We're Knot Friends | Hacker News Reader

We're Knot Friends

jeremykun.com

177 pointsedo-codes14 comments

> Thinking of this makes me realize me how little I’ve experienced communal activities since then. It has the same feeling of a family sitting together making Christmas cookies, or a group of artists sitting together sketching. People complain about the difficulty of making friends in your thirties, and I wonder how much of that is simply because we don’t afford ourselves the time for such communal activities. We aren’t regularly around groups of people with the sort of free time that precipitates these moments of idle bonding.

I've been thinking about this for the past couple of years, especially since the pandemic. I was locked down with my wife and two kids the entire, but we spent less time than you'd expect just being together.

We were either:

1. Doing explicit demarcated activity together like eating dinner, watching a movie, or playing a multi-player videogame. These are nice, but require coordination and don't provide much opportunity for idle chat (except for dinner).

2. Doing our own completely mentally-emcompassing things, usually involving separate screens. These also don't lend themselves to idle conversation. We may be spatially colocated, but we are all effectively worlds away.

Ever-present electronic devices connected to the Internet with an infinite feed of new media to consume has essentially destroyed all middle ground between those two poles.

It's horrible and horribly unhealthy. People need time to just idle next to each othere with our minds free to wander and free to peridically bounce off each other.

> or playing a multi-player videogame. These are nice, but require coordination and don't provide much opportunity for idle chat

People have shifted to the wrong kinds of games. You want a traditional turn-based game where most of everyone's time is spent waiting for the current player to finish their turn.

I'd say some co-op games work well if they are paced well - when you circle through levels where you can idly chat, levels where you have to intellectually cooperate (solve puzzles together and such), and something more dynamic (shooters/action levels/fighting bosses) that lets your mind switch back to the game entirely.

Also, tabletop games somehow create more intimate experience, IMO.

We tried some of those and they're OK. But they're still structured. What people really need is unstructured time together where our attention isn't fully consumed by something.

My daughter (age 8) is fascinated with these kinds of bracelets. It's been fun to have her find an image of one that she likes, and then reverse-engineer how it could have been put together to help her make one of her own. YouTube has made this kind of learning so much easier than when we were kids.

Like OP describes, it's an enjoyable communal activity, one that helps her get better with her hands and learn patience/focus, and is something she likes to show off to her friends when she's done.

Isn't this what lunch is for? (I know not all organizations have a culture of "taking lunch")

Work isn't always the best place to make or maintain friendships. In some ways this seems another lament for better "third places" in our lives (places that aren't home or work where friendship and socialization and community can better happen; without the strictures of work or the structure of home life).

This is a really lovely post about community, math and art. Has me interested in making my own bracelets or mini-tapestries. Thanks!

You can do some simple multi-colour work if you knot symmetrically and you have appropriate length threads (one super long base colour, usually). For seldom used colours in the bracelet, it's a bit like multi colour 3D printing with purge-to-infill. You just go back and forth with the background to hide the colour you're going to use later and the background just weaves back and forth over the threads (instead of adding a knot on each thread each time). The knots are the same as usual, but you do a mirror image to reverse the direction. It's less pretty than these, but you can easily do single colour pixel fonts. It requires a bit of planning if you need to move colours around to different columns though.

Fiber arts were definitely the original and oldest "3D printing". Automated looms were computers (with punch cards) well before the rest of computers. My mother has a computer-controlled embroidery machine and it is definitely a "3D printer" to watch it in action. Sometimes I think there's an obvious blindness in the way the term "3D printer" gets used that overlooks a very rich history in textiles (much of that history itself direct predecessors to the same tech).

Loved the bracelets, reminded me a lot of ones I used to make with friends growing up but were based off those plastic flat strings.

Another I see growing in popularity are bead painting. Inexpensive, slow paced, and can be communal since you can share your works or bead paint together since it doesn't require full concentration - some even sell their creations on etsy. If you don't want to deal with the daunting aspect of a blank canvas, paint by numbers also exist and is probably the ideal way to bead paint together. So if you're looking for an option with friends and family and bracelets aren't really your thing, try it out.

there was also the trend of using phone cables with the color coded patterns

This wonderful article made my day!

You humans and your artsy, questionably useful hobbies outside of work ;)

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