Goodbye, XOXO

The first XOXO I attended was in 2016. I was "in the closet" at this time – aware that I was trans but avoiding thinking about it or addressing it. On a whim, not entirely sure why, I decided this was my chance to present myself differently, in a new context. Nervously, awkwardly, I tried on a new name and a new set of pronouns, and an outfit that could most reasonably be described as "faggy".

I started hormones two years later. Neither the name nor the pronouns stuck but hey, that's the point of experimenting.

I know I'm not the only one who feels like XOXO was always a place where magic happens. There's a few things that made it special, in my mind:

• A 1000 person cap on attendees, chosen via a lottery with some selection criteria.
• A slack community that allows you to meet people ahead of time and stay in touch afterward
• A "social day" with meetups organized by the community on slack
• A focus on creativity, optimism, and vulnerability in the talks
• Attentive & graceful moderation
• Held right in Portland's heart – the inner SE neighborhood – and (usually) not in a convention center isolated from the rest of the city
• Closing and opening parties that most attendees are present for

All of this adds up to an environment that makes it easy to meet new people, and through repeated spontaneous encounters maybe turn some of those people into friends. It reminds me of Dan Cook's article about how video games can build friends – all the ingredients are there.

Now, XOXO is over, and everyone who loved it is grieving and writing reflective & sappy blog posts about it. Me included. As I sit with this bittersweet feeling of watching the end of something beautiful, these are the thoughts on my mind.

1) I should update my website

Like, for real. I'm always happier when I'm taking care of this place. I have so many thoughts I post that would only take an extra hour or two to turn into a blog post. I spent some time adding new links to my "computers" wiki page that have been building up in my queue, and the process of sorting these things into their places is immediately satisfying and produces the exact results I'd hoped for. Every addition cascades: oh, this page is getting big, let's tidy it a bit, oh hey these links are all kind of in one category, let's maybe group them in a section. Maybe I should have a whole page for esolangs now? The process is point, and the more I do it the more I want to do it.

Cabel Sasser's talk was an extraordinary journey, and he had the whole audience glued to his words as he told the story of discovering a talented artist via an absurdly lascivious mural in a rural McDonald's.

The takeaway of the story for me was, someone out there will care about what you're doing, even if it's 50 years later. Share your work with the world before it's lost forever.

2) trans women are beautiful

Every XOXO, the transfemme people find each other.

At XOXO 2016, I had a pleasant conversation with a nice "boy" and exchanged twitter handles. Two years later, when I came out publicly, it didn't take long for her to follow right after me, and when she showed up at XOXO 2018 she wasn't on hormones yet and was still deciding on a name, but the transfemme community was supportive and immediately accepting of her as one of our own.

In XOXO 2019, Olive saw groups of trans women like me and my friends having a great time, and it ended up cracking her egg. She mentions it in her game about coming out!

I have to wonder how many eggs cracked this year.

I called it the "trans snowball". A few people join the #trans slack channel. I help organize a meetup on the social day, and we start to put names to faces, and maybe start thinking "oh, I want to have more conversations with this girl, she seems cool". You bump into her during lunch and say hi, and while you're doing that someone else bumps into you, and before you know it there's six or seven trans girls around a picnic table having animated conversations. At the closing party we all hug and make sure we've exchanged handles (more complicated in a post-Twitter world). It's a profound, beautiful experience and I'm grateful to have had any role in facilitating it.

3) I miss my friends

Despite all that, I felt myself kind of removed from the lovely beautiful people I was meeting, this year. Avery (who wrote a very sweet blog post of her own) asked me why, and I answered, instinctively, "I don't want to get my heart broken again."

Some of the most amazing, beautiful, brilliant people I've ever met are trans women I met at XOXO. I have a picture on my phone of two of them kissing me, each on one cheek, during XOXO 2019. Looking at it makes me want to cry. When the weekend ended and they left town I felt so hollowed out by the emptiness in their wake. I burned out, and began a 3-year downward spiral – only exacerbated by the pandemic.

Annika, who also wrote about how the intervening 5 years have hardened her, was the only one of my XOXO trans friends who attended this year.

Most of those friends weren't at XOXO this year, for various reasons. It felt like a crucial piece was missing.

Ultimately, I've decided in the last few years to focus on building local community in Portland, and that's honestly been going really well. As amazing as everyone is, I don't want to spend my time glued to my phone because the coolest people I know live in there. This actually kind of segues into my next takeaway.

4) how will I get cool people to visit portland now?

Like come one. Why would anybody cool come to Portland? It's a sleepy town and not really a destination for anything. And yet, I noticed that my whole timeline of cool internet people that I admire was full of people who attended, or people talking about how they wish they could've. For a weekend in August, Portland is actually on the internet's map.

The shoes feel impossible to fill, too. An event like that takes real expertise, clout, and guts to organize, and I doubt there's anybody in town who is ready to take on a challenge like that.

