The bright side of a Moon
Tomorrow will mark 22 years since I purchased the domain bamoon.com and began using it for my main space on the internets. Trying to think of a good way to celebrate.
Not to spoil things too much but the celebration will likely involve writing some words. Just sayin’.
My 500 words a day streak continues. In private, as mentioned previously. I haven’t been writing anything coherent, just tapping out words until I reach my goal, so haven’t posted anything here. I’m glad you are still out there watching and reading my posts. I promise to have more substantial or at least entertaining things to say, soon. I know that habit forms the foundation for inspiration, after all.
I came downstairs on Friday with some dishes and to get a refill of water and saw Jeff Goldblum on the TV. “Whatcha watching, dad?”
“Oh I was scrolling around and saw this new show.” He used the remote to bring up the title. Kaos. “It’s a little weird but I kinda like it.”
I paused, behind him, watching for a moment. “Is that Netflix?” Dad grunted a yes. “Oh that’s that new show where he’s playing Zeus?” Dad grunted again. “Not really your normal kind of thing.”
“Jeff Goldblum is amazing. I’ll watch anything with him in it. Even if it’s a little weird.”
I laughed and walked in to the kitchen to put my dishes in the dishwasher. As I was filling up my water bottle, I shouted out to the living room. “Even a Marvel movie?” Dad did not like Marvel movies. They were too weird.
But dad sounded interested. “Oh, was he in a Marvel movie?”
“Yes, he was in Thor: Ragnarok. It’s very funny for a superhero flick.” I walked out, paused again behind him. I put my hand on his shoulder, briefly. “He plays a bad guy.”
“Well, I might just have to watch that one. Like I said, I’ll watch anything with Jeff Goldblum in it.”
Stay tuned. I will post an update after he watches one of the better Marvel movies.
Wrote tonight about minor celebrities, people whose work I admire but are unknown to most of the population. I was inspired by a video about Tony Hawk, pro skateboarder, who tells many stories about people telling him he looks like that famous pro skateboarder, but don’t believe him when he tells them that he is in fact that pro skateboarder.
What a surreal experience it would be to have that happen. I’ve never been famous in that way. Well, briefly. I’ll write more about that later. But this idea of minor celebrity ties back to XOXO Festival for me. Most of the speakers and guests through the years have been people whose work I was somewhat familiar with, but the one thing they all have in common is that they create work on the internet, and they were known to Andy Baio or Andy McMillan, both minor celebrities in this same way.
I don’t want to mythologize the Andys; I do want to say that they are seekers of and magnets for the coolest things you’ll ever find on the internet. Indie games, digital artists, writers with deep knowledge of esoteric and lost topics, the Andy’s seek them out and promote them. They lead a small community of like-minded, inclusive, and kind people.
This is the viewpoint I’m writing my final post about the final XOXO. A very specific kind of community for the people involved, focused on a specific kind of fame for people. A fame of empathy and imagination. That’s the best kind. Stay tuned.
I won’t be posting it, but I did sit down and write today. I had a shitty day. Long story made short, I was on-call for work, and had to deal with not one, not two, but three different clients having network and server downtime on a long weekend. And that caused me to have to cancel my D&D game.
Boo. But that’s behind me now. Tomorrow will be better.
Still processing XOXO and the profound effect it has had on me since I first learned about it. Which was way back in 2013, the second year for it. I’d missed the first incarnation entirely despite being, even back then, chronically online. I knew who Andy Baio was: chief technology officer (CTO) for Kickstarter, an amazing crowdfunding platform, and also the blogger behind Waxy.org. To me, he was the guy who creates and finds cool things on the internet. Finding out that he lived in my hometown, and that he was behind an art-tech festival, I knew I needed to see it and maybe be a small part of it.
In August of 2013 I had quit my job out of depression and grief and had no plans to go back to work. I emailed the info email account for this festival, XOXO, and asked if it was too late to volunteer and help. I got no answer, but I resolved to watch for it again next year.
