I think about these friend posts from time to time which runs the risk of making my really cool friends who are constantly doing things and making stuff in the day to day, like, more likely to get attention. And that’s not a terrible thing, after all, this is still the attention economy or whatever, by posting about my friend Amber, I might direct attention to her online presence and her cool cosplays, or if I post about my friend Nixie I might get people looking at her Patreon, all that kinda thing.
I wanna talk, today, this close to Christmas, though, about a friend who doesn’t really put himself out there on the internet, and who isn’t here to ‘sell’ himself. Sure, we’ve done that kinda thing, we’ve all had fun doing things… but
like
Some friends I want to talk about, and who I think about, because they’re my friends and I love them and that’s really cool and really good. Because my friends are great.
You probably don’t know Jason. Jason’s a friend of mine, from in America. Jason draws, Jason plays videogames, Jason likes Star Wars a lot (and that’s been a source of some tension, I suspect). Jason likes Star Trek – really, that’s why I’ve been watching Star Trek at all, as one after another, these series have been made part of my experience and I get to set aside a space of ignorance. Even now, we watch Lower Decks together, which is my favourite piece of Star Trek media.
It’s real funny watching people complain that Lower Decks relies on in-group references for its humour because like, I think those people may have just pickled their brains with those references. I like it a lot and I don’t know if anything in the show is old. I just ask Jason when we’re done watching the episodes.
Oh, I’ve been rereading the Ranma 1/2 manga? And that’s partly because we’ve been hanging around on the Ranma 1/2 subreddit and talking about it. Which is extra weird because that’s how we met, back when I was a kid and Jason was also a kid but the kind of kid who would go ‘I’m not a kid, huff.’ But still, the kind of person we’d look at now and both go: Well, we were kids.
Anyway.
Hey, remember how I mentioned I’ve been trying to draw more? You might have seen it, seen me posting art of just random things that strike my fancy. That’s partly because drawing is something I used to do a lot and I liked it, and part of why I drew so much was because it was something I shared with Jason. Now, don’t get me wrong, Jason is way, way better than I am, and there was a time when I even felt discouraged from drawing because Fox and Jason were both just better than me. Why have my own skills brought to bear when other people were just doing it better?
But Jason, in the early days, was someone I drew with, because I wanted to draw things and wanted to share them with him and, that encouragement came with its own joy. Restarting drawing like I have lately, I haven’t quite gotten back to where I was, but I mean, back then I was drawing strictly because I wanted to draw cool characters with huge boobs or amazing butts or both. There’s time to just enjoy the drawing, as I draw things more and more that I like. I owe that to Jason, Jason is someone who made me remember how much I just like drawing.
And we play City of Heroes! In fact, Jason is the person who got me into City of Heroes. This game that at this point has been part of my life or influential in my life, for twenty years, is a game that I ultimately only started because my friend recommended it, and said hey, we can play together! I write about City of Heroes and I use it to make OCs and I love this game and its universe and it informs a lot of how I think about videogames and about how I think about heroes in superhero stories, and I owe it all to my friend.
Jason is one of the earliest people I drew with when I was a child. Like when I was sixteen, I think, I reached out to a stranger, on the internet, who had a shared interest with me, and that became a way to talk about it, and honestly, it shaped my days. It shaped a lot of my internet habits too. I remember from back then a story about ‘who messages first’ and what that represented. This is really early internet days for me, when a .txt file someone put in their signature on Usenet was imparted wisdom from an older, more serious generation than I had ever encountered. I remember at the time it lodged in my brain that if you message the other person all the time, you want to talk to them more than they want to talk to me.
And anyway, years on, I have learned: That’s stupid.
This year has been a rough one full of people talking about their social networks dissolving. Tumblr is full of ‘jokes’ about how people who have never had a conversation are friends, are mutuals, are beloved and yeah like I get it, I get that human relationships are fluid and complex and take a variety of forms. But you should reach out. You need to put work into those friendships.
If you find yourself unwilling to do that… like, that’s okay? Maybe that’s the emotional level you want that friendship at. That’s okay.
But I have this friendship that has lasted longer than my students have been alive, and part of that is reaching out, and holding on.The platforms you spend time on don’t get to dictate how you should act. You can reach out! You can say hi! You can be nice and friendly!
One of my best friendships started that way.