BUILD 16/30: Articulating Friendship

⊕ show captionAbout the Title Picture: Mira, Rumi, and Zoey from K-Pop Demon Hunters are totally Sri friendship goals!

I saw K-Pop Demon Hunters over the weekend in one of the singalong events, which was my first time seeing it. After initially thinking it was a bit simplistic, by the time Free played I was completely mesmerized by the evolving themes. When Rumi came out singing This is What it Sounds Like, I was bawling and am now 1000 percent a fan.

Allies, Friends, and Fear of being Found Out

Without getting too insufferably detailed about the movie, let's just say that I find the themes of weirdos finding each other and becoming staunch supporter of each other highly relatable. Together, the three members of Huntr/x are at the top of K-Pop, which is an incredibly competitive industry for real. But...beneath the friendship and effortless demon slaying are buried insecurities and, in the case of lead vocalist Rumi, a fear of being discovered to be not as she seems. This causes a rift in the group, but by the end of the movie they come together again which is not only a relief to me, but cause for reflection about acceptance and the power of friendship when one can speak their truth instead of hiding it out of shame.

It so happens that this friendship model has been on my mind for quite a long time. I started this year by vowing to adhere to my personal values first because this was my truth, and I had discovered the further I strayed from it to meet the needs of others the more unhappy I became. Not crushingly unhappy, mind you, but unhappy enough to feel a deep disatisfaction with myself. In 2025, I accepted a lot of things about myself as something not to hide from, but something to learn to express. So, K-Pop Demon Hunters has hit me at just the right time.

Daring to Propose a Foundation for Friendship-based Organizations

So, today's sharepiece is my working definition of friendship upon which I'd like to engineer a culture where being vulnerable and true to one's self is an explicit value with explicit patterns to follow. The definition is selfishly based on my needs for friendship, based on my experience of having been extremely lucking finding great friends in various stages of my early life. It is a shame that these opportunities to form bonds are less frequent in later in life.

The definition ain't perfect, but it's a start. I've tried to articulate what's important and why, and from this I can start to draw out mechanisms and activities that are suitable for loose organization of like-minded positive self-empowered people who want to build a cool place to work and live somehowI've talked about The Colony and The Meadow before as concepts based on collaboration and friendship respectively. Defining friendship as a means to building trust is the foundation of these ideas. My DS|CAFE Discord Server has been a working laboratory for for testing related concepts too. .

BUILD CHALLENGE COMMENTARY

This took a lot longer than I thought. I originally started by copy/pasting the revised Community Guidelines for DS|CAFE, but as I tried converting them into a standalone document I realized I should define how the various guidelines helped create a nice community. And that's when I I knew I needed to go all the way back to friendship and what it meant to me.

My definition of friendship may seem technical, but that's the way I think about things. It takes work to build a beautiful friendship.

BONUS ACHIEVEMENTS

I also moved my downstairs computer speakers into my bedroom, since it's much warmer here. I hate moving speaker systems because of all the wiring, but it was totally worth it. With music, it was a lot easier to stay focused in a groove.