For the year after that, I tried scraping nickels off the internet using Mechanical Turk, a far more exploitative crowd-sourcing app, only falling farther and farther behind on rent and other expenses. But in the summer of 2014, I saw on Twitter that they were again asking for volunteers for this festival, and I immediately emailed. I got a response from Andy McMillan almost immediately, and I was in. I could be with the cool kids. I wasn’t a cool kid, but at least I could help them run their show.
It’s funny to me now that I have almost no blog posts about that. I have one, and it focuses on one single lesson I learned: do the things you love often, make it a habit. That lesson is one I have learned from many different sources, and clearly, as I blog here for the 149th day in a row, a lesson I am still putting to good use. If for nothing else, Jonathan Mann, the Song-A-Day guy, thank you for reinforcing that drive in me.
But holy cats the other speakers that year! Dan Harmon, who I only knew as the creator of Community, inventor of the Story Circle, and Harmontown host, was there, doing a version of his podcast live from the stage at XOXO. Before the show, wandering around, I saw him talking to a woman, and screwed up my courage to go tell him that I loved his work. I politely waited while they exchanged some kind of tense argument, and the woman pointed at me and said something about me being his typical fan.
I mean, sure, I was (and am) a chubby, bald, cis, white dude. Fair, I suppose. I considered myself a feminist and socialist at the time, although many miles of travel down those roads still stretched before me (and still do) so it stung a little. But then Dan Harmon defended me. “What is that supposed to mean?” he challenged her. “This guy is just some random guy, he’s here at this festival the same as you. What is it you’re trying to say?”
I didn’t stick around and I don’t remember how the conversation went. It is entirely possible my memory is incomplete or a fuzzy confabulation. But I remember Dan being argumentative, I recall the woman being dismissive, and I remember feeling awkward. I was glad I got to tell Dan I loved his work though. I still do. He taught me to acknowledge my failings, because that’s the only way to overcome them.
That year I told many creators and writers and artists that I loved their work. What’s funny is, I never saw myself as a creator, writer, or artist. Not then, even with 10 years of blog posts and two first drafts of novels under my belt. I didn’t think what I was doing was on the same level as the folk at XOXO 2013, because my blog traffic was tiny, and I never published those drafts, and the only drawing I did was for myself.
But I am a writer, creator, and artist. I do it because I can’t not do it. I blog here. I make amazing maps for my D&D game and craft stories and lore that my players tell me is deep, rich, and engaging. I do it because I love doing it, and have fun doing it. I’ve been living the XOXO dream, whether I allowed myself to admit it or not. Thank you, Andy B. and Andy M. Your inspriation and energy are a positive force in the world.
I am very sleepy tonight. Not sure why I’m so tired today except of course for the disordered sleeping from the past couple of nights. I go to bed early, wake up in the middle of the night, can’t get right back to sleep, and by the time I do there’s only a few hours left until the alarm goes off. A couple of nights of that would be enough to tire out anyone, I think.
Still need to write something, so I’m relying on habit, as is my usual tactic. It’s warm in this room even though the weather has cooled a bit. The room is warm because this is where my computer sits, and my computer, being a gaming PC, produces a lot of excess heat. I am not using the extra graphics capability right now. Right now I’m typing out green words on a black background, my writing style of choice. This green-on-black reminds me of terminals, and command lines, and old old writing programs. I don’t stop to examine why I like it, I just do.
Spent most of the day wishing I could be thinking and writing D&D stuff but instead, I had to do work stuff. Boring, stressful, work stuff. Not going to talk about that now, though. I’d rather not think about it. There must be something else for me to write about?
