It's Ok to Dance Again

November 11th, 2021
contra, covid-19
In March 2020 contra dances, along with most everything else, shut down. For most of the time since I would have considered it irresponsible to hold a dance regardless of whether it was currently legal, but at this point I think holding dances with masks and vaccination required is reasonable. The risk to vaccinated attendees is very low, dancing is now fully allowed again, and since many much riskier activities are common opening up activities like this doesn't appreciably change the shape of the pandemic.

I've gone through all the contra dances on Try Contra, and categorized them by whether they appear to have resumed. It looks like ~26 out of 331 dances (8%) have restarted. Here's the list; let me know if I've missed any: trycontra.com/list.

(The closest one to Boston is the Worcester dance, which I'm playing on Saturday. I've brought up re-opening with the BIDA board, but we do not have consensus to restart dances at this time.)

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

Ozy in Asterisk on coping with AI doom

I wrote an article for Asterisk Magazine about people who believe in AI superintelligence soon, and who are chill about it.

via Thing of Things June 24, 2026

Fiddle Practice

For a while I wasn't learning how to play violin very well because whenever it was time to practice I didn't want to. I didn't really like practicing, because (1) it's boring, (2) I have better things to do, and (3) actually I guess there …

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts May 3, 2026

more     (via openring)