kjwcode | Social stuff

One of my back-burner tasks has been trying to be more social and "out there". I'm naturally a fairly extreme introvert, so it can be challenging. I enjoy interacting with people, though -- but that's a pretty recent development for me, perhaps in the last five years or so.

DW is one part of the solution. I'm back on IRC (mostly in #dreamwidth and #dreamwidth-dev -- haven't found any other channels that tickle my fancy yet) and recently joined Meetup and the Ubuntu Vancouver group. I haven't been to one of the events yet, but I'll be at the Ubuntu Jam with Oneiric on Friday.

I'm always looking for new and interesting ways to meet people, though. People here are among the friendliest I've met yet, so I'm wondering if I can pick your brains. What else should I be looking at? Where do you interact with people, both online and IRL? Do you have suggestions of mailing lists (I know -- how archaic! But hey, I'm old skool), IRC channels, websites, groups, and so on?

I'm a late-30s bi male who is pathologically interested in science, computing, maths (though still a relative newbie in this subject), culture, and everything else in the interests list in my profile. My strengths are being pretty easy-going, curious, and fairly knowledgeable. My weaknesses include not suffering fools, bigots, homophobes, etc. terribly well and being utterly addicted to caffeine. I'm in a committed relationship so not looking for singles specifically, though I certainly have nothing against them. :)

Any suggestions?

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To affirm some of the stuff you've already got there: I've really been enjoying the local-area tech meetups I've been going to.

If you haven't cruised down the Dreamwidth Latest Things page yet, it's great for a lot of fascinating things.

I seriously love the DW Latest Things page. I normally run through it at least a few times per day. Everyone who's not a DW dev that I'm subscribed to is due to it, and seeing the diversity there was one of my hints that DW was the place for me. :)

I'm looking forward to seeing how the local Ubuntu meet-up turns out. I've had bad experiences at similar events in the past (nothing but big schmoozing and business-card-wanking sessions with lots of "oh, you should come work for us, we're so much better than the fools you work for right now"), but I'm heartened to hear you've had better experiences.

I'm a nerdy disabled introvert(ish) so I don't really get out much; most of the people I'm friends with I met online, or through people I met online. I spend way too much of my time on social media, as well as online games such as MMOs. I also get lots of pleasant casual chitchat with people just for walking around with the dog.

I think "follow your interests" are words to live by. You're going to be happier being friends with people who like the same things. Before I was disabled I really adored going to tech groups, for instance; I'm not really up to it anymore or I would still go. I sampled several different kinds and settled on the ones that I liked. Just going out to see cultural events or whatever is good, too.

Online, I'm finding a pleasant amount of people-discovery on Diaspora; something about social media seems to make it easier to bump into people. I don't know that it's as good as Dreamwidth security-wise, but it doesn't have to be if you don't write anything too private there.

I've stumbled into good forums just by web-searching for a niche interest, too. And of course there's user discovery via communities and other people's friends lists here. Someone else's posts can be a place to get to meet someone through their comments and yours.

There's a lot of schmoozing and wanking at mine, but I tend to not have business cards (this is partly a function of being broke when I think about getting them, and partly a function of I-do-not-need-to-talk-to-that-person-again, though I regret not having them when I do run into someone I want to continue the conversation with, though in that case there's old-fashioned pen and paper) and tailor my answers to "so what do you do" in the direction of the actual thing I'd like to talk about. Relatively few people are interested in the views of a temp who does office work; quite a few people are interested in the views of a person who volunteers design (and random thankless tasks) for one of the few majority-female open source projects.

You certainly make a good point -- "follow your interests" is something I left unsaid, but should have said. It was the (perhaps obvious) reason I mentioned several details in the entry. :)

One of the things I'm looking forward to is finding ASL classes. It will be nice not to have to struggle to keep up with conversations in busy, noisy places, and eventually give up, which is my steady state these days. I can't even sit in the back seat of a car and keep up with conversation in the front seat.

I think I have a diasp.org or similar account... I should try to log into that again. It's been several months at least since I was last there with my two contacts. :) It'll be interesting to see what's changed. Thanks for the input!

True enough! I don't keep business cards for a slightly strange reason -- I'm a sysadmin. If I hand out business cards people seem to take it as an invitation to call me at odd hours with personal computer problems. :)

The DW project is interesting to a lot of people. I mentioned I was getting involved to my sister-in-law, who's a reporter. I told her about the project (including the incidence of first-time contributors and the majority of female contributors) and she wants to do an article about it. Would you be interested in being interviewed for the article if she decides to write it?

Ahh, sounds like you need the special don't-call-me business cards, with name/website, and maybe even an email address.

Being interviewed sounds like fun! If she does decide to write about it, holler out in #dw and email

denise, and your sister-in-law will be able to pick and choose.

You might be able to find signing social meetups as well as classes. Also I don't know if it's common in your area, but I know a lot of parents of young children who are learning ASL (perhaps a modified form of it?) because it is easier for a child to learn to sign than to speak. So it is gaining popularity, which is really neat.

Culturally speaking people on Diaspora seem very friendly so far; it's also very diverse especially in languages. I'm monolingual but no one has seemed to mind that. People seem to be nice about dropping in and saying hi and sharing neat things.

I treat it as a public-only network, like twitter, so if they turn out to have any security issues then it won't be a problem for me. Like twitter, you can do hashtag searches and it will show users who list that tag as an interest, as well. It's changed a lot recently; I had dropped down to be entirely quiet for a few months, then resumed when Google+ started having problems, and it was a much busier place when I returned.

I'm actually really looking forward to the signing meet-ups -- there are at least two each month in areas I can get to easily. Step one is being able to understand what's being said there, though, and at least being able to introduce myself and my relative inexperience. :)

I figured out my diasp.org account login and signed in to have a look around. I seem to be in a little bubble of myself and two friends, and wasn't able to find anything to expose me to anything else (save for a "random tag" or similar link that kept taking me to the same tag time and time again -- something about parties). I've put a request for an invite in at Join Diaspora in hopes that one will have a few more opportunities to break out of one's own bubble.

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