This writing, essay, document, is originally made with the goal to tell the story of  the Nobuparty and the Indonesian TPOT scene we've built over the past ~2 years, lessons we've learned in the process, and the visions for the future. But, as I would rather not have perfect be the enemy of good and also because certain processes happened internally around my relationship with the Nobuparty, this is me trying to crystallize as much as I can to send to a future me. 

That’s not at all true, but I like that meme so we’re running with it. For the last 13 months I’ve been running a series of increasingly expanding informal events akin to NYC’s house parties that has grown into it’s own scene in a way. It is a hodgepodge collection of Weird And Interesting people who are around in the meta-scene that exist around Jakarta, Indonesia, and we call it the Nobuparty.

Talks in a Nobuparty ranged from Superconductor breakdowns, latest Turnip memes, the 2020-2024 National Medium-Term Development Plan (RPJMN), mad political gossips, and the ever infamous dongdoy, while the people told their stories during presentation nights, shared their self-written poetry, learned how to do lockpicking, played some DDR, got themselves a tarot reading, all while music is playing in the background and the alcohol flows throughout the night.

After consistently running these house parties every month for more than a year, I have decided to end it here, or at least take an extended break from this all. Why? I’ll talk about it while I take you on a tour across time about the Nobuparty, shall we?

What is the Nobuparty?

Using my online moniker as the name of the gathering, the story I’ve told myself multiple times now that it becomes history is that this meeting happens from two very simple desires colliding. Amir (@amirism_) wanting to hangout with old and new friends around our local scene in an informal manner, and me, Nobu of the Nobuparty, returning back to his family’s house and wanting to do something here like he used to. Together with our Local Scene Person, Jati (@jaticarta), we ran the first event on the 23rd of August. The event itself starts from a congregation of ten filled with uni friends and a few local rationalist friends that grew to the eighty something participants event from all assortment of life.

Defining what the Nobuparty is seems more doable now than it was back then as we have a clear definition of what each subsequent Nobuparty ended up being, but I find that reifying what it was defeats the purpose of the running of the Nobuparty and contributes to why I want this all to end. The premise is simple. I am going to invite a bunch of weird and interesting people from my many parts of life, get them all together in one room, and let them do their thing. When people come together to a social event, they come with a certain purpose, and that purpose is to make friends and have a good time, and we banked on the trust that people have agency and will do just that.

The first ever Nobuparty was a success! There was a total of 16 people who ended up coming, with a few of them arriving later at night, but it was super duper fun!! https://t.co/uuFAODTLTd pic.twitter.com/zTLWQtogfU

— nh (@nobu_hibiki) August 20, 2022

Trust that people have agency

I had big reservations against the Nobuparty at the start, and that reservation continued until maybe the 4th or 5th one, I don’t actually remember now. The idea that an informal unstructured event where people would just come and hang out doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t people have better things to do with their time? How do you invite people to a gathering on prime time like a saturday night for something so nebulous as “come and hang out with me and my weird friends, trust me bro”?

Knowing that, it is extremely important to note the effect that a specific twitter retreat, Kai Camp, had on me. It was a 20 person TPOT event, ran as South East Asia’s answer to Vibe Camp happening so far away, with Kai (@kaisoapbox) saying that we’re going to do our own Vibe Camp, hence Kai Camp. I… cannot verbalize what happened at Kai Camp. I tried, I’ve failed. It was probably like something clicked in me that there is a place somewhere that I already belong in, but more importantly for the Nobuparty, is that I can actually trust that people will be agentic and do things that they want to do.

But, the Nobuparty is not Kai Camp. While there was a few non-TPOT Twitter people in Kai Camp (love you Mich & Nic <3), most of the people there have self selected themselves into a particular vibe and characteristics that made the dynamics possible. If I wanted to do the Nobuparty, there was at most 3-5 people who went through that self selection process, and the rest of the potential participants will have to be either TPOT-adjacent people, TPOT-adjacent-adjacent people, or people who are not at all part of this subculture we were in. Can we really do that?

The only answer to that question was “let’s trust that they can”, and so we did.

