In the transient hour when "staying up late" becomes "being up early", I've booted up feels for the first time in several months to workshop something for the tilde carnival. This month it's about "town connections". A couple years ago I met a friend in Matsuyama City (we'll call him Eitaro), who I'd kept in touch with occasionally over LINE since then. As far as cities go, Matsuyama City is pretty small, but it certainly has its charms. It's famous for its hot spring, Dogo Onsen, which inspired much of the setting of Spirited Away, and also has the Bocchan Ressha, with an engine approximately the size of a small van originally from 1888. But funnily enough, the most striking thing to me was that sometimes you could just be sitting around in this city and someone might just start talking to you. Perhaps, myself looking like a tourist, people tend to get curious what I'm doing in Matsuyama. In this way, I met an old man who was Professor Emeritus of American Jewish Literature at a university in Nara, who told me about Kaigun Curry (literally "Navy Curry"), a recipe created by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 19th Century. It was so popular among IJN servicemen that to this day, some former IJN port towns still proudly serve their own local versions of Kaigun Curry over a 100 years later. My friend Eitaro had actually moved up to Matsuyama City for university from a rural village in Kagoshima, and although the people in Matsuyama were quite friendly, it doesn't quite compare to his hometown, he told me. There, perhaps by necessity, everybody knows everybody else. If you met someone during the day, you talk to them, because you've literally known them for as long as you can remember. I found myself a little envious of his journey at times-- a sociable lad, lived in different places, studying environmental science (a passion of his). And Matsuyama City was not his final stop either, for he graduated several months later and moved up to Tokyo to start a new job. The Tokyo metropolis, is literally the biggest in the world. As of 2016, the UN estimates it is home to 38.1 *million* people, and its land area is second only to the New York City tri-state area. "It's a lonely city", he told me, just a week after he'd settled in. All 38.1 million people, and the emptiness of the modest apartment he'd rented stood in stark contrast to the social liveliness that he'd known all his life. "I want to go home." For those of us who live in a big city, it's easy to isolate ourselves by accident. Even if you go outside every day, maybe for a walk in the park or for groceries, to say fewer than ten words collectively to real people standing in front of you. "What would you like to order?" "Cheeseburger, please." "Would you like anything else?" "No, thanks." "That'll be 9 dollars. Here's your receipt." "Thanks." In fact, unless you really make an actual, concerted effort to find others, you could see thousands of faces each month and yet never have a single, genuine human interaction. That can't be good for us. It gets worse if you work primarily with tech, because as far as capitalist society is concerned, your raison d´étre is staring at a screen pushing buttons. Human contact is largely a side effect that everyone dreads-- meetings that could be a paragraph in an email, emails that could be a single sentence on Slack, and so on. We're all on tilde.town as a kind of rebellion against this reductive way society treats technology. We're all looking for proof that there is humanity left in our computers, obscured among the unknowable avatars on social media, the AI generated adware sites, and the propaganda bots that haunt the ghost of Twitter. The thing is, there's one thing that it cannot emulate about an actual town: the serendipity. I can't really "bump into" someone on town; socializing here still has to be a deliberate attempt. I can log into IRC, but unless I wrack up the courage to say something, I'm still just lurking like I do on Reddit or Mastodon. I see lots of people regularly on IRC, but I don't really know them. Topics that interest them often don't interest me, and vice versa. Or maybe I am interested, but I've nothing to add to the conversation. That's not to say I haven't met great friends on town, or that there is a paucity of friendly people. I've met townies IRL and had a great time, talked at length about drawing, and heck-- I'm writing this on a computer that used to belong to someone else on town. But sometimes I wonder if there's something more. That maybe there's some way to make that connection forming a bit easier, or natural. In certain ways these bits and bytes over SSH confine us still. We believe in the power of computers to connect us and enrich us, but I wonder if this is a problem that can really be solved with code? Though I often forget, I've been trying to play the Conversation Game with as many townies as I can. It's a game I made to practice my social skills: two players have an icebreaker question they're trying to find their opponent's answer to. To win, they need to get the answer without their opponent finding out what the question is. (https://pilosophos.com/writing/the-conversation-game) It's a simple game, but when you're dancing around your question trying not to make it obvious to the other person, you tend to end up talking about all kinds of interesting stuff. For someone quite bad at holding up a conversation normally, this is quite useful. This is just one part of my attempts to connect with other townies who I maybe don't know as well, and obviously that cannot be my end-all-be-all for connecting with people here. You can only play this game so many times before you're bored of it, and it takes a certain amount of time commitment to play, so people aren't always up for it. When you're separated by miles of network cable, blocking out a chunk of your day for someone you know only as some pixels on Weechat is a big ask. So in some degree I'm both excited about and a little afraid of Tilde Con. Excited about meeting townies face-to-face, yet afraid that I won't have much to say to them. The prospect of being wordless when plunged into a room full of people is an experience I know all too well. Try as I might, it's something that can't really be solved by software.