A goose has never done anything mischievous in my presence, but I've heard stories of cousins up north bawling over the thieving head-jabs of Canada Geese, who can remove a cracker from between a toddler's fingers with Iko Uwais-like speed.
Now a goose can steal your cousin's mouse cursor, too, thanks to a VR developer who goes by Samperson. (opens in new tab) Inspired by the avian rascals of Untitled Goose Game (opens in new tab) and SkateBird (opens in new tab), he put together a small program (opens in new tab) that adds an animated goose foe to your Windows desktop. The orange-beaked criminal waddles around your screen, steals your mouse cursor, drags Untitled Goose Game memes into view, and gets mad when you close them.
He keeps honking and stealing my cursor as I attempt to write this.
Desktop Goose is available on itch.io (opens in new tab) on a pay-what-you-want basis. After downloading it, Chrome warned me that the file is not common and so may be dangerous, as it automatically does for any archive or executable that isn't widely downloaded—though, in this case, the warning is apt. The goose hates you.
I don't think I'll ever reintroduce this feathered villain to my desktop—it is hard to work around goose attacks—but Desktop Goose did make me feel a little nostalgic for virtual desktop pets, which used to be a bigger thing. The Bad Dog screensaver (opens in new tab) from After Dark comes to mind, along with the various shareware pets that could inhabit Windows desktops throughout the '90s and 2000s. I miss those anti-efficiency programs.
You can see more of Samperson's work on Twitter (opens in new tab), and he also has a Pateron page (opens in new tab) where he shares early builds of projects with subscribers.