Did it work? Did the trust bloom into something beautiful? I don’t know. I think so. My vision of the past is clouded by the things that has happened, it’s hard for me to remember whether it was good or not. But, I do know that the Nobuparty ran consistently every month. I contacted people, people came and enjoyed themselves, they enjoyed themselves enough to invite their friends, up to the point where they’re willing to pay to finance the event. I’ll let the people that came to the Nobuparty to be the judge of that.

Culture and scenes

If there is one thing I want to talk about here, it is the culture that serve as the background of the Nobuparty and how we navigated through it. There are two part to culture, the first is our beloved TPOT in particular the prevalent norms and values of meta discussions and openness. It is the main vibe that I want to embody, and transmit to the people that comes. It took a lot (and by a lot I mean a REAL lot) of hard open discussions about what we each personally want out of the events, disagreements about the goal of what we’re building, as well as the things we would like to personally do in the Nobuparty. This was Our Thing, not just My Thing. Sure it’s called the Nobu Party, but that’s just because the first event was being done at my place and out of everyone I’m the one with the most hosting inclinations. Everyone is here actively, and will take active actions to make the event fun for themselves.

This then meet the second part to culture, which is the Skena. Just like how there’s a bunch of different scenes out there in TPOT (Rats, Dharma, Astrology, etc), there were many interesting scenes here in Indonesian Twitter as well. Skena, a direct translation of “scene” to Indonesian, is being used here to refer at a rough collection of account on twitter that interact with each other with the only shared identity being that they speak Indonesian and is somewhat interesting. Not unlike TPOT, just Indonesian, and less techy. From novelty jokes account like Turnip (@wortelsoup), local industrial policy enjoyers, e-girls, to east european based memes account that used to exist from facebook groups (hyper specific, I know), we had a population that exist within the same membrane, but they mostly exist in their own separate bubble, connected only sometimes through personal connection that stems from the fact that they’re all have to exist here in Jakarta, or through large nodes in the community like Jati.

The Nobuparty, as said by different people at separate times, have been a melting pot where the many disparate bubble of the Skena met each other, ones that had beef with each other, ones that on paper will never gel, and made them had a good time together. The Nobuparty caused a number of Dimensional Merge, causing them to congregate and gel in weird and wacky combinations. Exactly what I wanted to happen, to make weird and interesting people from different part of life meet and hang out with each other.

I claim credit only to the Nobuparty and nothing more in regards to what ends up happening out of this dimensional merge. There was a dream I stated that I want the Nobuparty to be something akin to Raden Hadji Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto’s house, a place where people of the future importance started their journey, a place where people with different thoughts might for a moment share their ideas. A future Muso, Soekarno and Kartosoewirjo, sharing a drink in this one moment. Is that the way this is going to go? Who knows lmao.

note: if you’re not Indonesian, these are all big names in Indonesia’s revolutionary history

How we run the events

While the practicality of the Nobuparty change dynamically every month as we account for more people, differing crowd, shifting resource, and changing expectations, I can pen a few thoughts on how I plan and run the Nobuparty.

1. Poster. I am a very visual person, and find that having a good poster riles me up and gets me excited for an event, and I assume many think so too. I’ve had immense fun making the posters for the Nobuparty, with each subsequent one being better and better. The only thing I need to create a poster is a set date for when the inner crew can do a party, and we’re good to go!
2. Personal Invites. I think one of the biggest contributor to the Nobuparty success is that I did a lot of legwork to personally invite people to come to the Nobuparty. This means create a personalized message explaining what it is in a way that would interest the invitee, and following up on invites. It is important to not be needy about the invite, but make it so that they feel that you want them to be there.
3. Structured Events. For an informal event such as the Nobuparty, the existence of a structured event seems antithetical, and I agree. However, I do believe there is a value in doing One Big Thing where everyone comes together and both build context of the social space they’re in as well as destroy whatever anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of a new space, allowing people to blend in and act informally in a more relaxed manner. I like the poetry nights for this, as they’re recognizable for people unfamiliar with the weird context of a house party, while being an open enough container for people to do interesting things (like that one time someone brought clay and did “pottery night”).
4. Talk To People. In order to help people gel and blend in even more, I believe it’s important for the host to talk to people, in particular those that seems to have difficulty blending in, or those that look uncomfortable. This is mostly a Good Host thing, and I have a Lot Of Thoughts about it so maybe one day I’ll write down my thoughts on it.