Would it be D&D? I have to set up a WordPress site for Biscuit Con at some point. That’s D&D related. I have some really fun ideas for the next few sessions of my campaign. I can’t really post about them here because my players might see it, but let me just say that this next phase of the campaign is set in and around a druid grove. I think my players think of the druids as bad guys. I’m not going to say one way or the other. They, like all my other factions, have their goals, and what they would do to achieve those goals, and not everyone in the faction agrees on either of those points 100%. This should be a nice break, though, from fighting undead and kobolds for them. I get to use other enemies. Fun stuff.
XOXO is coming. My first volunteer shift is this coming Thursday after work. I can’t remember what I’m doing but it’ll be good to be among the techno-artists again. I have severe imposter syndrome for my own sake but I really like the hopeful, progressive, creative, and techno-focused vibe from the founders, staff, volunteers, guests, and attendees for this conference. I wrote about what it is a few days ago; go check out that post.
If you’re reading this and you’re an XOXO-ian, say hi! I think somehow I got a burst of traffic from there. This isn’t an XOXO focused post, though. I’m just fumbling my way to 500 words so I can go rest. I’m pretty close now, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I don’t try to find a nice “button” ending. But thanks for reading. I love you all.
Had a check-in with my team lead today. They like to have one-on-one talks every couple of weeks. They ask how I’m feeling, what, if anything, I need, figure out plans for the future. We almost never focus on specific tickets or clients; our talks are more about how I feel overall about the job, about life, about goals and stuff.
It’s great. Have I said how much I really like this job? I can’t stop the anxiety brain; that anxiety is baked in after all these years, it’s not going away. I will always have that insinuating voice in the back of my head, the one that tells me I’m no good, that I’m messing up, that no one likes me. But on good days, I can tell that voice to shut the fuck up. And I am pleased to report I have been having more and more good days lately.
Despite what I said, today my team lead (let’s call them T.) started out talking about a specific call, mostly because we had just finished dealing with it. The client was upset because they thought we had been ignoring their issue today, and that their issue had been caused by a network outage that they also thought we had ignored. It was sort of a mess, and I was on the front lines, since I was the one who had to communicate with the client.
To be clear, the network outage was not something we could control, and we did, in fact, notify the client over the weekend when we got notified about the outage. The client ignored those notifications. And the other issue was… how can I talk about this without giving away company secrets? The other issue was unrelated to the network outage, as near as we can tell, was entirely the domain of a third-party service provider, and was the result of a settings change that the third-party told us was a) impossible to make and b) undocumented – there was no log or ticket for the settings change.
Someone is lying and I am reasonably sure it isn’t us. Either the client made the change, or the third-party service provider did. We will not be able to tell, but it got fixed and that’s as far as me and the company I work for should care about.
My team lead, T., however, started my one-on-one by talking about how it irked that the client was upset with us when we did all we could to fix their issue. And T. could not stop thinking about it. I absolutely saw T’s point of view. Here’s what I offered them:
I also feel a responsibility, a duty, to do my best. If I don’t feel that, for whatever reason, then I do not do things. I let things slide or ignore them. I push when I have that sense of duty.
But my sense of duty is based in rules. It’s got an algorithm. Duty means I have a process, or I can create one. Caring, on the other hand, is emotional. It’s about empathy, it’s about a connection to the issue or the people involved. Maybe we need to separate the rational duty from the emotional care. Save the emotional care for better things.
T. appreciated that, and having talked it out, we were able to move on to other, better topics. It was a good meeting.
My team lead called me today. He wanted to know if I’d be willing to take another tech’s on-call rotation next week, since they’d be on vacation.
“I would love to, and I’d be able to during the week, but that weekend I’m volunteering for a conference so I’d be really distracted.”
“Oh, that’s understandable,” he said. He’s very reasonable and very much about work-life balance, so I knew it wasn’t a big deal. “We’ll make it work somehow, no problem.” He paused. “On another note, though, what’s this convention about?”
“It’s called the XOXO Festival. It’s… kind of an indie-artist tech conference? There are multiple tracks for music, for games, and for videos and podcasts, and art of all kinds.”
