man, I got a lot of people wondering why Solstice was Not Dark this year and the answer is that I absolutely intended it to be dark and was apparently miscalibrated on how dark people would in fact find it! I had fretted about whether it was okay to include the most depressing song I know (No One Survives) or if I'd fail to bring the audience out of the darkness if I did that (since like, for *me* Songs Stay Sung is an adequate answer to No One Survives but I think this is deeply un-universal), and made sure to hit a lot of different anti-despair points in order to hopefully address a lot of people's cruxes about despair, even though the core of the program was to my mind fairly low on actual *hope* (and I did talk to one person who I did in fact fail to bring out of the darkness, so I think this wasn't an entirely misplaced concern, but the imbalance of reactions I've gotten does show I was somewhat miscalibrated). but like, the core of the arc for me was very deeply about "even if we're all gonna die (which I can neither easily endorse nor easily refute) we can be okay", which I certainly don't think of as *not dark*
anyway, thank you for the review, I have really enjoyed reading about people's Solstice experiences! and thank you for the travel notes from other Solstices too, I keep wanting to make it to more Solstices but being unable to because I'm too busy with Bay Solstice, so comparative notes are useful!
I think one possibility is - I was kind of implicitly aiming the program at a recent past me who had really not emotionally accepted the approximate-certainty of mortality or the increasing-plausibility of near-term human extinction (which I had kind of... gradually begun to take seriously in the past few years and then when I noticed I was taking it seriously I also noticed I found the thought of this deeply emotionally paralyzing); about a year ago I had a set of experiences in which I guess I managed to process this stuff much better and got way less blocked by it, and I was kind of hoping to recreate this experience for those who needed it (while hopefully also bringing something useful for people who don't need it).
I think I was not wrong that this is a thing some people need, based on some feedback I got.
but I also think, based on all the "why was this so not dark" comments, that maybe a lot of people have already done that processing a long time ago, or never quite had the problem that I'd had, and so when the program spent a bunch of time on "look it's very possible that we might all die soon, how do we cope with that" they were like "yeah old news I'm not going to have a lot of feelings just because you *mention* x-risk", which is extremely fair really
(Bay Solstice creative lead here)
man, I got a lot of people wondering why Solstice was Not Dark this year and the answer is that I absolutely intended it to be dark and was apparently miscalibrated on how dark people would in fact find it! I had fretted about whether it was okay to include the most depressing song I know (No One Survives) or if I'd fail to bring the audience out of the darkness if I did that (since like, for *me* Songs Stay Sung is an adequate answer to No One Survives but I think this is deeply un-universal), and made sure to hit a lot of different anti-despair points in order to hopefully address a lot of people's cruxes about despair, even though the core of the program was to my mind fairly low on actual *hope* (and I did talk to one person who I did in fact fail to bring out of the darkness, so I think this wasn't an entirely misplaced concern, but the imbalance of reactions I've gotten does show I was somewhat miscalibrated). but like, the core of the arc for me was very deeply about "even if we're all gonna die (which I can neither easily endorse nor easily refute) we can be okay", which I certainly don't think of as *not dark*
anyway, thank you for the review, I have really enjoyed reading about people's Solstice experiences! and thank you for the travel notes from other Solstices too, I keep wanting to make it to more Solstices but being unable to because I'm too busy with Bay Solstice, so comparative notes are useful!
I think one possibility is - I was kind of implicitly aiming the program at a recent past me who had really not emotionally accepted the approximate-certainty of mortality or the increasing-plausibility of near-term human extinction (which I had kind of... gradually begun to take seriously in the past few years and then when I noticed I was taking it seriously I also noticed I found the thought of this deeply emotionally paralyzing); about a year ago I had a set of experiences in which I guess I managed to process this stuff much better and got way less blocked by it, and I was kind of hoping to recreate this experience for those who needed it (while hopefully also bringing something useful for people who don't need it).
I think I was not wrong that this is a thing some people need, based on some feedback I got.
but I also think, based on all the "why was this so not dark" comments, that maybe a lot of people have already done that processing a long time ago, or never quite had the problem that I'd had, and so when the program spent a bunch of time on "look it's very possible that we might all die soon, how do we cope with that" they were like "yeah old news I'm not going to have a lot of feelings just because you *mention* x-risk", which is extremely fair really