I should have made a blog post yesterday, but I didn’t! I’ve been having too much fun, to be quite honest!

I’m at Nix Camp, a fun adult sleepaway camp event at a neat old observatory near Liverpool!

I’ve actually never been to Europe or left America on my own before, so this is a bunch of firsts for me! I’ve met some awesome people, and I’m celebrating having the free time to do the good programming after getting a little sick of Gradle.

I’ve not got much cool to share other than “my blog is up and I’m doing stuff on it!”

The trip

I traveled from my place near NYC using Aer Lingus with a 10 hour layover in Dublin. It was a wonderful decision, Dublin is a gorgous town, and everyone was super friendly. Getting through customs and security was no issue, even though I don’t have proper global entry. I had lunch at a random pub and walked towards the city center (centre?), getting my steps in.

Then I got to ride a new type of aircraft for me to Liverpool, the ATR-72. Some of my fellow passengers were horrified to be on a schoolbus with turboprops, but do you really want to spend your life on assorted 737s?

A one night’s stay at a hotel, and then an uber, and I was at Nix Camp. Albeit after sleeping in past noon.

Thankfully, Nix Camp has a super casual vibe, with people coming and going as they like.

The venue

I’m all about Cozy Science. Give me a stone cottage surrounded by dishes and antennas. The Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre delivers that by the ton. I will have to find an ergonomic and clean way to share photos here. Trying to just get something out for today, I’ll describe some wonderful things about it.

It’s located on top of Bidston Hill. Next to the observatory, there’s the Bidston Lighthouse. This hill is two miles in, but visible from sea, making this lighthouse the furthest inland by far.

This is in the middle of a woodsy park a short walk from suburban Britain. Visiting in September, the weather is mild and pleasant, and the trails are a mix of soil and huge stones. Some ancient carvings are around. You can hike it with a decent pair of sneakers (trainers?).

The building itself is a bit of a maze, and delightfully quirky. The current owners run it as a sort of artist retreat type space, and the Nix Camp folks are one of the more technical visitors. The last people were witches! Good for them. The first day, we got a tour of the whole building. From top to bottom, the roof has two domes that were used for stargazing, with tiny windows that can be moved around with a crank mechanism. This would let you point your telescope off at part of the night sky in the dark, safe from the elements. Nowadays, they’re quirky lounges.

Under that, there’s bedrooms and a library. More on those later.

The ground floor has a movement room for yoga or movie watching, and a big kitchen area where most of the campers have been hanging out so far. There’s also an administrative office/museum room that’s full of fascinating artifacts from the building’s history (THE TIME GUN! They fired a cannon every day to calibrate clocks on nearby ships, for navigation, and and and! Sorry, I’m overstimulated.)

And the basement has a community radio station and music library. Their station has a pretty laissez faire ethos, which reminds me of my area’s WFMU freeform station.

And beneath that, there’s yet another basement, which did super special science involving monitoring the tectonic plates with lasers in a pitch black room.

Remarkably, this building has a cozy, welcoming big farmhouse vibe to my bumpkin American mind. The bedrooms are spartan, IKEA twin mattresses with a communal stash of blankets, and each bunk has curtains for privacy. Think hostel, not motel. Campers are expected to clean up after themselves and care for the space, a fair trade for such a low price. So far, it seems to be working for the place. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable with sleeping with new friends in a coed room with such arrangements, Nix Camp offers a different rate for people staying in local airbnbs. Being a tall and sturdy trans woman, I felt pretty safe, but you know what you need to feel safe.

The people

I have too much social anxiety to go around and ask like “Can I please blog about you and include your name?” because frankly I’ve got social anxiety and somehow my amygdala isn’t chilling out after my prefrontal lobe took me across the ocean.

However, everyone’s here for nerdy fun and learning with nix, and there’s people from all over. So far, the ratio is heavily male to female (there is another woman here, but hopefully as awareness of the event grows, the ratio gets better!). And so, it’s easier to talk to them than I do with most strangers back home, and I’m realizing how nice it is to relax with a chill community, a few of whom I recognize from NixOS discourse threads and git repos.

The structure (or lack thereof)

I’ve attended Recurse Center, which remains my archetypal hackerspace/tech camp. They have a loose curriculum where you can study whatever programming makes sense to you, and that’s the case here, with no formal scheduled events in advance. Having ADHD and no refills on my meds thanks to American goofiness, this is a double edged sword, but I like the vibe. People are dynamically pairing, and I’m able to slip between different conversations like I’m at a cocktail party. But instead of very pretty people talking about if they did or didn’t get to go to Heidi Klum’s Halloween Party, it’s delightful nerds talking about if flakes are cursed and how to avoid IFDs.

These folks also have a lot of fascinating hobbies, and they bring with them delightful snacks and toys from their homelands. We’re planning an outing to a local hackerspace and radio club to play with Meshtastic LoRa radios.

The vibe in general

I love it here. I’m having a blast and feel accepted and free to play with technology as it makes me happy in a way taking a vacation in my own apartment never let me, as I dreaded returning to work. Even the NYC skyline started to make me feel sad thoughts about keeping up at work, and I love my dirty, dysfunctional home across the tunnel. This is a fine way to empty a travel card’s points. I hope I can center down and build something good, but even if I can’t, I’d like this trip to be a moment when I come out of my shell and share more of what makes technology a fun part of being alive.