I shared the website with him and he browsed it while I tried to shorthand a quick description.
XOXO is sort of hard to explain. It’s got a vibe unlike so many other conferences out there. It’s definitely not tech-bro territory, and it’s not wild and pagan like Burning Man, and it’s not techically nerdy like DefCon. Its attitude is sharing, curious, talented, and kind.
The festival takes the best parts of Portland, and none of the worst parts. XOXO is a product of the Portland I love, created by two friends, Andy B. and Andy M., who are perhaps the most curious, talented, and kind people I know. I’m happy to have been even a small part of XOXO, even though I have never felt my imposter syndrome as strongly as I have among the staff, volunteers, guests, and attendees at any of these festivals.
And I’m sad that it’s ending. Did I mention that? Andy and Andy have spent a lot of time and energy creating and curating this thing, and they want to put a bow on it, make one final statement, and move on to other projects. So 2024 is the last XOXO. I had to be there. I missed the last one, in 2019, because I was in a depressed headspace.
But I’ve stayed in the community — oh did I mention there’s a community? The XOXO spirit begat a private Slack that has been operating for as long as Slack has been a thing, I think? I’d have to go look. I’ve stayed in the community and it has been, for me, the Best Place on the Internet. I try to give back to the XOXO family as much as they’ve given me.
I’ve always been a volunteer, helping to staff and run the past events, and this year is no different. Tonight was the volunteer orientation and it was amazing to be in-person with people I’ve only mostly interacted with online for so long. Andy and Andy stood up in front of us, talked about the vibe, and reminded us all of what our expectations should be.
“But you know all this,” Andy M. said. “Everyone here has either worked, or attended, a past XOXO. We couldn’t do this without you.”
The feeling is reciprocated.
If I sit and wait for inspiration, chances are it is not going to show up. Inspiration is great but it is not reliable. Not for me, at least. I don’t have a muse. The gods did not gift me. I don’t even believe in gods and even if I did, it would be the height of ego to assume they would grant me anything.
No, I do what I do, which parenthetically, right now is writing, because I am stubborn as the mule-iest mule what ever did mule. I don’t give up. I might take breaks sometimes, but if I intend to do something I will always come back to it and I will always complete that task. To call me bull-headed is to say you might be surprised I don’t have long pointy horns. Oh maybe that metaphor got away from me.
No, I have a duty to show up, except that duty is for the silliest things, like having exactly the same breakfast for years in a row, or trying to reach 500 days survived on one save in The Long Dark. Or driving my car into the ground because it’s easier than shopping for a new one.
Or for writing at least 500 words a day and posting it on my blog, like I’m doing now.
Many times I don’t have an idea about what to write. I joke about it with Tracy. I’ll send her a message “I don’t know what to write about tonight” and then 20 minutes later I’ll send her a link to the post I wrote.
And it’s true that lately I have been going very meta, writing about how I don’t know what to write about, or musing about motivation vs. habit. I didn’t promise that every post would be award-winning. No, my promise is to just keep going, to get into the habit, so that if and when I am inspired by something, I can channel it and put that inspiration to words, hopefully capturing some of the essence of random ideas with good foundations.
Every author I’ve ever admired could be described as prolific, because they just don’t stop writing. I shouldn’t compare my output to their drafted and re-drafted, vetted, edited, and published works, though. I don’t get the privilege of seeing any of the earlier versions of those stories. So I won’t.
Me, I’m the obstinate fucker who puts it all out here for anyone to see, the good, the bad, and the boring. You can trace the tensions and joys of the past 4 months by my daily output. Sometimes I do have a good idea and the right frame of mind to share that idea in the best sentences I can muster. Those are the good days. Good ideas, good days. Bad ideas, still an okay day as long as I post something. No ideas, still have to write and post something. It’s all about the posting something.
Ain’t no destination. It’s entirely the journey, y’all.