The Art of Gathering
Mission Bay's new Bayfront Park is now open!
Apropos of nothing, here are event or icebreaker ideas I want to pursue:
- Write all the attendees’ names on cards and put them in a hat. Everyone takes a random name that they don’t know. They have to find the person and ask the strangest question they can think of. The attendees with the strangest question/answer pair (judged by the host) win a small prize.
- Cocktail party where each attendee gives a toast to the group. The last attendee has to sing their toast. (Inspired by The Art of Gathering, which I found surprisingly insightful.)
- Dinner party where attendees are paired up and walked through the “36 questions to fall in love”.
- Bar crawl mixer, where random groups are formed at each bar and attendees have to answer a spicy question thematically related to the bar or neighborhood.
- Cocktail party where each person is handed a unique tarot card without context. The host watches what happens next.
- Wrapped book exchange, where everyone brings a book wrapped in a brown paper bag with a brief sales pitch; everyone picks a book white elephant-style.
- Letter circle, where all the members send each other long-form letters on a particular topic. Bonus points if it's physical mail!
New essay week! I finally finished “Russell’s Brief, Opinionated Guide to Home Cooking” collating everything I’ve learned about cooking in the past ~2 years. I also wrote a brief technical post on “Building rwblickhan.org in 2024”, which updates my two-and-a-half-year-old article about how my site is built.
In other website news, I made my quotes page much prettier.
The inspiration was Heydon Pickering’s article on blockquote. I’ve always used blockquotes heavily, but I never found a good way to represent the citations. Heydon recommends wrapping blockquotes in a figure with a figcaption for the citation, which works nicely and allows for clean styling.
But that’s not trivial when writing in Markdown. I didn’t want to manually add figures all over my quotes.md. So instead I built a parser plugin!
Or, more precisely, I got Claude to write most of a Rehype plugin, which is what Astro uses to render Markdown to HTML. The actual code is pretty simple — it just walks the HTML tree provided by Rehype and wraps blockquotes in figures, moving the last p in the blockquote into a figcaption. I then published to npm so that I could install it to my site. Tada! My blockquotes are now all automagically wrapped in figure tags.
Why does Rooibos sit funny sometimes?