Category: Videos

On Making Friends

This topic has been coming up a lot in a variety of locations for me (blog posts, tweets and toots, articles, videos): it seems like it’s pretty universally agreed upon that making friends (and really, relationships in general) as an adult is hard. It definitely feels pretty true, and there’s all sorts of reasons why it’s true (and while it’s easy to point at technology or society or all sorts of external reasons, those make up only a fraction of the reality).

I’ve got no easy answers, and it’s certainly something I continue to struggle with. The answers I’ve heard really boil down to one thing: Do The Work™.

What spawned this post is that I really appreciated John Green’s video about this (I find myself deeply empathizing with and appreciating a lot of his videos, seems like the sort of person I’d enjoy knowing):

This, in turn, was a response to Hank Green’s video:

Which I think makes a certain amount of sense (though I don’t entirely agree with the notion that we valued people more — I think the factor of having more shared experiences and enforced proximity while you build that value/appreciation for each other is a big contributor).

While I’m on the topic, one of the other pieces that popped up on my radar recently was a link to this Ask Polly letter, which I can sympathize with (being guilty of a lot of the same weird behavior when I uprooted to SF), and is also at least partly what John touched on in the above video.

Also, Shen did a comic also about this recently as well. Seems like it’s on a lot of peoples’ minds these days.

Tracy Ullman’s Woke Support Group

It’s true. It’s super easy to start overthinking everything. Being “woke” is a good thing, but like she says, it’s a slippery slope. (To be clear, intersectional awareness is valuable, as is being aware of the consequences of your actions. But you can take it too far, where you’re actually causing more harm than the thing you’re calling out. Don’t @-me.) It also reminds me of a CollegeHumor bit:

Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough

The latest from the creator of Too Many Cooks takes a look at games and streamer culture. (Fair warning: gore, sex, depression are all present.)

Different games like WizardSlots can have different requirements for game mastery, and still have both fall under the aegis of a casual or casual-friendly game. A more distinct delineation is to establish the play intensity of the game: examine the amount of investment in game mastery that is necessary to continue to move forward in the game. If there is little room for players who haven’t invested as many resources into mastery of the game (e.g. they didn’t spend hours playing the same zone or area, learning all its quirks and best solutions to the challenges it poses), then that game will only be attractive to players with a high investment threshold, i.e. it isn’t a casual game, no matter how simple the interface is, no matter how complex the game mechanics are.

Mixed feelings. Some of it misses the mark, but other parts punch above their weight. But hey, keep those likes and subscribes coming.

Link: The Boho’s Lament

Via Kottke. This is about New York and the Village, but I feel like it’s about more than that. It’s about the homogenization, pacification, and gentrification of the places that were previously the havens of the freaks and weirdos who struggled to fit in anywhere else. It’s about society (and how we interact with it) becoming performative, and anything that deviates from the norm becoming a spectacle for others. You can sense some anger and frustration in this video, and I definitely get why. People who have been outcast, or are considered weird or a freak are people, and shouldn’t be treated as a spectacle or a tourist destination.