make no compromises for the things you want, the things that you think might make you happ

middle gap is 106 inches







life deck game

puzzle conversation game







scavenger hunts/bingo

the line between subjective and objective and how it can vary between people

anything predictable can be exploitable

individuals can live morally and create an immoral .

individuals can live rationally and create irrational .

we went to this weekend! we had a pretty good time. two big takeaways:

1. culture. has a great culture of people doing stuff and encouraging other people to do stuff. There's spontaneous activity all over the place, where people are organizing shows, gaming experiences, interactivity, etc. This is one of the biggest things that made it appealing to me and one of the biggest things i enjoyed. There's a fundamental feeling of "maybe something will happen that I will enjoy" that emanates that makes it super exciting as well as a big feeling of "I can do whatever I want"

most other places don't have that culture. the only other place/places that I've found that have that culture is .

I wanna think about how to bring about that culture and how to encourage it. Syz is just now developing that kind of culture.

magwest also doesn't have this culture yet. I want to think about what we can do to bring that culture to magwest.

2. priorities. i had some thoughts about priorities this weekend and I wanted to do some internal analysis about it. Cons represent a conflict of three different interests for me - a desire to spend time with people i'm already close to, a desire to find new people to become friends with, and a desire to experience the actual content that's offered up.

at the end of the day - i think it's valuable to recognize how much i prioritize each of these things. I definitely want to prioritize time spent with people I'm already close to, since that's the highest expectation value of satisfaction (high probability and high values) and the highest probability of compounding effects. meeting new people to become friends with is has a smaller expectation value of enjoyment (lower probability and lower values), but still decently high and
also has compounding effects. Enjoying the actual content has higher probability and lower value than meeting new people, but the overall expectation value is probably the same and rarely has compounding effects.

of course, it's reasonable to be proactive about finding activities that combine some of these goals and those are the things that should be pursued as often as possible

There's a lot for me to figure out with the second one. I don't honestly know how to do it very well by myself, much less do it with other people.

Combining the first and third thing come pretty naturally when you have common interests with your friends.

places to go

i wanna talk about a phenomena that i have encountered over and over again in adult life - you meet someone really cool, you seem to mutually like a lot of the things that each other likes and this process repeats over and over again. However, you try and make plans with these people to try and get to know them better, but the plans fall through over and over again, or the times they work are few and far between enough that you don't really end up growing in friendship very often.

the fundamental problem, i think, is that the two of you have two comfort zones, primarily defined by people. Fundamentally, no one wants to go hang out with a bunch of people that they don't know. When the two of your have friend groups that don't have a lot of overlap, you naturally end up pulling people out of their comfort zone and into yours.

There's a couple ways to get around this!

One is being someone that takes the plunge and jumps into their friend group. This isn't super ideal - a lot of the time, the proper commitment means foregoing your primary friend group a decent enough amount of the time that it's uncomfortable.

Second is picking an activity that equally pulls the two of you outside of your comfort zone. this isn't ideal either since neither of you are particularly likely to do it that often

there's a theoretical idea in my head of merging comfort zones? I am not sure what this consists of, but I will think on 

Physical space is a great way to find new content. Being in a bookstore or at a flea market engenders a sense of curiosity and excitement that digital space is very bad at doing. 

What are some of the concrete differences?

Let's compare going to something like EBABZ vs twitter.

EBABZ didn't have a crazy amount of really good stuff, but it had a really good sense that it had a BUNCH of stuff for me to look at and very little cost for me to look at it. Seeing a few things that were interesting from the get go made me want to explore more, even though i didn't think that any of the stuff at the beginning was super special. There was an additional effect that I would notice stuff out of the corner of my eye and mentally queue it up to look at later. There was the fact that I could be pretty selective about what I wanted to look at - where I could look vaguely at a table, decide whether it was interesting or not without investing too much effort into what they had. This created a pretty strong sense that there wasn't actually that much to go through - I felt comfortable/confident that not much of my time would be wasted because it was easy for me to skip uninteresting booths.

I hate when people think that something is super unique and get really excited about showing it off like it's really unique, but it's actually super popular and it just seems unique based on their small circle of friends.

it's stupid to think that i do the things i do because i'm more virtuous in any way - i do these things because i can't not

closeness is just about relating?

if closeness is about relating, having similar experiences and synchronizing, it's valuable to have experiences where frequent synchronizing is possible or necessary.

