community and capitalism are detrimental to one another. the more community you have, the less capitalism you have. the more capitalism you have, the more community you have.
pusog fundraiser
A FROG IS BETTER THAN A FALSE PRINCE
luck manipulation
sandwiches and semiotics
starcraft and systems theory
systems of abuse
being a good person is a skill
your friends are not your audience
intro to systems
chord progressions
i do not think you can be a normal person if you have internally resolved the contradictions inherent in the assumptions of society and updated your behavior to match those resolutions.
in a superposition of believing that people are good and that people are terrible? this prevents you from making meaningful action with regards to advancing relationships.
a refusal to participate in the transactional nature of conversations.
let's start somewhere pretty basic: the awkwardness around compliments. compliments can be awkward for all sorts of reasons, but here's a pretty big one - compliments are often not merely a statement of opinion. compliments are often given with the express purpose of endearing you to someone. they are a way of saying "i like you and i hope this makes you like me too", but compliments are also scary in this regard. is someone giving you a compliment expecting something in return, whether it be favor or something more significant?
what do you believe with regards to people?
- people are generally not malicious
- people are very bad at being good
- ego prevents people from recognizing and fixing their flaws
people think of ego as high self confidence, but i'd like to redefine ego as how significant your selfhood is to you. what is this selfhood?
it is the idea that you can be good or bad and that different attributes will make you good or bad.
it is the idea that you are doing well or that you are doing poorly.
how do you increase or reduce ego? when you do things for/to people and tell them it is for a particular reason, then you increase ego. people become more concerned with needing to be a particular way in order to reap those benefits. when you do things for/to people for no reason, people feel more comfortable doing or saying whatever they want.
people think that compliments are good, but compliments are curses. the implication is that people like you for a particular reason and there's an implication that without that reason, people won't like you.
there's this fundamental question - what is put in your brain by the world vs what comes from yourself?
i think it comes down to internal vs external benefit. when you do something for someone, do you do it so that they'll treat you better, so that they'll give you something in return, or are you doing it in and of itself?
how much of your initiative are started by you vs by other people
there is this ineffable quality of liking or disliking someone, where interactions are by default positive or negative.
how do you separate what a person tells you vs what a
what do you need in order to be ok?
- are you ok by default?
- do you have a scarcity mindset?
love is not being unable to see the bad parts of someone, love is acceptance of those terrible things.
bon appetit style syz videos
thinking about people is good
internet club
progress club
understanding and insight over fandom
do most people get their worth from their jobs? do most people think it's healthy to get their worth primarily from their jobs?
when talking normally, people can react in a pause. online, that's a lot more difficult
TRASH MANIFESTO
how do you deal with contradictory judgement calls? how well do you talk about differences of opinion?
big difference between "i am hanging out with you because you are someone that is around vs i am actively excited to hang out with you."
validation with disagreement
inherent conflict between capitalistic, transactional perspective and a key detail of the human experience - that providing value to other people provides us with value.
story fundamentals
american myth of individualism
enjoying things is cringe
if you haven't seen this before, you haven't been paying attention
why is this so slow to respond
american individualism encourages people to be aware of individuals rather than a system. this mindset encourages a few myths. the first is that you are the primary thing that affects your destiny. another is that either you can do something about your situation or you can't and that your situation won't change unless you do something about it.
the default effect of your actions is that they primarily affect you, but this isn't true. worse yet, we've separated people in a desire to decouple people from one another unnaturally.
research questions:
- do you have a friend (someone you are not dating or related to) that you would be willing to financially support so they didn't need a full time job?
- is there any service you could receive from a friend you trust that would convince you to financially support them so they didn't need a full time job?
- if you and 3 other people agreed to take turns working and financially provide for the others, would you do it?
