I loved Project Lawful/Planecrash (not sure which is the actual title), but I do hesitate to recommend it to others. Not everyone likes their medium-core S&M with a side of hardcore decision theory, or vice-versa. It is definitely weirder than HPMOR.

Something that threw me off at first: it takes the mechanics of the adapted setting very literally (e.g. spell slots and saving throws are non-metaphorical in-universe Things). That's not normal for (good) game fanfiction. The authors make it work anyway -- perhaps because clear rules make it easier to produce solvable puzzles -- but it took some getting used to.

The glowfic format is strange, yeah, but it doesn't read much different. It does make for a clearer delineation of character perspectives (e.g. compared to an omniscient narrator), and the portraits/icons carry more weight than one might expect. The main drawback I noticed was that, without chapters, clear "you can stop reading and go to bed" breaks were sometimes quite far apart.

(also I had to take Stylus to the CSS to render it comfortably readable, but that's every site on the internet these days)

In principle, you can solve this with gpg-signed messages (the message could be as simple as "yes, that's me you're talking to on the phone"). Anyone you give your public key to can verify anything you sign.

...the problem, of course, is persuading anyone else to use gpg. Good luck with that part. :-(

Oh, finding less-partisan circles isn't the issue. I could do that; what I can't do is find circles pre-populated with people I've known and trusted for 20+ years, or with family. Those aren't relationships I'm eager to migrate away from.

Anyway, I was (perhaps ironically) more venting than looking for suggestions. I've found ways to deal with it, and this, too, shall pass. Thanks though.

Well this is relevant to my life. -_- I'm torn between feeling validated that someone else is bothered by this behavior, and annoyed that I didn't post something like this myself.

You even chose almost the same term for it. Mine is "hate bonding", as in "let's hate Team Bad together!", or "Two Minutes Hate" (...which has lasted eight years). It's infected a large enough fraction of my loved ones to be seriously depressing. I spend a lot of time listening to people I love ranting about how other people I love are stupid and terrible.

(Or did. I considered distancing myself from all noticeable partisans, but chose not to because that covered most of the people I'm close to. Instead I blocked the channels where these conversations took place and stopped responding to mail in this category. ...which, at least in the medium term, nearly amounted to the same thing. The last decade has been pretty lonely.)

You note that bringing up the negative consequences is frowned upon, but in my experience it doesn't even take that much. Declining to bond in this way, even implicitly, often makes people angry in and of itself.

My realtime coping mechanism is closest to your "zoning out." I read somewhere that people get uncomfortable quickly if they're talking and not getting verbal acks ("uh huh, sure, yep, okay"), so I just suppress those until they peter out. Works one on one, not so well in a crowd.

Blink. Were there any significant downsides? And did the improvements persist, or diminish over time?

Does this really hold? I'd expect inflation to cost richer people more purchasing power on an absolute scale (because they have more cash to devalue), but less as a percentage of same (because that cash is a smaller proportion of their net worth).

+$BIGNUM for this. It's frustrating when interesting parts of the LW-sphere conversation happen on closed services. Some of us (e.g. and sometimes-feels-like-i.e. me) neither have nor want a twitter account, and twitter has made it increasingly difficult to follow references to it without one.

I have the same complaint about facebook, though it's not the culprit this time. Every so often I'll run into a post that depends on a reference that is facebook-account-walled.

Yeah, the source post for the plate metaphor is one of the more enlightening things I've gotten out of the rationalsphere outside of ACX or the Sequences.

I didn't get much out of the supply cabinets myself because I travel heavy, but I loved that they existed. The universal whiteboards I wish I could mimic, but most of my wallspace is spoken for. The high-quality display mounts are definitely something I want to copy if I can get away with it (does anyone know the model?), though I think my apartment complex might complain about me bolting equipment to the walls. 

Most useful specific amenity for me was the default availability of food/snacks/water/coke (though coke sometimes ran out). Personal fuel management is a substantial interrupter and brainwidth cost at most conventions.

ETA: I do wonder if I can get some of the "empty plate" effect at home by carving out specific days for "no obligation-processing (including social obligations)". Not a Sabbath-style day of rest from everything, just from "I need to handle X" things. The problem, of course, would be enforcing it in large enough blocks to be useful. Going cross-country for a week ties me to the mast in a way that might be difficult to replicate.

Set up a small monthly donation. Doubt it will help much on its own, but maybe enough others think like me that the sum will.

Thanks, fixed. I could swear I looked that up, I have no idea how I still got it wrong.