Moon Memo: The end of Movie Night
Good morning from my office. Rain outside. Listening to Erik Satie and drinking coffee. Tired. Last night I went to a lego convention, where my friend Beverly had invited us to see her world of creation. Work week gets longer and longer. Maybe we just need to acknowledge that the 8 hour day is bullshit. We work for 4 hours. We talk for 4 hours with people that we don't necessarily know. And that's fine. You can steal poetry in those hours. Steal those hours in your little moon memo, and share it with the world.
Ending movie night
I sent the message at 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday: June's movie night will be the last, and the chat will end right afterwards. And I wanted to give a little bit of context, and talk about what I've learned from movie night.
Movie night was never meant to be a digital community. It started off as what it sounds like: a chance for me to see movies with friends. I was tired of social media being my only friendship outlet. Like many people, social media became the only way I interacted with people in 2020-2021, and I wanted to have a more in the flesh experience. So I said "come over for movie night" to a bunch of friends.
And it was the best! Movie night was a lot of fun. It was a chance for us to laugh together, be silly together, snuggle up together, be a group together.
And it grew. It started out as about 7 people in our tiny little living room, and at our biggest was about 30 people.
The chat started because I wanted to let everyone know that movie night was happening on a specific day. It made it easier to communicate than to send a message to 30 different people. And it became a rich experience for me. A place I could tell my closest friends I was awake, and I was going to sleep. For us to offer each other supports. To offer community care.
I think the chat is what first became a bit of a burden. When you pull together as wide of a friend group as I have, there are inevitably going to be groups of folks that don't necessarily know or (frankly) like each other. Like many trans groups, it got very very explicit, which made a few folks uncomfortable. So we split off a shenanigans chat, which seemed to work. Then disagreements came up, and often I had to be the one to step in and moderate.
That became exhausting.
I think the online element is where I started to see some flaws in the community. Any time you set up a social network, you have to have codes of conduct to make sure things are respectful, and kind, and fun. And the Movie Night chat didn't start out with those. It was anarchy in the best and the worst way. And I often felt that because I had set up the space, I had to be the mom. Had to enforce the rules. Had to reign in conversations that were troubling for folks.
The last 3 months of movie night have not been as fun for me. It has felt like a chore. The chat hasn't been feeling kind hearted. There is tensions in the friend group, and I've felt like a goalie. And I don't want to feel like a goalie.
So before it became more of something I dreaded, I decided that it was time to pull the plug. It doesn't mean that there won't be movie nights. Just that the monthly event, and the chat that comes with it, will go away.
I learned a lot about community building from this. I've met some people I don't think I would have ever met on my own due to movie night, folks that I will love forever.
This does make me want to read Casey Plett's On Community. Maybe it would have been a good idea to read this earlier. Maybe I should have kept it really small. Maybe. But I'm glad to be here, and to be in love with my friends. It's time for different priorities.
Windows
I haven't been a regular user of windows for a long long time. As you all know, I've been an unfortunate apple fangirl since at least 2017, when my school switched to macbooks after years of really shitty windows machines. MacOS makes a lot of sense to my silly brain, and when I fall in love with a technology I fall hard.
Windows, on the other hand, has always been a bit buggy, a bit slow, a bit invasive with its updates, a bit clunky.
For this job, I can't use my personal computer at all. We are required to be logged on to our VPN any time we do anything work wise. I can't access my accounts on non-OHS computers. Which is great for work life balance.
And I'm starting to realize that I don't NEED MacOS to have a good work experience. All the tools I use are cross platform, so my todo list is right there, on both my computer and phone. My notes live in Obsidian, which syncs beautifully between devices and works on all platforms. And I'm using google chrome for work stuff, which means if I need to access my email or teams at home I can (I do not).
And also...
I used to think Apple was a more ethical solution. I had totally swallowed the bullshit. But as things are coming to light about Apple's business practices, about how they treat their developers, their anti union stance, their partnership with Trump...
There are no ethical companies in tech.
This work laptop is fine. It answers the email. It is good for a typing machine. It gets the job done.
I don't need fancy tech for what I do. I need email and chat and a browser and plaintext.
Current work stack:
Google chrome-Browser
Microsoft Teams/Outlook/OneCloud-Chat, email/calendar, File management
Obsidian-Notes and writing
Todoist-Task Management
The Doubt and The Disconnect and a Humane Society
Posted to a discord I'm part of, The Sad Girls.
Keep coming back to the idea of what a Humane Society is. What would a real humane society be, that includes my friends, that doesn't waste it's time with war, that somehow got past the imperative to protect ourselves by taking care instead of staring at the stranger with anger and discontent? What if the need for enemies melted? What if the rich fuckers weren't in charge, burning out all the resources?
I can't escape the fact that I'm shutting down something I care about, but has become too much for me. Is that part of a humane society?
Anyway: this isn't sexy, and this isn't hopeful, and this isn't probably relevant to any of the girls on here. But these are the things I'm pondering, early in the morning, typing into the ether, etching light on a screen in a place meant for selfies and affirmation.
Feeling like the disconnect is coming. And that isn't healthy for anyone. Especially me.
Outro
Well this was a barrel of laughs. Maybe next time.
Love you all a lot.
Misha