- if you could informally provide a service to a friend that you trusted in exchange for them supporting you financially so that you didn't need a full time job, would you do it?
animal crossing
borderlands 3
the difference between seeing and understanding. you can explain what an elephant is to someone else, down to all its properties, but this does not give you the same understanding of an elephant that seeing an elephant does.
nothing is unprecedented
theory - the greatest contributor towards intelligence is not nature or education, but the people around you. If you want to be more intelligent, then you should spend time with intelligent people.
people who trust their feelings and believe their feelings vs people that don't
pop weird
meal suggester
god's love has limits
global competency matrix
self optimization
hedonism engineering
only the greatest fool shall sit on the throne of god
the phenomenon of people talking past one another
context important vs individual important
thinking about a social structure for goals.
a common structure for goals makes it easy for people to talk about their goals, while socialization encourages people to work on their goals, learn more about how to improve them, and provides people with a better understanding of each other and themselves.
what is it specifically? participants create 1 to 3 goals to focus on over the course of a month, two-month, or quarter year. once that's decided, once a week, people "meet" to talk about how their goals are coming along.
i'm already seeing a lot of optionality. how should people meet? what should the format of the goals be? what should the format of the meetings be? i'm going to record my thoughts and establish something more concrete or else people will be confused.quarantine goals
- record a two hour dj set that i feel happy about sharing online
- finish generator app
- build music pipeline that will let me write a song in < 2 hours
the nature of the internet is that it will create more successes than ever before, but even more failures than that.
there's a significant value in the question of number versus proportion. if the number of successes goes up, but the proportion stays the same goes down, the democratizatioon
i should spend some time writing about how i'm feeling during this quarantine. there's a few things that I'm finding a little extra difficult. One of the first, most obvious things is that i'm finding it difficult to get motivated and excited about intellectually stimulating tasks. this definitely gets in the way with work, but is especially getting in the way of my ability to focus on projects that i'm excited about. maybe the primary thing is that the lack of external stimuli make it difficult for me to get emotionally invested or excited by something.
the things i used to get excited b
who you are is obscured by who you want to be
in poverty or relative poorness, there's almost a natural assumption that things aren't going to work the way you expect them to. you buy a cheap washing machine or cheap oven and you find that it has problems all the time. you end up figuring out how to work around those problems and working around those problems becomes a natural part of how you live your life.
a life is just a tool
art is not a solo activity
drinking games
simplified turing test game - players are presented with a single light and a single button. players have 5 min to tell if the light they are using is triggered by a another person or triggered programmatically
testings
outside vs inside
so much of culture comes from inaccessibility. specialized context does a lot to make things impactful.
emotional complexity
THE LINE
do or do not by default
you have to learn to take care of yourself before you learn to take care of others. if you can't take care of yourself, you're going to be bad at taking care of others.
are you willing to change your systems? do you recognize that your behaviors are probably upholding the system
a story where someone falls in love with someone over twitter or facebook without ever meeting them. however, they finally have a chance to meet up with them, only to realize that they had never interacted with that person at all - instead they've been interacting this whole time with a bot that they set up.
creativity as a function of security
anondraw
quarantine events
if you're only going to do it if you get paid, then it's not worth doing
fundamentals of systems thinking: when you have one person doing something, it's fine. when you have hundreds of people doing that thing, things change.
internet meetup - people meetup and share things that they found on the internet that they like. show and tell style
better ways to build online communities
there's a bizarre non-humanism to social media conversations. people rarely ask things that they would in real life - things delving into deeper and more meaningful things. comments are rarely just responses - they're opportunities to rack up your own points against the general outside group by making a joke or starting an argument.
as someone who has been suicidal in the past, i can tell you that things that give me a reason to live are a lot more valuable than things that enable me to live
i know you're fighting for you life, but can't you be civil
a bunch of things i write here have not been saving properly. as a result, i've been having to play this game where i guess what the last thing i was thinking was
spotify playlist syncing with friends
don't trust your eyes
parasite and the line
i don't want the things you can offer me
luxury poisons the mind and dulls the senses
the individualization of capitalism
american society has a perspective that the quality of what you make or do is most important. there's a significant
you can only compromise with good faith actors. a bad faith actor is a pawn at best.
fuck art
stories always have such simple relationships of liking someone or not liking them. "being there" for other people is presented as a binary choice. real relationships are more complicated. people have varying levels of ability and compatibility. people have different levels of interest in one another. people have different things they want out of the relationship. people have varying levels of knowing what they want out of a relationship.