Of course once the events starts, once the ball gets rolling, there are infinite things to think about. Gender ratio, food distribution, discussions topics, power dynamics, safe spaces, etc. I think at that point it’s important to discuss it with your friends the way I did with mine, and I’m eternally grateful for all my wonderful friends that I can talk to about the Nobuparty and it’s many infinite fractals.

The breaking point

But, eventually, the well of faith runs out, the party grows beyond the original structures, and it coalesces into something else. As I wrote this I talked with Amir and Jati, and this phrase came out: “There was definitely a lot of overflowing trust that had been built by Kai Camp that facilitated the (creation of) Nobuparty. I had overflowing faith production post Kai Camp and I ran out because the Nobuparty wasn’t producing as much as it was consuming”.

As I said in the start, there were two simple desires that causes the Nobuparty to start, Amir’s and Mine. With Amir gone, and my desire no longer happening, things starts breaking down at it’s seam as I start finding it harder and harder to hold faith that this is something I want to do. From the change of location due to friction with other family members, increasingly complex logistics needed to run and finance a house party (accommodations, drinks) which begets some level of coordination, which begets some level of formalization, the moving of a central figure (Amir moving away to the UK), to the many different personal issues that are piling up for me, I just found the Nobuparty to have… no value for me, personally.

Now, this isn’t as to say that the Nobuparty is bad, or that I don’t like it. Before the 10th Nobuparty so many asked me whether it’s going to happen that month, and the phrase “Nobuparty is Infrastructure” flies around the mouth of participants extremely often. From a community building and scene building perspective, this is not just Good, but GREAT.

Sadly, my gut reaction to that was “If this is infrastructure, surely someone else can do it, right? I don’t have to be the one that does it?”

There are a plethora of more practical reasons beyond the one I wrote up there, ones that I sadly cannot write as they involves other people and more importantly they involve shadows of mine that I’m still working through, but there is one that I would like to underline. Any nobuparticizen that is reading this, including the constellation, know that I hold no ill will towards you personally.

I abhor the lack of initiative to make this thing yours the way the earlier people did, and I’m extremely sad that the agency that ends up showing up happened too late after the breaking point. I hate that we instinctually try to coordinate and formalize things when what I would have very much preferred was for this to be something akin to an anarchist commune where power structure exist but not formalized. I would like for everyone to trust everyone else more, and for everyone else to act in ways that doesn’t betray that trust. I know that strangers are scary, and I know that at certain level centralization just make sense, but if that is the path we are going towards, please, don’t, put me in the center of it. I am more than happy to stand higher than the crowd to provide a schelling point, a landmark to help you navigate the space, but no more than that. Don’t put more responsibility on me, be it intentionally or unintentionally.

The End

But that’s it for the Nobuparty. 12 Volumes, all greater than the last, all a new experience for me as the host. It has been fun, I might do something of the sorts again in the future when I have my own house and also have better faith producing processes within me again (i.e. have wife), but that’s all for me in this space! If you are a nobuparticizen and you are interested in running a continuation, spiritual successor, or something akin of the Nobuparty and you need help or want someone to talk to about this, hit me up! I love hosting, I just don’t want the responsibility to be entirely on me, y’know? I have chronic anti-pedestalization shadows and shit like that.

There’s literally an infinite amount of things I could say about the Nobuparty. People who has talked to me about this knows some depth, but there are always more, and this thing has to end somewhere, just like the Nobuparty. Talk to me about this if you want to know more. Prompt me on it. I am happy to have people talk to me about this.

If you’re so inclined and have read so far, please write a little something about the Nobuparty for me. Either on DMs, or in public (tag me). It’ll mean a lot to me. Thanks, see you around <3