A quick add - preparing food is also an activity that many people enjoy! If you want to have people volunteer as a way of getting them engaged with field building, bring some knives and chopping boards, and have them make carrot/cucumber/celery sticks for the dips, or cut fruits into cubes for people to eat. Also, generally, fresh food > packaged processed food. There's just something about biting into a grape that is not replicated by Ferrero Roche or whatever fancy thing you get. Also, fruits and veg are usually non-allergen, vegan, acceptable by most religions, and have water in them - great all around! Nuts are also great, but allergy is problematic, so keep them separate, and ideally outside.

Yeah, this is hard, and important to making an event like this fun!

A few random thoughts:

In leadership training a warm-up exercise was "I'll sing this [nonsense tune with lyrics on the whiteboard, similar to singing Game of Thrones tune, but people don't know the melody already] as loud as I can. Your goal as a group is to be louder than one of me." The presenter was obviously a loud guy, but it normalized everyone shouting as he would do it first and we'd just aim to match in a way that felt normal even in the corporate office setting. I've ran this a few times even with quite strong cultural gaps and nors against me, and it worked every time.

This reminds me of Bring the Light which I assume was a warm up song with simple lyrics, still good meaning and fun to do (remotely at least! :) ). More like that!

Music in clubs is repetitive, and at least Serbian Turbo-Folk has very predictable rhymes - from one line's content and ending you can guess the likely next line, allowing you to sing along to a song you never heard before!

I assume other cultures have songs like our Bećarac which have one person sing a line, everyone repeats, then they sing another line (usually a subversion of expectations theoug a pun or ending the line without a rhyming word because the rhyming word would have been naughty) and everyone repeats (with laughter). These can be also made on the spot alongside a canon of existing ones and are quite fun - kind of rap battles and disses of old, but much easier to craft.

Anyhow, best of luck, shame I'll miss it, but I'll catch it one year!

I deeply feel this, especially as I fear that my son has a chance of needing to cyborgize himself to compete in the new world more than I've had to (glasses and phone). I have a preference for him being human to non-human and I'm not sure what the future holds for him.

At the same time, I cannot speak for anyone else and your calculus will be different in different situations, but if the world ended tomorrow I'd still have loved the two years I spent with him and he'd prefer existence to not having existed for that time. If your timelines give you move than 2 years of life of a child, I think it's worthwhile, unless you have high S-risks fears.

For completeness, I've also seen mil., bil. and tril. - but never with o at the end.

My past self is super guilty of this and for a decade now working on it - I'm a younger brother, and being unable to do a thing was a sure way to get someone else to do it (i.e. someone older), so I'd make myself unable to do it (through making myself tired, hurting myself in the process by doing it recklessly or other not-quite-conscious but actually beneficial to me strategies). It's a pattern I noticed at 16, but didn't fix until 23 or so, and I still find a part of me scheming to do similar stuff. An issue I have now is that my 2 year old has absolutely learned this - he wants to roll up his sleeves, he gives it a horrible effort, and starts crying at the failure, waiting for us to fix it. Instead I guide him to do it since he can do it with patience and effort, and he seems happy to do it, and for some things he just learned it and is now not having the pattern - but it doesn't generalize, he does it for new challenges. It'll just take time, but it really starts early.

IMO the part about Bureaucracy is likely not true 10k years ago, although it is (as you cite) 6k years ago. The Academia part is not clear to me as a parallel - becoming a priest was (I would expect) mostly a thing of actual belief, as people used to actually believe things, in ways that our Academia (the Eldritch kind) is not.

AFAIK the breast milk also contains antibodies which reduces the number of sick days in infants, on priors that should also have a (small) positive effect.

As a father of an almost-two-years-old who is infinitely curious, I would benefit greatly from a write-up of what you found works and doesn't. I also don't live in the West and visit only occasionally so it is costly to buy things to try out; I'd appreciate learning from your experience!

Oh, I didn't notice, but yeah, just a link to it, not the whole text!