american reverence for existing systems is miserable
i don't want to be surrounded by people that think i'm amazing. i want to be surrounded by people that can make me better.
people seem to have these invisible walls that they can't seem to get past. there are lines in the sand that they're used to telling themselves "oh there's nothing past here anymore".
noita
art is disruption. taking an existing form and making it both new and enjoyable. a combinatorial form generator is a natural path towards art.
i have a theory that good ideas can be generated from taking a form and putting a spin on.
bioclay - a form of clay made up of living cells constantly trying to bond with one another. starts out as a bloody mass, but once you form it and leave it alone, it'll start to "heal" and scab over until the scabs fall away leaving a soft skin and flesh sculpture.
commodification of humans
feedback default or feedback optional?
you don't need evidence if people are going to agree with what you're going to say anyways. i personally feel like it's really important to gather evidence
syzygy is weird from a marketing standpoint because we are trying to advertise an informal place. we are trying to enforce a form on something that we also want to be informal.
the form does not and should not be concerned with the informality.
tired of doing the same thing over and over again
What level of ego death is possible?
decreased capability for decision making as you get older
People are misery but people are also joy. Would you rather be happy or avoid being upset?
Thinking things through more deeply is good
i fucking hate repetition.
Intelligence is a generalized skill
Personal progress is infinite and impossible and worth doing even if it makes you unhappy.
Dunning Kruger cyclic effect - people find out about the dunning Kruger effect and think, "well that explains why all those idiots act the way they do"
infinite loops that people get stuck in.
blame is an infinite, endless cycle.
blame is violence
often what is fair or just leads to a worse future
doing your fair share is not enough in a terrible world
you can't just try the same thing over and over again and call it "trying"
if you had to choose between a better world or a fairer world, which would you choose?
What's something that you used to think everyone else agreed with you, but then you found out that actually very few people believed that thing?
tired of compliancy
how can you have so much and still feel so hungry for more. will anything make you happy? is there anything more you can demand from the world?
internally entertained or externally entertained? does someone or something external to you need to provide you with content or can you create that content yourself? are you a consumer or a creator?
good questions are better than good answers
don't like to consumer unless it enables creation somehow. consumption without creation seems pointless?
i like theory crafting
thinking about people's tendancies to ignore trouble rather than tackle it
untitled goose and acessibility
let's get polling app, task management app
for the future automation, crm, marketing (mailchimp), knowledge accumulation
infinite vs non-infinite entities
reducing something that you see as infinite makes it more interesting, more exciting and gives you a feeling that you're starting to slowly understanding something amazing and incredible.
reducing something that you see as non-infinite "takes the magic away"
the idea of fairness
crowdfunded event app. people throw out event ideas, dates, and times. people can browse and mark themselves as going to events that they're excited about. if the event confirms, then the event is on!
I'm going to break my bones trying
there's a perspective that's that if everyone cleans up after themselves, then syz will be clean. however, there are factors that contribute to uncleanliness besides this. additionally, people don't reliably clean up after themselves. we need two different efforts. the first effort is to pick up all the uncleanliness that isn't covered by people cleaning up after themselves. the second effort is to decrease how much of that effort there is a third effort that is indirectly related to cleaning is dealing with people individual frustrations at cleaning up after others.
Been thinking about two types of organizational/relationship stress. There’s one type of stress that’s pretty well known that i would call “Quality Stress” this refers to the stress that comes from not having something be of a particular quality. You work on something and it’s not quite as good as you wanted or as flashy as you wanted or as popular as you wanted.
the other type of stress i would call "fairness stress". This type of stress isn't defined by any particular quality, but by the amount of effort that you feel like you put into something compared to other people. You feel like you're putting in more work than everyone else and you feel like that's not fair. You feel like other people are taking advantage of the fact that you're more willing to put more effort in, or the fact that you have more time to put the effort in, or the fact that you care more.
in general, i definitely like to think that i have fairly decent coping mechanisms for both of these things, but i was definitely having a lot of frustration with fairness stress leading up to the this show on thurs and throughout the past few months.
there's a lot of questions there that i think are actually fairly difficult questions. if i feel like i put in way more effort than other people/the other person, what's the right thing for me to do? is it ok or good for me to pressure other people into putting more effort into the things i care about, regardless of whether or not they care about it? Should this be something that i try and deal with in my own head? should i talk to them about it and cut them out if they don't improve?
i think a common response to this is going to be that it depends on the specifics of the situation. different people are going to have different boundaries and different things that they're willing to compromise. At the end of the day, you have to know yourself and know what you want from other people and you have to make that clear to others. If they're not able to provide that, then you have to figure out what compromise you're ok with.
