When I was in Hong Kong a few months ago, I noticed that a lot of intercoms have this particular animation of a cat sleeping and chasing a fly, on a loop:

It was actually kind of fun to see it all over Hong Kong on LCDs of varying quality.

Turns out this was Neko! A “screenmate” application from the late 1980s that made its way to various software platforms and apps since.

I liked the idea that somewhere in the intercom factory someone wanted to add a little delight to a very pedestrian (no pun intended) surface, and that’s why now we have Neko all over Hong Kong.

(I liked it so much I recreated it and added to the bottom of my site.)