jefftk

Software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.

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That's right: if it were free to include then sure, even if only 5% of attendees can read it. But it's actually quite a lot of work.

I can't tell if you're joking? But at the risk of missing the joke, where do you see this in EA philosophy?

Twilio has extended this by two years: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/changelog/Extension-of-Twilio-Programmable-Video-End-of-Life-to-December-5-2026

Speak up if you want me to keep this running until the new EOL date?

It could be fun to see how much of this is automatable: I have a camera roll that goes back to early 2012 combined with my selections for each year. That's a decent amount of annotated data!

For an example of #1 at a solstice, I think The Next Right Thing at the 2023 Boston one went pretty well. You can hear as the audience figures it out and starts singing along. The original version is much more complicated, and this version I simplified intentionally for the event.

For #2, here's Song of Artesian Water where you can hear people joining in progressively over the course of the song.

For #3, here's Chasing Patterns, which is also a good bit of #1.

I don't think there are other community venues that could host the solstice celebration for free

Instead of having one big gathering for the whole Bay Area you could have several gatherings small enough to fit in the houses of community members who have large spaces. Since the main bottleneck is organizers splitting like this wouldn't make sense for the Bay, but hosting them at houses is pretty common in cities with smaller gatherings (ex: Boston, which I help organize).

On sheet music: I think this isn't part of the tradition because most versions of Solstice have segments where the lighting is dimmed too far to read from paper, and also because printing a lot of pages per attendee is cumbersome.

I think a bigger factor is that not very many people can sing unknown songs from sheet music, so it wouldn't help very much to include it on the slides.

There are two ways to get large numbers of people to sing together: you can teach everyone at least rudimentary music literacy & show them the sheet music, or you can sing songs that everyone is already familiar with.

Other ways, all of which I've seen at solstices:

  1. Limit to songs with a melody and structure that are really easy to pick up.  A lot of praise music does this.
  2. Songs are long enough that even though they're not super easy to pick up most people will have it after a few verses and there are a lot of verses. Some people are going to find the first few verses not so fun.
  3. Leader sings something, everyone sings it back (call and response).

Yes! But not just time, you should also compare them on accuracy.

A common experience in parenting is that a little kid will strongly prefer to play with toys that other kids are playing with, even when there are lots of others sitting around totally available. Conditional on another kid having chosen this toy out of all the options it's probably a better toy!

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