Another common thing is feeling like an event was going to be somehow revolutionary for you and it just wasn't. You had your hopes way too high for how emotionally impacted you would be by something
feeling like someone knows you is good when they do something for you correctly, and feels bad when they do something incorrectly. this could be them being wrong, but also it could be them being right in a way that you don't like.
independent software firm focused on making money off of small-scale (less than 1000), quickly-prototyped applications. The goal is to be spinning up new ideas and new applications all the time and to have a comfortable living salary based off that. the end game of all the products is selling the product to someone else, whether it's for people to use on their own machines or whether it's selling the code for other people to grow and develop into its own company.
why do people do this thing where they're like oh, let's go to first fridays together, we haven't hung out in so long and then they go to first fridays and they just spend the whole time talking and catching up and not interacting with first fridays at all.
why are people bad at just being like "hey, let's just hang out and talk and catch up"
the main appeal of a bar is paying money so that no one has to do any work in hosting.
critique or affirmation
a pervasive feeling that people don't care about the same things you care about. a similar feeling that people aren't able to do the things you can do.
thinking about getting to a point where you can write code more quickly than you can ship it safely.
fundamentally, do you want to be around people with similar taste?
new drum machine format where different velocities correspond to one of a number of different drum samples
should maybe start using trello more often
i don't want to make anyone else feel bad. i just want to stop feeling bad.
make a music playlist every month and send it out to people and get people to vote on the songs.
why are there so many more boring people in adulthood
chat app where a bunch of people join and they're trying to figure out who everyone else is.
a body is a curse
i die every moment
people are the best way of drawing in people
house party vibe vs public event vibe: is the appeal the person or people involved or is the appeal the activity that's going on?
a style of art where magic or fantastical elements are used to describe the internal feelings of ordinary events. examples: nichijou, scott pilgrim. i guess you would call them visual metaphors, a tool rather than a style, but i guess there's a particular stylistic metaphor. framing and composition
money is ego is victory is justice
critique club
event crowd control
when you get too close to people and see them everyday, you don't have an opportunity to see how they're doing long term
i don't like authoritarian mindsets. mindsets that assume that the people in charge know what they're doing.
web videos - might be a good way to churn out ideas that are more difficult to explain with the written word.
a person's shadow or echo
experience hashes
video essay ideas
omni instrument
syz identity
relationship terms
nothing a person does that isn't changing a system or creating a system matters
people can create and change systems within themselves.
aren't you tired of the way the world is? don't you want something new
there are many things that someone has to do, but only a few people have to do and it's unfair to expect or ask anyone to do.
how long will you just do the same thing
imagined conversations
event game
how to stand out
entropic creation
rubber duck therapy
what do i want?
quota
invisible door game using mazes as a metaphor with conversation sections?
this is fine, but it's not me
question/answer theory of good story telling. question/answer format of good game design? you tend to play a game with this question of "what can i do"
it's hard for me to understand the perspective of people who haven't optimized for their own happiness, or can't see what they want beyond what they want in the moment.
we can do better
is the world enough for you?
one of the things i think is important is to always see yourself as someone with the seeds to be a completely different person.
every setting in your brain has a knob
maybe it's valuable for syz to be right next to some core group
everything that's real can be validated in multiple ways
enhanced baseline cognitive load as a result of cognitive disassociation
invisible door
persistence of vision display
there's an unspoken part to interactions which is that reactions to things are automatically coded yes or no, regardless of the content. what makes you be like "come on" versus "oh it's not that bad" when someone says something that's not great. what makes you excited to agree with someone vs think that what they're saying is boring and trite?
natural curiosity
community engineering
Some sense that you share a similar context to others is special
artist/creator mixer?
