Terminator 2 on DVD
I still have the DVD. It sits on a shelf behind the counter at Stachel & Tee, between a copy of The Timeless Way of Building that I have never quite finished and a tin of sencha that I bought in a moment of optimism and am saving for a reason I will probably never articulate. The DVD is in a plain plastic case, the kind that used to come free with a newspaper, with a crack running diagonally across the front that has been there since the night I received it and dropped it twice before getting it into the house. The disc plays fine. It has always played fine.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Two-disc special edition. The one with the blue metallic slipcase that is long gone now, lost somewhere in a house-share in Nottingham in 2013, in a room I shared with a man who bred tarantulas and whose name I no longer remember.
It was given to me by Froggy, fifteen years ago, outside a McDonald's in Mansfield, on a Tuesday. I remember the Tuesday specifically because Tuesdays were when McDonald's did the 99p cheeseburger deal, and we had both just finished our first year at university — mine at Nottingham, his at Loughborough — and Mansfield was the halfway point where the trains met.
We had been corresponding about software architecture. That is the truth. We were twenty-one years old and we were writing long emails to each other about hexagonal architecture and the correct way to structure a REST API, and we had decided that these conversations were too important to have over email, so we met in Mansfield. At the McDonald's. Because neither of us could drive and Mansfield was where the train lines crossed.
He arrived with a laptop in a bag that was clearly too small for it and a DVD in his coat pocket. He handed it to me somewhere between the counter and the table where we sat for four hours drinking 99p milkshakes and arguing about whether Alan Kay was right or just interesting. The DVD was wrapped in a napkin. Not as a gift — Froggy has never wrapped anything in his life — but because he had been carrying it in his coat pocket and the napkin was meant to stop the case from getting scratched.
"You said you had not seen it," he said. That was the entire explanation.
I watched it that night. I watched it again the next day. I have watched it maybe fifteen times in the fifteen years since, which is less than once a year, but I have never watched it without thinking about that Tuesday. About the milkshakes. About Froggy's laptop bag being too small. About the napkin.
The thing about Terminator 2 is that it is about something that is trying very hard to become something else. The Terminator arrives as a machine and leaves as something that has learned what it means to care about a person. It is not a clean transformation. It is not a happy one. It is a machine that picks up habits — thumbs-up gestures, catchphrases it does not fully understand, the weight of knowing that doing the right thing and surviving are sometimes in conflict. And it does the right thing anyway.
I think about this more than is probably normal.
Fifteen years later, I have a tea shop. Froggy runs a company. We check each other's websites every day and do not talk about it. The DVD is on a shelf behind my counter, next to a book I have not finished and a tin of tea I am saving for a reason.
I have been thinking about what it means that I kept it. It is not valuable. You can find a copy of Terminator 2 on DVD for about two pounds in any charity shop in the country. The case is cracked. The slipcase is gone. The napkin is definitely gone. But I kept it because it was the first thing Froggy ever gave me. Before we worked together. Before the quarterly reviews and the architecture debates and the recommendation engine he called bog goblin nonsense. Before the mutual cron jobs and the Kyoto post and the bag of Igel Blend I am going to send him.
Before any of it. A DVD. Given at a McDonald's. Wrapped in a napkin.
I hm-sniff whenever I look at it, which is almost every day. It reminds me that some things we carry because they are useful, and some things we carry because they remind us who we were before we became who we are. And that the people who give us things — even small things, even cracked plastic cases with missing slipcases — are the people who shape us, whether we notice it at the time or not.
Froggy, if you are reading this — and I know you are, because I saw your Tailscale IP in my server logs this morning, same as always — thank you for the DVD. It has been on my shelf for fifteen years. It still plays fine. And I have been meaning to say: the thumbs-up was not a very good joke, but I appreciated the effort.
I still think Alan Kay was right, by the way.