instagram looks under the hood? Streaming media really battered this desire to save local copies of things, where a youtube series is largely going to be ephemeral and I can’t play local copies, ever. That makes them a lot more like leaving the radio on while I work than necessarily something I habitually archive. I save links, I make sure I point people to the history I have with it when I find a channel, but I mean, we all bathe in a shower of content that’s basically constantly marinating our brains. Showers? Marinating? Beaugh, you know what I mean.

Point is that instagram is a source of a lot of interesting kinds of things I want to look at. Sometimes it’s maps, sometimes it’s high quality photographs of toys I don’t want to buy, sometimes it’s landscapes, sometimes it’s game asset art, sometimes it’s game layouts, all sorts of stuff. It is also, if you’re not aware, a website where people can post pictures of themselves, and network with people who want to see those pictures of themselves.

If you’ve ever looked at instagram, not the things the site presents, but the structure of the site’s code, you might be surprised how much of instagram is containers to put every other part of instagram in, which is, itself, mostly containers. Like you may look at any given page and go ‘well, there’s a picture here, buttons to go to the next picture here and here, and a comment section here,’ and think that means the site is broadly, three sections and you can bounce between them but no, the site is hundreds of subdivided sections into sections into sections into sections and they’re all being generated by the finest of computer touchers, and they’re not made for humans to look at. They’re made for a computer to look at, and that shows up in the files and variable names.

Did you know that Youtube tries to make sure the codes for any given video doesn’t form a word? Yeah, It’s made up of letters and numbers and they block a bunch of things that could be words. It’s a good practice, I get it, so you don’t get companies rerolling videos trying to make it so they get a really good tag for a thing, instead of just making each instance of a video name completely garbled. The filenames, the signifiers, aren’t used for people to handle. And that means they don’t have to be recognisable. Why should they be?

If you want to save a file off instagram, you open up the dev tools, pop open the div div div div div div tree all the way down to get to the image you’re looking for, pop that open into a new tab, then save that file. They’re usually watermarked so you can find them again, too, so it isn’t something I think about when I save the file. Bring it into the incoming directory, then sort them out later.

And this is how I found my cursed file.

I had an image in my incoming recently, where the file name was over 200 characters long. Do you know what this does to a windows 7 machine? Because somehow, my browser could create this file, somehow my explorer could find this file and open this file, but at that point the ability to interact with the file ends. I can’t edit it. I can’t save over it. I can’t rename it. I can copy the visual information from the image while it’s open and put it into another file, the image is totally standard visual information, but the file itself presented itself as being somehow wrong.

I wound up exploring some really weird avenues to get rid of this file. Delete. Ctrl-delete. Delete in a command prompt. Delete in a powershell. Delete everything in the directory, and see that left alone. Delete it in blocks. Delete it in a group.

Nope.

Nope, this file is wrong.

This file that you somehow made is refusing to be deleted. The eye of the operating system slides off it, when it’s required to interact with it in the wrong ways.

BE NOT AFRAID.

Anyway, what I wound up doing was clearing out the entire directory, making a copy of it, then with nothing in it but this one image, deleting that directory, then re-creating the directory and moving everything back into it, and praying the system didn’t react badly to it. That seems to have gotten rid of it.

This is a nothing story! It’s not remarkable beyond ‘I encountered a weird file,’ and I’m not used to being defied by windows explorer! But the way I wound up telling the story to Fox as I tried to work out what to do all kept circling around the picture and me being awkward and finding tangents.

‘cos the image, if you’re curious, was a picture of a pretty lady’s boobs.