I like to imagine the video is wholesome. A kid, a webcam, a loyal dog giving a sloppy kiss. The “tacosanddrugs” just a random edge-lord tag from a teenager who thought they were being hilarious. The dash-dash framing a protective spell against the mundane.
There’s the anachronistic .flv —a graveyard format from the Flash video era, when YouTube was barely crawling and webcams meant a Logitech sphere plugged into a Dell desktop running Windows XP. The hyphens wrapping the title like protective runes. The non sequitur energy of “Tacosanddrugs” paired with the mundane absurdity of “Webcam Dog Lick.”
Here’s a blog post written in a reflective, internet-culture, slightly eerie style—fitting for a strange file name like that. The Ghost in the File Name: On “-Tacosanddrugs - Webcam Dog Lick.flv-”
So here’s to you, . You’re not lost media yet. Just… resting. Have a weird old file with a cryptic name? Let it live in the comments.
Or maybe it’s weirder than that. Maybe the dog isn’t licking the kid. Maybe the dog is licking the lens. Maybe “tacosanddrugs” was a chat room, a inside joke, a code. Maybe this file has changed hands on a hard drive for fifteen years, copied over from one forgotten folder to the next, no one brave enough to double-click.