Social stuff

[kjwcode]

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?

Comments

[oda]

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.

[kjwcode]

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.