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Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Psycho Killer, by The Talking Heads 🎵

I'm chewing a lot on friendship + communities, and wanted to write a bit about them. I don't think I'll have time to write that post up tonight, so instead I'll write about something adjacent: the good collective noun for such a group of friends/companions.

So "finding your tribe" is a often used for what I'm after, but as a non-Native, this feels like using "Spirit Animal" and the problems associated with that.

In the case of "spirit animal", one White person who wanted to be culturally aware suggested "Patronus" as a substitute (explanation here if you didn't read Harry Potter).¹ This might map to "Hogwart's House?" But that's far too large and inclusive. "My Ron & Hermione" is a bit too specific to that cast, and really, we all know that story was about Wayne. Besides, Twitter leftists will criticize you for comparing too many things to Harry Potter (no, for real. To be truly cool you have to fail to understand that popular media being popular means that it will be recognized and used in many places).²

I like "fellas," largely because of this tweet:

Judas: still on for Friday?
Jesus: Friday?
Judas: yeah, the last supper
Jesus: the what?
Judas: supper. Normal supper with the fellas

— David Hughes (@david8hughes) January 5, 2015

But "investing in the fellas" and "finding my fellas" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

There's also "the boys," from tweets like this

its fucked up how there are like 1000 christmas songs but only 1 song aboutr the boys being back in town

— wint (@dril) November 29, 2015

and others in the meme (like here), but it suffers from many of the same issues as "fellas," as well as both being gendered.

Next up is "chums," which invokes the memory of Wesley Snipes:

I call my tabletop groups (a D&D group and a Mouse Guard group) "the lads."

For the last few years at work I've been calling my team "Comrades!" which is inversely appreciated/loved with the size of a company I've used it at. It's probably the one I like most, especially as I'm more open about leftist policies. I'll probably use that in most instances. When I wrote the post I'll have this more figured out.

🐸 Sapo 🐸 appears to be recovering nicely. His incision looks pretty gross but he's more-or-less back to his energetic self. He goes in to the vet tomorrow for a follow-up, and in 13 days to get the sutures removed.

I AM VERY BUSY

We had some friends over for a game of RoboRally. I got last place.

1. ^ Thinking of your Patronus is a fun exercise. Mine would be a zergling, or if I had to keep it with real animals, maybe a cuttlefish.

2. ^ Most of these same folks never respond negatively to Simpsons screencaps used in the same way. I enjoy it plenty and hope they keep up with it, I just wish they had more awareness of how much of their games and criticisms mostly exist to make them feel superior (as is true for many groups).