As an easy example, an action movie or experience that's kinda just one thing or not very dense in detail is not a good experience for getting to know people better. Even if people wanted to have a more involved interaction with one another, it's difficult to because there's so little to bond over.

Let's describe experiences in terms of opportunities to synchronize. there's quantities of these opportunities, probability of synchronization, and quality of synchronization.

meena
movies, collaboration opportunities

kevin
movies, events around town, video games, collaboration

chara
events, writing sessions, jam sessions, getting food

gossip is primarily defined by two things - the transfer of information from one person to another and the lack of a central source of information. These are also two characteristics that describe the ideal transfer of culture. 

What makes people close?
hypothesis 1: deep understanding of another person. Expressing personal fears or anxieties can help here, since they explain why a person does things that they do or why they are the way that they are, but also being around someone for a long time or and intrinsic empathy can also do this.

What makes people feel safe around other people?
I don't mean literally safe, but feel safe in being who they want to be or being who they really are or expressing their thoughts and opinions.

The obvious one is exchange or expression of . Having power over another person or what they care about gives people the ability to retaliate or hurt other people in exchange for being hurt. However, this is complex socially. Someone saying they were abused might seem like an expression of to some, and seem like a manipulative act to others, depending on the context. There is an idea that someone has given you something and now they deserve something in return and enforcement of that norm makes that exchange pseudo-violent.

However, this idea creates a paradox - the that was shared is no longer a , but a tool or a weapon. The danger or the perception of danger is removed. This is the fundamental detail of a . The other person that the is being shared with has to believe that you think there might be repercussions to what you say.

Why would you say something that might have repercussions? The first obvious answer is that this is a thing that matters so much to you or has affected you so much that you need to talk about it to someone. This is the case when you're about something difficult that you're going through or a generically traumatic experience.

Another possibility is that revealing the information can get you something that you really want. Maybe it's important for someone else to understand you or maybe you think that telling someone this information can make you closer.

in order for a to resonate, the risk has to be clear.

how do you make the risk clear? an easy way is to talk about something that you very rarely talk about. about stuff that you always talk about creates this impression that you feel comfortable about these things and so there's no risk involved. another way, not as easy, is clear nervousness or anxiety about about the thing. this includes stuttering or disclaimers.

What else makes people feel safe around other people? Understanding and empathy. You might feel a certain way, but not talk about the way you feel to people without having some sense that they will feel the same as you.

about people does a lot to cover these bases. You talk about a shared experience, you get a strong feeling that other people feel similarly to you, and you get a little bit of that risk - where people are trusted with your opinions of other people (which could be dangerous if they heard about it)

what about about insecurities?
it's not something that's talked about. it kind of viscerally paints you in a light that doesn't make you look great and it reveals a worry or fear that can be manipulated

what about about things that you're trying to make happen that you don't know whether it'll happen or not?
This has a lot of similarities to about insecurities, but also has the advantage of giving a common problem for people to help you with.

about attraction and romantic interests is always interesting to people

How do you grab people's attention but non-violently? Alternately, how do you direct attention towards the things that are best and healthiest for people?
my whole thing is that relationships are what's important so let's focus on that!

Let's idealize the healthy relationships that we see other people in and point out the great things about the way that two people interact. let's make relationships the content that people are excited to talk about and think about

value in complimenting people to other people rather than directly. even better, compliment the relationships between people. This avoids saying frustrating and problematic feeling things about saying things like "oh you're so smart or so pretty" which is subjective and ridiculous

create situations in which people need to depend on one another
encourage people to take on tasks that are too much for them and subsequently get them to ask other people for help

that get people to be closer to one another

How to make people deeply curious about other people's perspectives

email leads vs FRIENDSHIP



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8XxPbsY9r0
https://abstrakt.vade.info/?p=48
https://gallery.leapmotion.com/manososc
https://www.nltk.org/book/ch02.html



Donation box

Saturday meetings/work with house meeting-esque personal catch up

room

Pet room





things that have only one reason to happen don't happen









https://github.com/conradoqg/naivecoin



the more i get to know you, the more interesting you should be. 













game































cumulative experiences

care

best simple burn thing



juxtaposition









word game