I started this out with the intention of posting a 2024 Year-In-Review, but realized that with the number of new people in my orbit and how frequently I come across people who know me solely as an event producer (albeit of a very particular flavor of events), I decided it makes more sense to do something like a high level ‘past seven years’ review, with more detail as it approaches 2024. I spent a decade as a heroin addict. I was mostly functional until I wasn’t. By 2017, I was in Los Angeles having graduated to crystal meth and sleeping on sidewalks. I was assaulted. I was arrested. I had guns of various sizes pointed at me, and not always by the police. I slept in abandoned buildings where rent would be collected on behalf of various gangs (of course, not in cash - most of that culture operates via trades). I dated a bona fide psychopath who almost killed me. Somehow ~all of that~ combined with lots of introspection when I was younger created just the right circumstances and pressure for something to fundamentally change in my brain. I sometimes call it my happiness switch flipping. There was a moment in time where I suddenly, deeply, felt that everything was okay and was going to be okay forever, a feeling which has held strong in the subsequent years. It still took me roughly another 6 months to get out, but in late January 2020 I reconnected with my family, who were kind enough to come pick me up and let me spend a time at their house where I rather manically did self experimentation as I embarked on a completely self-designed healing journey. And boy, was it rapid. My parents cautioned me I'd level off, that what I was experiencing was the high of sudden safety, but nearly five years later I’m still riding that high. During that time I was writing down my thoughts and learnings to try to share with others. I could probably write a book or two about those early days. Much of it wasn't landing, though, and I realized I needed to find people who shared enough of my baseline world model in order to even try to communicate my thoughts. I needed to widen my net, broadcast my thoughts to a bigger pool, and attract the people they resonate with. @goblinodds, a loose acquaintance from before I was homeless, wound up in the discord server I was using as an interlinking long form blogging platform, and they kept telling me I should join twitter. "Oh haha I mean I'm sure it's great for you, but it's not really for *me*, you know?" (famous last words). They tweeted a link to one of my blog posts, and the traffic uptick made me realize that the wider pool I was searching for was on twitter. I made an account, and it wasn't long before I realized those people that I had been looking for, they're here. They’re you guys. I thought I would be joining twitter in order to talk about overcoming addictions and whatever crazy thing happened in my brain to bring me from where I was, to the kind of person who's capable of being where I'm at now. But I liked you guys too much to stop there 😂. So I started just having fun on twitter; chatting, playing, and making friends. I saw that more and more people were hanging out IRL, and when a tweet crossed my feed talking about a hypothetical large-scale gathering I thought "seems fun, why not!" I gathered a phenomenal team from people who expressed interest under my tweet about this potential event, adding and losing a few in the time since. That was fall of 2021. The first @vibecamp_ took place in March of 2022. It was electric. Punctuated by screams in the distance as people met those they'd been chatting with solely online, in some cases for years. Prior to the first Vibecamp none of the team had done anything like this professionally before (though we did have people like Buddhi with extensive Burning Man experience) and there have continued to be learning curves in many different areas along the way. We knew that we had to get the second one “right enough” or people would write the success of the first one off as a fluke, so we spent many hours over the first two years discussing high level things like principles and vision and more mundane things like how to set up systems to automate the things that were too manual (for the first vibecamp, I wound up personally DMing a stripe link to a couple hundred attendees for them to purchase tickets after some fuckery with PayPal made us have to switch away from Brown Paper Bags as a ticketing platform). Vibecamp 1 had hit a cultural chord. It took off as a meme, and after the first one went (very publicly albeit not universally) well, the second one saw a hype bubble in attendance. We jumped from 400 attendees to around 700, and added an additional day. I spent the first day or two of that event holed up in the staff building, interacting only with the people who were having the hardest time. The only people tweeting about it live were unhappy people (as it turned out, the rest were too busy having fun to be on their phones). I was convinced it was a disaster, until @VitreousSolid gently suggested I go take a walk with him and I was bombarded with hugs after peeking into a dance set. Not everyone hated it; I was just only exposed to the people who were having difficult times. But it was a high variance event. High highs, low lows. That was in 2023. One event a year for two years. Walking out of each we felt optimistic but had laundry lists of all the Very Basic Problems we needed to fix. In 2024 vibecamp as an org put on 3 multi-day events, and I worked with a different team to put on another. Everything felt different in 2024. Vibeclipse was our first event of the year. A couple hundred people came out to watch the total solar eclipse in Texas at our favorite children's summer camp. It was easy, and the atmosphere warm. Vibecamp 3 was in June, and attendance was back down to the 400 range. Again, compared to the previous two events, it just felt..easy. Not without problems, of course! But the atmosphere was tangibly different. Relationships are solidifying amongst attendees, in a way that counterintuitively seems to be making the events feel more accessible for offline friends, or people lacking existing connections. (and we are always scheming on ways to move further in that direction). Additionally, I think we’re starting to find our voice. @ungatedlife wrote a manifesto for us, a snapshot of where our emerging values have started to settle into. The people who aren’t as good of a fit are starting to filter themselves out as ‘what it is’ is starting to take a more legible shape. Leaving those first two events of 2024, the difference of tone in debriefing conversations compared to the first two years was stark. It felt less accusatory, more collaborative - and far more expansive. Even within the org team there was less “oh god oh god how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again” and more “ooh you know what other cool thing we could do to make the next one even better”. Despite lower ticket sales than expected, the first half of the year was fantastic. I’m a big fan of doing stints with other teams solely for the experience (and have encouraged people on my team to do this as well! Colby spent a few months working at Vitalia and came back supercharged.) Because of this, I decided to take some time after VC3 to work primarily on what would become Network Society Camp. I bit off more than I could chew. I’m getting much clearer about my strengths and weaknesses, what I enjoy and what I struggle with, and where I really shine. Vibecamp has three people on payroll, including myself, and at the time we thought we needed to run a third event in 2024 in order to keep the lights on. Ms. Bowman’s School for the Socially Inept was in alignment with the team’s values and the good we want to accomplish in the world, but spinning up an entirely new event concept is very different from running one for even the second time, and this fall I wound up with two new events taking place within the span of a month. I dropped many, many balls I would not have dropped otherwise by splitting my attention to that degree over summer/fall. Both Network Society Camp and School for the Socially Inept went well in the most important metrics! The two teams got enough people at each event for them to not feel empty, and for most people to have enriching experiences (it is simply impossible to please 100% of the people attending 100% of the time). But they were hard. And vibecamp wound up not only losing something like $17,000 on the venue alone (not including labor), but it also it turned out we sold enough vc4 tickets this fall that we would have been able to keep payroll going had we just not run that event at all. My mantra this year has been yelling furiously in my head “I’M LEARNING SO MUCH!!!!” (Often while stomping in circles around my living room). But *deep exhale* we really did learn so, so much. We went from one event a year, to pulling off 3 multi-day, 100+ person events in one year - 4 if you include the one I did with the non-vibecamp team. So what’s next? That’s what I’ve been talking about with anyone who will spare me the time since School for the Socially Inept wrapped up. There are a few big things on the horizon, the shapes of which are still forming. On a personal level, I am determined to make 2025 the year I finally start writing a memoir. I’ve been taking public speaking training off and on for the latter half of this year, and want to start giving talks about my history. I want to share what it’s like to be a woman living on the street. I want to speak on how I got addicted to drugs, and how I got off of them. I want to show how someone with a nerdy childhood that probably looked a lot like yours, dear reader, could wind up addicted to hard drugs and consorting with gangsters, murderers, and criminals. I want to try to humanize some of those we tend to Other the most. And for vibecamp, the team has been discussing ways we can use this platform we’ve built to widen our impact. I’ve been meeting with philanthropy world mentors to look into different organizational structures. I don’t yet know what our mission will be if we go that route. Will it be something mostly spun up to help Vibecamp get to a place of more consistent financial stability? None of us make very much, and most of the people working on it have never been paid for their time. Or will it be that, and training other people to host events? Or something even bigger, to try to attack the loneliness epidemic from our specific niche of social infrastructure in the digital age or to enable others to create media and art to disseminate some of the strongest, most prosocial cultural norms around here? Many ideas are swirling, as we also look into various approaches other orgs have taken to insulate themselves from the stress that comes from spending much of the year not entirely sure how they’ll keep the lights on in a months’ time. For the events themselves, one question I return to over and over is how can we make the arts program more robust? A percentage of each ticket sale going to art grants is what we’ve been trying to do - but what happens when you undersell? Should we crowdfund? Should we make a platform where people can do their own crowdfunding? How do we give attendees a voice in how the grant money gets allocated? We are walking into 2025 with many unanswered questions, far more than I’ve listed here. But at the same time we are buoyed by a profound sense of optimism and excitement in what the future holds, and the deepest gratitude for everyone who has supported us along this crazy crazy journey ✨💕✨

