Board games club. That's also fanatstic hobby as you can fine-tune the level & character of interactions with others to your own taste.
Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
401–410 of 585 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mum some years back got involved in a church (as a non religious person). She somehow ended up giving talks at church events and got invited to speak out of town (she would talk about subjects such as helping refugees etc). Eventually though she felt like she was being excluded in subtle ways and being asked to give too much of her time. I also went to a couplebbible reading events some years back (free food lol)…
> Religion is weird. I think it's fair to say that there are people who: {believe | disbelieve} x {true things | false things} x {for good reasons | for bad reasons}. Deciding what's true can be a challenge.
Religion is a special kind of thing that's quite different. It isn't like a philosophy or believing vaccines don't work. It's a structure of your reality.
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mum some years back got involved in a church (as a non religious person). She somehow ended up giving talks at church events and got invited to speak out of town (she would talk about subjects such as helping refugees etc). Eventually though she felt like she was being excluded in subtle ways and being asked to give too much of her time. I also went to a couplebbible reading events some years back (free food lol)…
Once you learn that parables may exist and are never literal, but can still impart wisdom, it makes more sense.
Religion wouldn't be a problem if people understood the difference between descriptive and prescriptive text. Churches don't teach this.
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#404My neighborhood. When we moved in we sat out front every evening, and made small talk with every single person who walked by. Some were caught off guard, some kinda just waved and moved on, but most stopped to talk. What's interesting is that people who had lived in that neighborhood nearly 20 years together had never talked, and met for the first time as both stopped to chat at nearly the same time. Then we started…
Based and grill-pilled. We've been doing the same. I recently have gotten into brisket smoking, and for the last few weekends, my wife and kids have been out in the yard every Saturday all day smoking meats. At night we offer some to everybody who walks by. It's really been nice.
Ah hell yea, smoked meats. Are you a fellow enjoyer of Sweet Baby Rays too?
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sincere question: when did you join JW, and what was your immediate reason for doing so? The reason I ask is that there are a lot of people recommending churches (of various kinds) in this thread, and I take it most of the non-religious among us would very much not be comfortable regularly attending a religious organization's meetings purely for community, while not believing any the things that organization believes…
I was raised around it but decided to become baptized at 19. I'm in my 40's now. Reason? Life, the world around me, and pretty much everything just made better sense. I feel secure and happy this way, and I like it. I'm plenty open minded, and I've studied other belief systems, but I made a conscious choice that I stick to because it makes the most sense to me. Some people think that because many of us have left othe…
Are you allowed to have non-JW friends?
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#406Mostly church and ultimate (Frisbee).
When I lived in the bay area and played in ultimate leagues and pickup games, I knew someone who worked at almost every big company.
Another nice thing about ultimate is that it is social exercise, so you kill two birds with one stone (for those of us who sit in front of a computer all day).
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gardening should be possible in the southwest, but you may have to utilize greenhouses or whatever the opposite of one is. Much of the "desert" will bloom if you pour enough water on it (and drip irrigation does wonders). But you can't do a "midwest" style garden.
Right, and we're used to that style of gardening (and tropical, we've lived all over). Here the main problems are that the soil is completely garbage, it never rains, and there's too much sun. She's had limited success planting things in large bags full of garden soil, watering every day, and building a system of shades from the afternoon sun - it's just a big hassle compared to gardening in a lot of the eastern side…
Gardening isn't easy to get started. Most people end up living in houses that have poor soil (fill dirt) and dont realize how much you need to water to have success. Automatic irrigation with sprinklers and timers is critical otherwise things will die while you go on vacation. Your gardening season is probably offset from the rest of the country with a dead zone in the July/august when you get heat kill.
My wife for example likes to water for 5-10 seconds and that basically does nothing, you have to water significantly more as you need to put down 1/2" a day or more during the peak. It would take forever to do that with just a garden house and the pots you have can probably barely hold the water required to last a day. Reference https://earlywarning.usgs.gov/ssebop/modis for you area.
Also if you aren't buying compost by the truck load you probably aren't buying enough. For the first run you need like 6+ yards to fill up a couple beds, and the next year that will decompose to half and you will need to fill up again. Spend a bit more buy the good stuff (ask online whats good locally), the city waste compost is not great stuff has plastic and shit you will never get out plus it holds water poorly due to all the filler they add.
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for this. No church is perfect, but my experience is that church is a place where I can go to gather with people from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and needs and come together on some common points: we need more than ourselves to make it through life, we need to be kinder, and we should serve each other. I have seen my congregation rally around new parents, people with mental health conditions, and other such…
While I totally understand why you'd find community there, I am surprised that you'd consider Church to be a place to find people of diverse backgrounds. That hasn't at all been my experience
They probably mean in terms of profession or class. I would be surprised if you didn’t find that kind of diversity at most churches.
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#409A friend of mine is an extrovert with a touch of Agoraphobia. (The agoraphobia came on in middle age) Most of his social life is online games these days like Destiny 2, Dead Island 1/2, etc. He's happy enough. I did the online circle of friends thing back in the Destiny 1 days and it was fun enough. I'm less extroverted, so don't need as much social time.
Extrovert and agoraphobic? That must be painful for your friend. Poor guy.
Some other health issues mixed in there too (COVID, back problems, shingles). I was really worried for a while there I was going to have to bury him.
He's doing better now. So now, I just gotta worry about getting him back out into the world. Maybe a date?
Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?
#410Hackerspaces! Check this list [0], maybe there is one close to you – and if you by any chance live in Oslo – swing by Hackeriet [1]. [0] https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces [1] https://hackeriet.no/index.en.html
Out of interest, do you find many working on software projects at hacker spaces? Each one I've looked at online seems to have more of a focus on hardware, electronics, metal/wood working with little mention of software. The caveat is that I've only really looked at UK based ones so this may be regional. I've been trying to find a space that has a similar energy as my old university CS lab. There was a bit of a perfec…
I go to my local hackerspace a couple times a week and there's nearly always a few people working on software, and just there for the social aspects and/or to bounce ideas/solutions off others.