drethelin comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Raemon 23 December 2012 06:56PM

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Comment author: moshez 24 December 2012 09:01:18PM 0 points [-]

I used to have a group of friends (some closer than others), and we would all get together and play Settlers of Catan a given day of the week (~4 years ago, I don't remember which day it was). It consisted of the "same thing" (obviously the game turned out differently every week, but still) every week. There was not really room for "nonparticipation" in the sense that if you wanted to hang out with these people that day, you played Catan. Would it upset you if you learned that there was a regular meetup of Catan LW enthusiasts who meet once a week to play?

Some of my closest friends are from the Israeli filking community. There's no "ritual" per se, but we know and love the same songs, we sing them together and not-singing is kinda frowned upon. It's certainly "weird", and even somewhat exclusionary (helped by a bit of justified feeling of persecution from the rest of SF fandom). Would it upset you if you learned that there was a regular meetup of Filk LW enthusiasts who meet once a week to sing together?

I'm really asking these questions (in the sense that I do not find myself certain either way for what your answer will be, although I assign >.5 that it will be "no" on both).

If it is a "no", then it seems these are not your true rejections.

If it is a "yes", you seem to have a wide brush to paint "things I do not want LWers to do."

Comment author: drethelin 24 December 2012 10:41:26PM *  2 points [-]

Basically, rituals force themselves to be identity components more than other activities. I can play catan or not without feeling like I'm a cataner or not. I don't want there to be rituals that make you feel like an lwer or not.

Whatever happened to keeping identities small?