wow welcome to the magpie nest
everything happens so much
*shows up to the newsletter explosion two years late with Starbucks and a tumblr meme from 2012*
I started writing this introduction post in 2019, which is a fake year that never existed. At the time, I wrote that I had had a handful of pitches rejected for not really being enough to spin a whole story out of, and that I wanted somewhere to put those little things. And then I never actually did that.
I completely understand where those editors were coming from, but I hoped to build a place where I could just do the digital equivalent of finding a sick rock and running up to you like isn’t this cool? isn’t this cool???? And then I got self-conscious about that and never did it. But now it’s 2021 and fuck self-consciousness. Welcome to the Magpie Nest.
It’s actually a myth that magpies are attracted to shiny things. But for a while I was convinced that I was seeing them as good omens because I swore they always showed up when I was happy. Then I realised they’re actually just common and what was making me happy was, you know, leaving the house. Which I think is a metaphor we can work with here.
Case in point, I revisited this whole newsletter idea because I was thinking about how we get so caught up in the idea that Online is a Bad Place that gives you Brain Worms that we miss a lot of the genuinely great stuff about it. When I say ‘revisited,’ what I mean is that I was giving it idle thought without actually planning to do anything about it, except maybe say “I really want to write a newsletter,” to my long-suffering friends who have heard this 50 times before, obviously.
But then I read this interview at Embedded with Katie Notopoulos which said a lot of what I was thinking about, and I got enthusiastic all over again. And for a couple of weeks I was like hm well that would be nice but it’s scary and then I was like god you know what actually at this point I am more tired of not doing things I want to do because they’re scary than I am actually scared and then suddenly I was oversharing in a newsletter introduction post. You know how it goes.
Anyway, the point is, for a few days I was like well, let’s see if I even run into enough cool stuff online to sustain that sort of thing. And I sure did! I love the professional Mahjong player who plays FFXIV because it’s the best Mahjong client around. I love the people spamming conservative snitch hotlines with Shrek porn. I love the bunch of musicians who came together to create a masterpiece based on a cat making weird noises, and then I love the Tumblr user who wrote about how special it is that we are at a point in history where we can collaborate and share like this.
So yeah, there are a lot of magpies. You just gotta go outside. Except in this metaphor “outside” is “online” which are usually (though not really correctly) presented as diametrically opposite but you know whatever nobody’s perfect.
I recently nailed down (one of) the kind(s) of writing I want to do in a conversation with a friend: “check out this cool thing and how it connects to this larger context.” Which is to say, I am actually a professional writer and I will do my best to give Thoughts™ which are more than just running up to you with a sick rock. But also I make no promises.
And so I want to start with the best Tweet on the internet: @horse_ebooks’ 2012 magnum opus Everything happens so much. I feel this so acutely that it’s in my Twitter bio; a solid 25% by character count of what I choose to give people as a first impression of me.
And usually when I say it it’s with sort of a joking cynicism. Like oh my god i have to do things all the time every day until i die.
Actually, mostly it’s when another video game comes out, because there are too many of those damn things.
And I think that’s how a lot of people say it, with this sense of overwhelm. But I like it so much because it can be read another way.
It’s really a joy to live in a time when there are always so many good video games coming out. It’s a joy to be able to open Twitter and see my friends talking about them, even if I don’t have time to play them myself. It’s a joy to see the rest of my timeline too. Yes, it’s this stream of information that probably contains more in a minute than a sixteenth century Venetian tradesperson would have experienced in a year, but I love being able to see a fragment from a sports journalism article, a photo of Tokyo, and Hades meme fanart back to back to back.
Everything happens so much. Isn’t that exciting?
I want that reading of everything happens so much to be the thesis of the Magpie Nest. I hope it will be.
anyway, I still don’t know how to write conclusions and now I don’t even have an editor to give me gentle but deliberate instructions on that or also to ask me for the fifteenth time to please edit my run on sentences so you know what let’s just call it a conversational style and say it would be neat if you signed up anyway uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh bye
P.S. I’m not gonna charge for this or anything so yes I probably should have just put it on Medium but also. I was very attached to calling it The Magpie’s Nest and Medium titles don’t work that way.
P.P.S. You want to know things like “frequency” and “publication schedule”???????? don’t we all buddy