In the spirit of John Green’s book of the same title, our theme for the month of October is “the Anthropocene reviewed.” Writers were asked to review and rate some facet of human experience on a five-star scale.

When I was three years old and going to lab school (yes, it was called that—growing up in a college town meant that one of the main options for preschool was just… the psychology department), I had two great joys.

The first was getting a new cape every day. Every morning I would strut on in the there and when asked by the friendly, faceless (to my memory) teachers what I wanted to do I would declare, “I want a cape.” And each day they would oblige, cutting out a rectangle of felt and taping it to my shoulders. Although I do remember the cutting became less and less precise as time went on—very few right angles in the collection by the end. And it was a collection. Each day I would come home, doff the cape, and add it to a stack in my closet.

My second great joy was Microsoft Paint. We all know it. We all love it. My lab school had a classic, deeply three-dimensional desktop PC that was somehow both gray and tan and sitting on a table on top of a loft of some sort (did I dream this? I think that’s where it was). And one of my favorite things to do was whip that mouse around in Paint and make spiderwebs, as my friends Finn and Ocean called them. (Yes, those were genuinely the names of my best friends in lab school—purely a coincidence, I didn’t have an ocean theme criteria to be my friend.) We’re talking every single color, every kind of brush. Jackson Polluck wishes.

Besides those masterpieces, my memory of what I ever actually made in Microsoft Paint is pretty foggy. I remember the spray paint brush and how I would always try it, thinking it was going to look so cool, and then quickly undo it. I remember the satisfaction of using the paint bucket to fill a shape and the jolt of panic when a breach in the lines would cause one click to corrupt the whole canvas.

Microsoft Paint to me represents a time before the internet was a place I went to to be entertained. A time before YouTube, Club Penguin, or even Barbie.com. The years even after preschool when I had time to kill in the afternoons while my mom finished up her front desk duties but before I had actual homework.

I tried a few times to find Mac equivalents to dear ol’ MP but for whatever reason they never felt quite right. The eraser was in the wrong place or it wasn’t pixel-y enough.

I can’t even remember what the logo looked like to be honest, but just the thought of it is comforting. Imagine if that was still an option for me as a way to spend some time. Put on some music, get a big mug of hot cocoa, and mess around in Microsoft Paint? Yes, please.

I recognize that these days there is way better software for digital art out there. There’s a whole world of specially designed tablets and pens and gloves that cover just your pinky so you don’t smudge said tablet. But if I had a great setup I think I’d feel like I had to make great art. I don’t want to choose from eighteen different weights of oil brush and figure out which kind of lighting effects I want on the background layer. I just want to fill some big ovals with some heavily saturated colors. And then, if it actually looks any good, what a feat! I did it on little ol’ Microsoft Paint.

Of course, there are people who do actually make incredible art with it. But Mr. Paint will have to remain in my nostalgia vault. I haven’t had a Windows computer in a decade and I think I read somewhere that it’s not supported anymore. But it will live on in my heart as a feature of a simpler time: when playing counted as learning and I looked forward to deciding which color to scribble with. Although, to be fair, I also got really excited every time I had the chance to play the Microsoft pinball game. So maybe I was just a sucker for a screen.

But the point stands: I loved that software and I’m thankful for whoever decided that it should be preloaded on every Windows machine for whatever reason.

I give Microsoft Paint five stars.

Christina Ribbens

Christina Ribbens (’19) studied history, studio art, and data science at Calvin and public humanities at Georgetown. She now lives in the part of Virginia that’s almost Washington, DC where she helps award grants to arts nonprofits. She takes a lot of walks to admire the landscaping in peoples’ front yards, mostly listens to British comedians’ podcasts, and likes to make friends via sports.