Decemberween ’23 — Fox

Some things you have to write in the dark, so you don’t look at yourself while you do it.

Fox is my wife, my partner, my housemate and my system administrator. She and I have been together for more than twenty years at this point, an adolescent friendship that turned into a relationship that turned into a marriage that is now at this point, all of this, all of this … stuff in our internet spaces. And it’s a lot. Just here, on press.exe, there’s the blog, there’s the podcasts connected to it, there’s the redbubble store, the local store, there’s the invincible ink rules webpages, there’s the activitypub and social media presences and there’s also, on top of all of that, our branding as invincible.ink.

I don’t know if you can appreciate how much work Fox does for this enterprise of mine. Yes, I write all the words (more on that later) but Fox is the webgoblin that keeps this site loading. She’s the one who manages the accounts and when a complicated problem comes up, like my article on Summer Time Render, which links to its own time-looping variants, she’s the one who shows me how to do it. She helped me get away from a complicated bloated piece of software that didn’t quite work in the form of Jetpack and – I mean she set the site up on its own in the first place. Quite literally, nothing of this would have happened as it is right now without Fox doing that. The internet, as a text and image medium, is shockingly powerful at conveying information with a utilitarian front-end. It’s something that I learned this year, a lot of people don’t understand or appreciate, like the reinvention of the book was not best served by just making better and more convenient books.

The ten years of Press.exe is not this one-and-done kinda thing either. Sure, she could have set up the WordPress and just left it, but she tinkers with it, and engages with it, and updates the feed and implements new changes to it. This past year, she’s the one who got me to re-attempt an engagement with Mastodon, through kind.social, which is an instance I like and like using. Fox may be a reclusive little web goblin, someone who uses the internet constantly and even has expertise in making the internet work at all, but she is an advocate for a kind of good internet hygiene. Use alt text (I’m trying). Store files sensibly. Archive large files offsite. Learn to use the ftp program, because even if you only need it sometimes, you do need it.

Part of how she maintains her own internet hygene, is mostly, she uses me as her discoverability system. Like, Fox and I used to play MMORPGs together, and I honestly cannot tell you the last time I’ve seen her playing a videogame online unless you count using a VTT to play D&D with our friends and our family. In which case she’s a web developer for a MMORPG, but I don’t think that counts.

Fox and I also made a point to watch a bunch of anime together this year, and play some board games. You might notice that a lot of posts on the site weren’t text articles on a topic, but were instead chats between us. A few of the videos on the channel, too, were of both of us – Fox learning all about Willie Beamish, or playing Eyes on the Prize with me, or even just us chatting about 2022’s absolutely stacked roster of waifus.

Fox, this year, contributed a design to Desert Bus For Hope that raised something in the district of $1200. That’s $1200 we could not, simply could not, have contributed. That’s $1200 that represents literally, weeks of work time. That’s $1200 that is going to Child’s Play to help children struggling with the worst time of their lives. And when it was done, when it was over, she spoke about it with a tone of sadness, because she was concerned that it hadn’t raised enough. That her art and her work and her other layer of also complex art, had not done enough, had not incentivised enough people to buy raffle tickets to try and help others, after we made it paid for it to be built and then shipped it to Canada, all for our own money.

Was it enough.

Fox is a person who cares, a lot, about being listened to, about being respected, and about doing a good job. She cares about how videos that feature her are presented, about word choice and about executing the things she cares about well. I have yet to see the problem, when dealing with Fox, that she doesn’t work hard enough.

This is a real struggle when we’re talking about a world and a time that’s making it harder and harder for her to work. How many things around us have imposed barriers and made life difficult for her specifically. I’m not about to put her business on the street here, but it’s absolutely a fact that I get to do a lot of things because of how I’m built that Fox has to demand attention to, has to demand focus on, because otherwise, by default, people do not give her that attention and respect. Simply put, Fox, since I know you wind up reading this: You are not respected and praised enough.

This problem, this brain worm, of ‘hey, have I done enough?’ is one of those things that things that can be hard to negotiate around. Because what does enough mean? There’s always more, there’s always more stuff we can do. Enough is a fake idea, enough is an imposition from an outside that doesn’t look at what we did and looks instead at what we didn’t do. It’s enraging watching as people take even the most modest of interactions with her and just fail to show her basic respect – even people who think they’re being friendly.

I put Fox’s article here, for the same reason, every year. Because Fox’s time, with me, is a gift.