GoKawiilPreviously: Notes from the SF Party Scene
Scott Alexander writes an excellent series of posts about Bay Area house parties. He’s written more than a half-dozen at this point. They all involve the straight-man audience/scott-insert (and the only sane man left alive, apparently) entering some strange lovecraftian event that, if you squint, could be called a house party. The weirdness of the event is, of course, the satire. Everyone else seems totally oblivious that they are the joke. These parties are completely and totally ridiculous, and any reasonable reader would assume that Scott is simply embellishing or straight up making up details and that these parties are not really real.
Which is why I am concerned that people do not believe these parties are really real.
Two weekends ago I was doing my quarterly trip to the Bay. I was invited to a spring gay peptide party.
O, sorry, you don’t know what peptides are? Wow, really behind on the times. AI is pretty lame in the Bay these days, because everyone is just swimming in it. People ask each other ‘what do you do? (for work)’ and if you say ‘O I work in AI’ they’ll look at you like you just said you’re best friends with Curtis Yarvin — who is now, by the way, deeply uncool (more on this later). Of course you work in AI, everyone works in AI. Saying you work in AI is like saying you work in tech, it’s already priced in. Which of course makes the phrase ‘I work in AI’ the least useful / interesting thing ever. I had at least three people give me a pitying glance before someone kindly informed me that since AI was obviously going to take over everything, it just wasn’t interesting to talk about.
Peptides. Now peptides are cool. And not just any peptides, but “cheap Chinese peptides.” I heard the phrase “cheap Chinese peptides” at least a half dozen times from as many people during my trip to the Bay, and I was only there for 2 weeks.
I have a bit of a molecular bio background so everyone being really into ‘peptides’ was a bit of a ‘wtf is going on’ moment for me. For those who don’t know, a peptide is a completely unspecific term. Saying that you are really into ‘peptides’ is about as specific as saying you’re really into ‘proteins’ or ‘molecules’. “Ah yea I’m really into those Chinese molecules these days” just doesn’t hit the same does it? A Chinese friend of mine quipped that he was also very into Chinese peptides, all things considered. From what I could gather, peptides-as-used-in-the-SF-party-scene are injectables like semiglutide (i.e. Ozempic). Most of them are for weight loss, but some folks swore that they had peptides for everything from skin rejuvenation to better sleep health.
So what is a spring gay peptide party? Well, the party was peptide themed in that
Everyone seemed to be on them They had extremely strong jello shots being served out of big syringes At least one person but possibly multiple people were injecting each other with peptides at the party
And also most of the guests were gay (obviously) and it was also spring.
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