guys please No More Parties In December

I'd forgotten how blunt Europeans are in meetings. French attendee: "Hello, you have given an explanation but it is very bad so I have many questions."

living w 20 people is great because there’s a good chance someone has spare elf ears

failing captcha is so dehumanizing

BACK

My least favorite thing about SF is how people are constantly sizing you up see how much they can gain by becoming your “friend”. Assessing who you know, how you got into a party, where you’re from or where you live, as basis for whether or not you are worth even speaking to.

a friend showing up to the function with a bowl of fresh warm homemade bread; much to learn

some people take a no so well i want to say yes

Dust storm blankets everything in its path as it rolls through the Phoenix, Arizona, area.

Do you like AI? Do you like MICE? Do you like Prediction Markets? Play the (extremely unofficial) Official Manifest Text Adventure Story, which went on pre-sale for $1 last week but is now available for the low price of $0: benshindel.com/manifest.html

need a plot in south bend to build the $160k pre-fab muji house

if ever you wonder what the girls are chatting about here is my friend and i in the corner at a baby shower > are you waiting for the singularity. > yeah so idk having a baby seems like a mini singularity in itself. > like i won’t be able to predict the ways in which I’ll change but i know i will and those changes would likely take me further away from myself as i currently am. not a bad thing, just is. > yeah i know i might not mind because it’d be transcendent or i’d like love the thing or something. > just feels like more duty bound desire atm which isn’t the approach. > no im not seeing anyone serious. > yeah mutual friend offered me 10k that i will find someone i like more than person i currently like. so > yeah he WOULD do that. > yeah im not sure depends on the guy. > no yeah it always depends on the guy > idk just feels like ive had chances and turned them down. if i wanted to i would’ve. pretty hard to compromise after that. > conceptually an intresting project. > exactly it’s not quite intrinsically that interesting to me into and of itself. > wish it was. > i’d be good at it. > oh you’re also freezing? > yeah my appointments monday. > yeah it’s like putting a multiverse on ice. > dunno is 60 enough who knows. > maybe i’ll have some organic and some engineered so they have something to be mad at me about. maybe I’ll have none. > do i want your extra medication? > wait wait how much is medicine. > dude that’s like 30% of the cost. > sure thanks that’s really sweet. > yes it makes sense to feel emotional about pastries they’re reallyy cute.

Lockheed Martin Sea Shadow

so im publishing every day in november and to counter the critic inside me that says if something is good or bad, i will just commit to sharing all of it

the growing horror realizing miso paste is not quite soluble

it’s best to be precise as often as possible expect when it’s best to use like poetry