Avery and I were talking about how it feels like Portland's hippy culture and absence of a strong tech scene (yeah we have Intel and Nike but those produce boring bureaucrats not cool nerds) result in your only options being techno-pessimism or techno-consumerism. Which is a shame, because our insufferable hipsterism could be really compatible with indieweb ideology! XOXO always felt like this necessary infusion of optimism and creative joy that Portland desperately needs. I'll have to make a point to find and befriend more of the people in town who care about this.

5) I should replace my binoculars

Ed Yong talked about how he burned out trying to carry the collective pain of the whole pandemic on his shoulders for over a year, but he ended on a heartfelt note about how he found healing by taking up birding.

I was gifted a pair of binoculars in 2020, and spent my time afterward watching the birds and squirrels in my backyard. I talk often about the experience of the gradual shift from "I can hear birdsong" to "Oh, the song-sparrow that sits outside my window is back again and singing her usual song." Noise becomes signal, like learning to read a new language. What were before "animals" were now "neighbors".

Birding is a practice of patience and love. You sit, quietly, outdoors, and listen, and wait, and watch. It saved my life in 2021, as my life spiraled further and further downhill and the only sense of joy I could reliably cling to was watching my newfound neighbors and learning everything I could about their patterns and behaviors. Once, I watched Princess (as I named the song sparrow, because I once watched them bully another Sparrow off of their favorite perch) sing not her customary little ditty (which I've learned shares some common song structure with most Portland song sparrows but is completely unlike what you might hear in other towns or states!) but low, gentle chirps and strange flickering half-melodies, as though experimenting or perhaps muttering. I really can't express what this all meant to me.

I lost my binoculars while moving out of that house, away from a life that was tearing me apart and into a much better one. I really should replace them.

6) what are you doing still on twitter?

This could be its own blog post. Here's the short version.

I met a handful of people whose primary social media is X. When you start birding, you want to keep showing up at the same spot over and over again, and eventually you'll start to become a part of the ecosystem and the birds will stop hiding from you. Joining a new network is like that. Grieve what you've lost, and take the new thing on its own terms, with attentive patience. It's worth it.

7) what the fuck am I doing with myself?

When I got home the night after the closing party, there was really only one thing on my mind: I've spent the last decade of my life being mildly ashamed of what I do for a living. Not like, morally. I've mostly gotten over that. But when I tell you I'm a webdev there isn't even a hint of pride in my voice. It usually comes out more like an apology, or a sigh. I don't like talking about it. What would it look like if I were excited to talk about what I do?

It's a scary thought. I've invested a good amount of time into building myself a "career" and it feels like a dead end to me. And that's not even counting the possibility of the bubble popping and me being thrown to the curb with the rest of the unlucky ones.

I want my current webdev job to be my last one.

I'm not in a hurry. I'm thinking about what networks I need to explore, what bridges I need to build, and what doors I need to open to make sure that when the time comes, I'm ready. When I quit my job last year to take a year off, I was so burned out that I didn't have space to do anything but spending that year healing. I don't want to get to that point again, so I need to be ready before I leave.

So, what are my options?

When I talk with Olive about her life making indie games via kickstarter, I get so envious. So, there's one option. It's what I wanted to do as a kid. She's been nagging me to try to run a small-scale crowdfunding campaign for one of my ttrpgs, so I might see if I can have something ready for this year's Zine Quest. Idk. Being an independent artist can be a rough gig, and I'm not much of a marketer. But I know I'd at least love the work.

I've also thought about going back to school and going deeper into computer science. I've reached the point where my tech interests mean that I'm semi-regularly ending up downloading research papers discussing wild new computing paradigms, and I bet I'd get a lot out of digging even deeper there, too. I'd make an ok professor, too, if that's where I ended up. Or maybe I become a maintainer on some really cool open source tool that people want to throw money at (it's not common but it does happen).

I could also leave tech entirely. I'm a fast learner and am confident that even if I completely re-specced at this point in my life, I'd be good at it soon enough. What if I went to school for urban/transportation planning and tried to get a local government job? What if Avery and I opened a DIY music venue? Or a board game manufacturing company? Am I too autistic to be a hairstylist? What if I became an event organizer tried to fill XOXO's shoes myself?

It's all confusing and intimidating, but it's hopeful to think about. I've been eagerly trying to learn from people who have done similar leaps, so if you're reading this and have successfully abandoned a steady career for something stranger and less predictable, I'd love to hear from you.

8) I'm glad I got to say goodbye

After a couple years of "cancelling" xoxo, they stopped announcing anything at all. I genuinely thought it was gone forever. I thought I'd accepted that, but I don't think I ever really gave myself the chance to grieve. I spent the beginning of the closing party crying and wistfully staring across the convention, knowing that in a day it'd be back to being a big empty dog park.

I used to live by that park. It's especially bittersweet that the field notes design are an imprint of the shadows cast by the oak trees.

The XOXO dream is dead, and I'm sad about it, but it's also a massive relief, like something hanging over my head for years has moved on. Now it's time for whatever comes next.