Hey, you know Nixie right? I talk about her about once a year, it seems. You know, the one who likes planes. The one who likes guns. The one who watches anime and recommends I check some out. The one who contributed to my Air America article, the one who contributed to the Nicolas Cage Month Con Air article, and the one who has gotten an article multiple Decemberweens in a row now.
It’s not just because I get to use pictures from Ascendance of a Bookworm because they remind me of her.
Anyway, this year, Nixie went to China and became a pirate.
It’s been a year of the social media collapse. Twitter, the place where Nixie and I first found each other, has gone from being a sort of expected ongoing failure everyone participated in to a website that literally pays Nazis for pissing people off, and I was one of those lucky enough to be in a position to easily rip off that particular bandage and extract myself from the place. As far as I know, Nixie hasn’t.
I don’t know.
Nixie has two frontends for making things on the internet, as far as I understand it. She produces stuff on Patreon, and she makes long, long, long threads on twitter. Archiving that twitter is itself a fundamentally challenge thing because like, it’s a thing that needs a specific skill to derive it and another skill to know how to store it for access. And even then you’re not going to rely on people paying attention to what you’re saying, right? The thing Twitter had going for it was that it was a subscription service to Me that everyone could run, which meant that while you may be mixing up a potpourri of whatever immediate concerns or interests you had, the whole space was still a place you could put stuff and that stuff was in a place where other people willingly and openly checked on the regular.
Losing that is a real problem, and it means that I can’t readily point you to just ‘hey, here’s what Nixie’s been up to this year.’ I don’t have it in me to put that all together and I do run a blog where I can put together a bunch of information. Hell, you’re four hundred odd words into this post and it’s just all about how as awful as it is to admit it, I owe Twitter for introducing me to Nixie, and even if I don’t need it to talk to her now, I know that its loss creates a void for Nixie and it’s one she hasn’t yet done anything to address.
I can’t fix that.
I can’t apologise for that, either. I don’t feel bad about using Twitter when I did because, like, it got Nixie into my life and Nixie is a wonderful delight. Even though I know before the point where Twitter sucked complete shit, it still sucked pretty bad and was responsible for a lot of bad things. None of those things are in my grasp.
So I’m just gunna tell you a story.
I’m at the bus stop. It’s a grocery day. I’ve mapped my time properly, but it’s the weekend for me, a Saturday morning. DST hasn’t kicked in yet here or there. I know I’m shaving times a little here. I had to check a few more stores than I normally would and that was frustrating. I mean, it’s the bus, I know the bus is going to happen on its own timing, and this being a weekend, it might be a little late. But that little bit late can create elasticity; there are just fewer buses on the weekend, and that means if something holds one up a bit, then it might take ages for it to catch up.
I could walk home.
It’s not that far.
But if I start on walking home, and I’m not right about that, and this trolley slows me down then I’m going to make the wrong choice and how much am I overly worried about what I’m doing? Why am I so worried about this?
Because I don’t want to miss her recital.
Nixie is getting ready to perform, in a choir, in front of dozens of people. It’s not her first. It’s not going to be her last – at this point, Nixie and I know full well that she wants to do more of this. She loves the recitals, she loves choir, even considering the complications and the challenges getting to go.
And so.
The bus arrives.
I get home in time.
I start the livestream so I can watch my friend performing with her choir, songs I don’t know from cultures I don’t understand and expressing ideas I can’t tell. I have to set up software to record the video, so I can capture her moments. I watch her file into place, I look for her in the big crowd of people, and zoom in and realise what I’m doing. Like, I didn’t grow up in a place with recitals per se. There were one of two but they were like the really privileged kids of architects or something like that in the church. They’d set up basically a unique event for their kid who’d play some piano and we’d all clap and I have no idea why I was there. But that was also the family that could afford a camcorder, and where I could see someone proud of someone they loved, reaching out and trying to make sure that they were there for this moment, they were there to encode and preserve this memory.
Nixie has spent this year learning Chinese, getting another name (ask her about her Chinese name, it’s sick as hell), and learning to sail. She has escaped the internet we know to Touch Grass, and in so doing she has learned more, seen more, and embraced more. She told me about how great the food was in China, about how the exercise excited her, and about how the Great Wall smells. I am not there but I am present, because Nixie has taken her memories, and her stories, and spread them before me to share.
I couldn’t be more proud of her and I want to be there to help encode more and more of those memories.
Sigh. SIGH. GRUMBLE even. Hey, I wrote about how it’s hard to link Nixie’s work? Well, she did that after I wrote this article so here’s a link and anything else that makes no sense in the above is because of that.