Day 1 — Virtual RC!

Today was my first day at RC! I've been hanging out on Zulip since last week though, mostly participating in the #games stream where we're doing a 30-day video game music challenge. I feel great nostalgia every day when I post a track from a video game I used to play. But I digress.

The welcome talks were supposed to start at 8:30pm (all times are IST). At 7:45pm, everyone joined James in one of the Virtual RC rooms. He sent everyone in batches to a breakout room where Rachel and Mai showed us how to navigate Virtual RC. After that, I was sent to the Kitchen by the Zoom balancer (a load balancer, but to balance people across RC rooms!) where David and some new Recursers were already chatting. We talked about where everyone is from and what the weather is like there, after which we all joined the Presentation space for welcome talks.

Rachel talked about how everyone is welcome at RC. She asked everyone if they felt like they didn't belong, and a bunch of us raised our hands. She talked about how everyone who was there belongs. She asked us about the things that we were scared and excited about, and wrote them down in those two columns as everyone mentioned them one by one. After seeing that a lot of people share the same fears (and excitements!) as me, I felt that I was not alone. It was really heart-warming.

This was followed by a skit about RC's social rules where David, Mai and Rachel showed us an example of each social rule being broken; and what we should do when that happens. Answer (from the social rules link): if someone points out that you broke a social rule, don’t worry. Just apologize, reflect for a second, and move on. After the skit, we did chat roulette where Nick randomly paired everyone for multiple 3-minute meet and greets!

Later, I attended another session where Michael gave everyone a tour of all the software we're using. Virtual RC is awesome! It's a 2-d grid which emulates RC's real space in Brooklyn. Inside Virtual RC, you exist as your circular photo. You can move around with arrow keys, add blocks to draw stuff, add notes / links and also start audio-only calls! I've yet to discover all its features.

I didn't manage to get much done today as I was jumping in and out of Virtal RC rooms to say hi and see all that was happening. Looking forward to the rest of the batch!