Hi, my name is Arwa and my interests include homosexuality and dinner. In November 2015, I poked my friend Britta for the third time in a row. At 13.46 EST on 2 December 2017, I deactivated Facebook for the 28th time. My peer group has reached Established Adult Life. I have unfriended 19 people: two of these were exes and one was my former dentist. Take it from me, do not accept friend requests from your dentist.

Those are just a few of the details contained in the archive of my Facebook history, which I downloaded on Monday. I stopped actively using the site years ago, but recently decided to delete my Facebook for good. First, however, I wanted to save a copy of my data. After all, I have been on the site for more than 11 years, almost a third of my life. My Facebook is basically a mausoleum of my 20s; a repository of old photos, status updates and conversations with people who have drifted out of my life.

Downloading your Facebook history is easy. Just go to settings and select the option to get your data. It took Facebook a few minutes to prepare my information, and then my entire history was neatly archived in four folders. Looking through your downloaded data reveals certain information you ordinarily wouldn’t see. For example, Facebook assigns one of two labels to what it calls your Friend Peer Group: Starting Adult Life or Established Adult Life. It is possible there are other classifications, such as Inept at Adult Life, but I couldn’t find them in my research.

You also get a file called facedata.htm, which contains your facial recognition intel. Facebook doesn’t appear to classify your face into categories like Adult Face That’s Starting to Look Old but I wouldn’t put it past them.

Then there’s a list of topics Facebook thinks you’re interested in and shares with advertisers. Mine included the aforementioned homosexuality and dinner, as well as things such as advertising agencies and journalism. Alongside this is information on advertisers who have your contact information and ads you’ve clicked on. Last Thursday, I apparently clicked on an ad for The Economist which mentioned a free notebook. Even in Established Adult Life, it is hard to resist a free notebook.

If you haven’t downloaded your Facebook history I highly recommend doing so. While we are all aware our online interactions leave a digital footprint, it is easy to forget how expansive that footprint is. Seeing your digital life organised into folders is something of a wakeup call, particularly when you realise the data Facebook lets you download is just the tip of the iceberg of what it knows about you. It doesn’t show you the full extent of the third-party data it has access to, for example, and it doesn’t let you know all the ways it has analysed your data.

After looking through my Facebook history, I felt inspired to archive my entire digital footprint. From my Uber rides to my Spotify listening history to my Google search results to my Netflix statistics – I wanted to examine the full extent of my data trail. As you can imagine, this exercise quickly became overwhelming. My data, I soon realised, was everywhere, and most of it was difficult, if not impossible, to access. It shouldn’t be like that, I thought indignantly. Companies should make it easier for us to keep track of our digital footprint. But they don’t and, I’m afraid to say, it wasn’t long before I abandoned my valiant attempts to take back control of my data.

Perhaps rather predictably, I started to think about homosexuality and dinner instead.

Don’t call it a punback

Last week, I spent a sweaty evening in Brooklyn surrounded by cunning linguists. I was at Punderdome, which is a monthly pun competition. Contestants get 90 seconds to come up with wordplay on a given topic and the audience votes on who should progress to the next round and become the punofficial champion of the night. While the audience and the contestants were largely made up of “woke” and very PC millennials, the wordplay was often smutty and occasionally homophonic. Despite this, it was very good fun.

It was also extremely packed fun. Who knew, but puns are trendy now. Judging by the amount of manicured facial hair I inadvertently brushed up against, every hipster in New York had turned up to enjoy a night of competitive punning. Some of the contestants even had groupies.

You know what? Seeing so many people pay good money to enjoy bad jokes was actually a rather heartening experience. You see, for centuries the poor pun has been much maligned. Dryden, for example, called puns, or “clenches”, the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit”. To be honest, if Dryden had used more puns his work wouldn’t have been so dry then, would it? (Sorry). Look, there I go, apologising for a harmless pun. This is exactly the problem I’m talking about. People feel obliged to groan when they hear a pun and say sorry when they make one. For years, pun-lovers have been forced to apologise for who they are and what they love.

But perhaps that’s all changing. Punderdome is just one example of what seems to be a burgeoning pun scene. There’s the UK Pun Championships, for example, and the O.Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Texas. Mark my words, the humble pun is on the rise.

Rate a species with zoo reviews

In otter news, it seems everyone is obsessed with rating everything these days – from your Uber driver to your brunch to your favourite carnivorous mammal. Last Friday, Oregon Zoo tweeted an Amazon-style review of a river otter: “Overall very good first impressions. Sturdy built, totally winter-ready and waterproof ... #rateaspecies.” This sparked a spate of zoo reviews. Monterey Bay Aquarium, for example, tweeted: “Four stars ... Heartless, brainless and spineless yet more emotive than most.” While that may sound like a pretty apt description of a current president, I should clarify that it was actually a review of a jellyfish.