Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 440 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#431

Post by lanstin »

spoiler wrote: post #423
lanstin wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn’t trying to take over the government and replace a decadent democracy with the Old True Values it isn’t really fascism.

Right, I've maybe misspoken then. Sorry about that. I think I meant traits that I commonly associated with fascism (bigotry, opression, discrimination, etc). In any case, I don't know what to call it, but the resemblance to witch trials, heresy (and maybe fascism? I'm unsure now) is just uncanny.

Not sure any large human society has been free of the ills of bigotry, oppression and discrimination, tho, century by century, we keep shifting things for the slightly better.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#432

Post by ch4s3 »

tomcam wrote: post #426
ch4s3 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before good treatment was widely available something like pneumonia could kill you if you had AIDS which was tearing through the gay communities in major cities at the time. These men basically built rave culture, ran most of the fashion houses, ran magazines(think GQ), and built a lot of popular culture in the 80s/90s. There was a culture of celebrating life in the face of gruesome and painful death. Magazines an zi…

These guys were smart, delightful company, and a lot of fun. Some were my friends. Some remain in my pantheon of artists. I still sorely miss Keith Haring. They also flagrantly violated guidelines that would have kept them alive, like keeping it in your pants or at least not fucking every guy in the bathhouse bareback. This was the rule, not the exception. I watched this happen in terror when it was called GRIDS, the…

That's really interesting. My only connection is hearing second hand about the city in the 80s from my in-laws and listening to Andrew Sullivan talk about the magazine scene.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#433

Post by wikibob »

zxexz wrote: post #207
pavlov wrote: post #69

I'm 42 and last year moved back to my home country. We wanted to throw a housewarming party but getting enough people in one place on a specific day at a specific time seemed like an impossible challenge. Everybody had busy schedules for their precious August weekends anyway. We ended up doing a full-weekend party where people could drop by whenever they can. The first guests came on Friday around 6 pm and the last o…

I've done weekend-long drop-in/drop-out parties many times before. Every single one, while exhausting, has been incredibly memorable and will be remembered for the rest of my life. You don't have to be around for the whole thing either, you can easily take some time to read or otherwise relax if you have enough friends coming over - nothing weird about friends hanging out in your house without you present. I used to…

This sounds like literal paradise.

I don’t know how to cultivate this kind of community. It’s not something I grew up with. I moved around a lot, and have recently realized that post-Covid I have nearly no friends.

While I don’t miss commuting, or open offices, I do deeply miss the sense of community that used to exist in the tier 1 tech cities.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#434

Post by snapcaster »

jodrellblank wrote: post #302
RestlessMind wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?? I actually think it maps pretty well to the reality. I have seen it at a personal level in my social circle and at a broad level of civilizations.

I was going to post the same complaint as the parent comment; for example: "Hard times create strong men" - maybe, but starvation doesn't make you strong. Being dead from disease doesn't make you strong. Rising to adversity might make some people stronger, but it will harm others who survive but are damaged. It could be that the already-strong people rise to adversity and the weak get crushed by it, Darwinianly? Or t…

Thank you, this is what I was wanting to comment but was too lazy to type it out. This is what I meant, not that it's strictly false but just that it requires so many clarifications/exceptions/etc. it's not a useful model anymore

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#435

Post by MattDemers »

Aerroon wrote: post #182
curiousllama wrote: post #135

One thing I observed moving cities recently, and realized has been true for much of my life: there's a pretty small number of people who actually organize things. As the density of your social network naturally decreases, you may have lost a few eigenvector-central social network nodes. Think back to those work parties: were they really spontaneous, or did "Janice in Accounting" always seem to step up? For me, there…

> there's a pretty small number of people who actually organize things I've observed the same thing in video games with group activities. People sit in party finder waiting for somebody else to organize a group. They could make the group themselves, but they don't. They just sit there and wait until somebody else does it. In real life I can understand this apprehension a lot more, but in games it's the difference of…

There's probably a discussion to be had here about the change from self-hosted servers and self-selecting your community, vs "party finder"/matchmaking becoming the prevalent way to play.

Previously you could go to "newbie" servers, learn the game or play without as much seriousness, or self-organize into clans/groups if you wanted something more serious. You needed to learn the customs and culture of every server and if you didn't like it, you could just go to another.

Now, everything is matchmade, there is no culture, and the "Ranked" vs "Quick Play" game modes means that you're just relying on the game to pair you with an enjoyable experience (that you can't just bail on without a penalty of some kind). Yes, this system is sometimes more preferable than going "LFG SM All" in LFG chat, but there is something that's been lost.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#436

Post by mixmastamyk »

nlnn wrote: post #152

I've noticed the same as well. My main hypothesis is that parties are just less interesting to all concerned because they're not that novel, and often just retreading old ground. When you're younger, parties are full of new experiences, lives are often changing rapidly (e.g. jobs/relationships/homes), so parties feel like a worthwhile way to spend time. As people get older and get more settled, then parties often fee…

Also to hook. Beware folks, never happened once in hundreds of parties I went to. Met others (that stuck around) at school, work, online dating... never a party or bar.

