One of my fave things about old twitter was our local Twitter Secret Santa. Thousands of people in AoNZ signed up and were matched with a stranger and asked to send them a gift. The fun and the joy of it came from trawling back through your santee’s tweets and trying to work out what they were into and what they might enjoy getting a gift about. I talked about it a bit here.
Now that Bluesky has reached a kind of critical mass, this is our first year having a (midwinter) Bluesky Secret Santa. And today is the day we get to open our gifts.
Now, here’s where I need to confess that I cheated and opened my gift early. I know, I know. I nearly held out, but when it arrived it felt like it was a book or a magazine and my parents were coming to stay and I thought it might be something nice to read.
Reader: my punishment for breaking the rules is that I have had to sit on my hands and not reveal that I without question won Secret Santa. I know it’s not a technically a competition, but my Santa is clearly in first place.
My Santa, Ann, wrote me a note in which she said that she was fascinated by family stories and excited to share what she’d found out about my father’s family:
I do believe that knowing and understanding more about our roots in this country helps make us better citizens and better people. That’s my hope anyway.
I was pretty intrigued, because while I know loads about my mum’s side of the family and have visited my maternal grandmother’s family home in Ireland, for various reasons we know very little about my dad’s side and I’ve never investigated it.
I opened the package to discover Ann had done my family tree on my dad’s side going back five generations!
The serendipity of breaking the Secret Santa rules just before my parents arrived to stay with me was wild. My dad absolutely loved it. We pored over the news stories of jobs, births, marriages, deaths and drunken arrests.
All of this would have been extraordinary and beautiful and heartfelt enough, without the added incredible revelation that my family is from the area in Aotearoa that I moved to ten years ago and I had no idea.
I jumped in the car and headed over the hill to the Mangawhai Museum (sidenote: extremely cool little museum if you’re on a roadie north). There, on the wall, were the great great great grandparents I didn’t know I had, Angus and Margaret.
It gets better. Ann had noted that my great great great grandfather worked at the Hakaru Dairy Factory, and that it was still there (albeit derelict). So, on I drove!
Totara, man, that wood lasts. Finally, she had recorded both of the burial sites for that generation (Charles Judd on one side, and the Stewarts on the other), so around the corner I went.
Here they are:
I can’t really put into words what it meant to sit in the sun by myself in these beautifully-kept little cemeteries and realise that my ancestors had been here all along.
As tangata Tiriti, I’ve always mumbled my way through any attempts at a pepeha, keenly feeling my status as a recent arrival in this country. Five generations still makes me extremely recent in the scheme of things, but experiencing this connection to the history of the place where I live — to knowing that my family drove these roads and built these buildings, and lived and worked and got married and died and were buried right here. Well, that’s a gift that’s priceless.
And to have received it from a stranger who, like me, still believes there’s good to be found in the social spaces of the internet — that’s a special kind of magic.
Thank you, Ann, I can never repay you.
Loads of things to share this week. First up, there’s a brand new magazine (both print and digital!) called Good Internet and it’s gorgeous. I have a long piece in there on The Web We Lost (and how we get it back). It covers similar themes to my Sunrise talk in more detail, and good news! The Sunrise talk is now available in video for those of you who prefer to digest me at 2x speed. And it includes the Q&A I did with Karl at the end.
Still more! The Tiny Awards launched this week, celebrating the best of the good internet. You’ll recall my wee LEGO Streetscaper site was a finalist last year. If you’ve made something cool or know someone who has, get amongst.
And to celebrate the launch, I collaborated with Matt Klein (Head of Global Foresight at Reddit) to write about the Dark Forest theory of the internet and why I don’t like the moniker “cosy web”.
this incredible video from Te Arawa Lakes Trust about their Uri 4 Uwhi project, which sees school kids learn to make woven harakeke mats to place on the lake floor to suppress weed growth.
another banger from my friend Mike, How to Live off the Rails:
When decisions are cheap you can make a lot more of them. You can make do on a few shifts a week. You can take a week off from your shit job to go on a road trip to the airplane graveyard. You can rent a practice space for your band. You can get an art degree (or two!) that might not necessarily result in anything. You can chase this new weird web thing for a bit and see if it has legs.
writer arabelle sicardi has put all of their advice about artists’ residencies — how to find them, apply for them, and succeed at them — into an online masterclass, which I purchased immediately. If you’re working on a creative project, consider going somewhere extremely cool to devote some time to it.
Forward this email to someone you think will like it — the social internet is still a wonderful place.