event kickstarter?
secret party
basic rules
ARENT YOU tired OF DEFERRING TO THE JUDGEMENT OF MACHINES
loss aversion
there are better ways to try
creative templating language
relativity reference frames for decisions
social questions
meta rank
how to have good conversation and enjoy it more
art show applications
personal variance
syzygy needs an alex
syzygy members gotta learn how to create space
syz invite list
we should host more events??? maybe working memberships should incorporate hosting events.
let's experiment with how little we need in order to do an art show
virtual friend
wall plotter
the states and moods that make people defensive
death of the ego as cyclical suicide
can you remove all the things designed to protect your ego and still be a functioning human?
people have a strong idea of what is their community and have a VERY hard time reaching out of their community
levels of community
assumptions necessary for automating thought flows
immediate feedback is important for interest and art
TRASH ETHOS
all things have an infinite number of good attributes and an infinite number of bad attributes
not all attributes contribute to positive and negative feedback loops
conflict between "it's cool that you did everything yourself" and "ughh doing anything takes so much work"
easy example: screenprinting is cool to do yourself, BUT it's a huge hassle to do which prevents you from doing it. outsourcing tshirt creation and actually getting a result from it is better than screenprinting eventually
mathematical modeling tendancies
fake words
vibe check value
live narrator project
plain language
meta is what people think about something that have 0 bias. when you ask a friend about a concept, there's bias there - that friend wants to make you feel good. even when you ask someone personally about an idea or concept, there's a bias - they don't want to make the conversation awkward
finding people with similar mental operating systems, maybe highly improbable
feelings of difference or sameness are manufacturable. all combinations of things have an infinite number of similarities and differences. we arbitrarily instinctively choose which things are important
a difference in perspective that i've noticed between the way that i think and the way that other people think is in seeing things as primarily individualistic or primarily systematic. This perspective doesn't connect to just people, but also events or actions.
axioms of life:
naturally, people like making other people happy and people dislike making other people sad. only hurt causes people to hurt others
why aren't people curious about what could make them happier
i just want
happiness comes from people similar to you. goodness comes from people different than you
syz lessons
sandwiches
self awareness test
joke formats
peer groups
mixing and mastering doubleblind test
the burden of justification in conversation
real talk
friends
internet club
??? is really important to knowing yourself!
new gambling
people should be comfortable enough that they're willing to say things that are stupid
thinking about putting our expectations on other people. the default of modern day is definitely to let everyone be or do whatever they want and just slowly phase them out of your life if that doesn't line up, but isn't it better to expect more of people? to spend time with people and then let them know what you want from them?
sf art galleries
invite only social network
olio
shibboleth
advanced specialization or generalized mediocrity
percolate
connection between dissonance and negative feedback loops
hunter mentality
relationship between age, stability, decreased risk taking, decay
conflict between constant progress and selflove
when you depend on something strongly, it becomes harder to criticize. i see a lot of people who strongly believe in the power of technology get more and more upset by technology being bad, but a lot of people don't realize that there are systems outside of technology designed to fix technology's problems.
higher order communication as a signal for the closeness of a community
short guide on how to engage with me
casual conversation
single dependancies
power distance
high quality interactions are difficult without getting to know someone for a while
his terrible swift sword
in everyone you know, strive to find something that they are better than you at
consider a giant living among ants. The slightest movement of the giant can destroy the homes of a thousand ants. as such, every ant is aware of even the smallest action of a giant, yet there is no reason for a giant to know anything about even a million ants.
consider how ignorant a giant must be compared to an ant. The ant knows of many worlds besides its own, but the giant, having no predators or anything that can hurt it, has no pressure to be aware of anything.
is it better to be a giant or an ant? both, or either, when it suits you. don't be fooled into thinking that anyone is one or the other. everyone is both at all times.
deep dive into different burning man principles
life deck game
puzzle conversation game
photography scavenger hunts/bingo
questions that get people to be closer to one another
How to make people deeply curious about other people's perspectives
email leads vs FRIENDSHIP
things that have only one reason to happen don't happen
links
cumulative experiences
best simple burn thing