Wish I had most of that time back now.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#437

Post by mixmastamyk »

Aromasin wrote: post #418
red-iron-pine wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So pick a sport that isn't injury prone to better suit the person? I do it because it's fun and challenging, and brings me back to my own military days. Switch CrossFit for swimming/cycling and rugby for soccer, tennis. or basketball. I'm replying to a recent college grad, and recommending things that worked for me. God forbid I try to help someone, with some simply suggestions of things that worked for me when I was…

What a dumb, deafeatist response from red-iron-pine. You wrote well.

Would also like to add partner dancing to the list. Fun, exercise, and opportunity to chat up new friends.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#438

Post by mixmastamyk »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #436
nlnn wrote: post #152

I've noticed the same as well. My main hypothesis is that parties are just less interesting to all concerned because they're not that novel, and often just retreading old ground. When you're younger, parties are full of new experiences, lives are often changing rapidly (e.g. jobs/relationships/homes), so parties feel like a worthwhile way to spend time. As people get older and get more settled, then parties often fee…

Also to hook. Beware folks, never happened once in hundreds of parties I went to. Met others (that stuck around) at school, work, online dating... never a party or bar. Wish I had most of that time back now.

^up, must have been deleted in an edit.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#439

Post by GuB-42 »

tarotuser wrote: post #147
nscalf wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is clearly correct. I still have many friends that I formed from working in the same office. For most American adults, the group you spend most of your time with is your coworkers. If you don't have a group hobby or activity outside of work, you have no mechanism to cycle new people in to your life in a setting which easily allows relationship building. There's a reason peo…

> For most American adults, the group you spend most of your time with is your coworkers. And that also guarantees that when you leave the company, you also leave your "friends". I wholly reject intertwining work and professional relationships with friend relationships. I certainly won't be mean to my colleagues... but my closest colleague is 600mi away. And that's OK. I do spend a bit of time with local groups for d…

> And that also guarantees that when you leave the company, you also leave your "friends".

Why the scare quotes, around "friends"? Coworkers can be true friends, couples can form too. And of course it can last for way after you leave the company.

What GP was saying is that in person meetings, as it is common in the office is how you get to know new people, who may or may not become true friends. Once connection is made, work becomes secondary, though it helps in the sense that it maintains physical proximity. There is nothing special about work in that regard, school, clubs, associations, church... have the same effect.

I also think the intermingling of friend vs work relationships is not as problematic as people make it, unless there is an obvious conflict of interest. I have people at work with which we don't talk about work when we meet outside. I also have friends I never worked with who happen to do the same job and we sometime talk about work. I know that some people want to set hard boundaries, and maybe they need that, but I have also seen plenty of healthy relationships between colleagues or ex-colleagues that extend well beyond work.

Re: Ask HN: Where are all the parties?

#440

Post by wikfwikf »

wkat4242 wrote: post #404
wikfwikf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the last par: suppose that it is true that a) 10 years ago people were less self-centered, impatient or poor than they are now and b) 10 years ago there were more parties. Does this form the basis of a well-evidenced claim that there are fewer parties because of increased poverty, narcissism or impatience? Of course not, because there are lots of other time periods we can easily look at. For example, in the 1950s…

Hmm in the 50s people were poorer yes but everyone could buy a house with a garden and actually on one wage only because the wife wouldn't work. I totally agree hosting parties at home is much more problematic as people live closer together and get annoyed. I can see it around me a lot. I live in a major partying neighborhood (50m from the most infamous square in town for noise) and I don't care about the noise becau…

I think this phenomenon is actually something else: in the 1950s people who were commonly depicted as being part of society tended to have a house with a garden and a nuclear family structure where the husband, but not the wife, worked.

There were plenty of people who couldn't afford a house with a garden, or who didn't have one for other reasons, or who were not married or had a different type of family structure, or men who didn't work, or women who did work. But they were made invisible by the lack of portrayal, both in that society's image of itself, and in our image of that society.

(Or by a different mechanism: when people outside of that structure were portrayed, it was as outsiders and aberrations, whereas married couples with children who lived in houses were portrayed as the norm. For example, the protagonist of 'On the Road', commonly associated with that era, does not have a fixed address or a job, nor a wife, nor children. The protagonist of 'Invisible Man', a book central to the discourse of who does and does not get represented in media, lives in a basement apartment alone without a wife or family. The protagonist of 'The Bell Jar' is a woman who lives alone in an apartment in New York while working at a job, then in her mother's house, then in a mental asylum.)

Post reply on HN