In 1985, a Ross Dress for Less exploded due to methane gas, and congressman Henry Waxman representing the westside used that to federally ban any idea of a subway for decades.
Prior to that, Henry Wilshire, who donated the land for Wilshire Blvd in 1895, made a condition that no rail lines would be built on Wilshire.
I believe in modern medicine but I lost some faith in the American institutions around it when I "diagnosed" my partner with the correct disease that the first rheumatologist dismissed and told them to just stretch. It was officially diagnosed years later, and we lost a lot of time because of it.
Airdrop has not felt reliable to me all the time, and completely fails on anything larger than a picture or short video. Especially if you are storing your files on iCloud and the pictures and videos don't live on your phone.
Been using Localsend to transfer bigger files between phone / laptops, never fails or has trouble finding a device, or stalling.
I use Blood on the Clocktower to do this, it's a social deduction game (that's just not randomly accusing each other) so it gets everyone talking easily
It has been my experience that social deduction games are very attractive to folks who have problems socializing in day-to-day life. You can see them almost come alive when they are given the permission.
I think a lot of people need prompting for something to talk about. They have no confidence that topics they bring up will be interesting to anyone else. So any kind of gathering that takes that pressure off will be attractive.
I've been trying to come up with some interesting prompts after observing just asking someone "What's been happening" yields nothing but "Oh not much, work". So far the old classics of just probing in to what they do for work, what they did last weekend, etc and then finding any bit of info to drill down in to more interesting topics works best.
Also very important to recognize most conversation starters are someone serving the ball to you, you need to hit it back with a continuation. If you're giving one word dead end answers you've just caught the ball and dropped it.
I was a bit surprised to read this. I didn't think I'd stand out in the sea of comments here. But to this, since a couple of years ago I had a break up, moved city, quit all social media and went outside to real events. HN is the only place I still comment on.
Yes and the reverse is also true. I don’t like to play social games at my meetups because that’s a framework that seems to stifle genuine conversation. I do sometimes provide hypothetical questions as a bit of scaffolding.
> You can receive $1 million immediately for every 1 year of your life you are willing to give up (taken off the end of your life). How many years, if any, do you sell?
> You get to ask a "Cosmic Google" one single question about any mystery in history (e.g., "Who was Jack the Ripper?" or "Are we alone in the universe?") and get the absolute truth. What are you asking?
> If everyone in the world had a floating stat above their head (like "lies told" or "pizzas eaten"), which stat would you want to be able to see?
Same. I don't like to yuck other people's yums, but I don't get a lot from those kinds of games. Talking to strangers is not a problem for me.
I have been spending a bit of time at the local board game shops and the crowd sounds quite similar to the crowd you are attracting. On a very basic level I just try to model being a social adult and hope it rubs off.
the one and only meetup i ever went to (that wasn't something vaguely work-related) was a Werewolf meetup (the game). It actually wasn't very social, but it was a bunch of people who were really into Werewolf. Which, really, was what it was meant to be (and it was fun, because i love to play Werewolf)
Although I've had some fun with deduction games, I'm usually extremely averse to them. Forced to sit down and try to lie while listen to my voice suspiciously, then having the group turn against me and all my friends and randos interrogating and accusing me... it's like a special hell-dream come to life.
Indeed, and if you're especially good at it and win the game, then everybody knows from then on that you can't be trusted because you can't be easily read.
This short-term thinking makes me pessimistic about UBI. Everyone's addicted to work despite automation and AI creating less need for work. And thinking we live in a zero-sum game where if someone else is benefiting, it must be hurting them somehow so they must block it. If someone's getting a "handout", they're a lazy bum.
You're absolutely right! But here's the kicker; it's not just AI slop - it's a whole new paradigm for the headline generation workflow process. By leveraging cutting-edge large language model architectures and advanced natural language processing pipelines, we're fundamentally reimagining the end-to-end content creation ecosystem. At the end of the day, we're not just disrupting the space - we're democratizing access to next-generation, hyper-personalized, contextually-aware headline optimization at scale, and that's a game-changer for stakeholders across the value chain.
