Where I grew up in Switzerland, I'd say the most authentic subcultures were in the secondary cities. A couple of tens of thousands of people in population. Big enough to have minority communities, but still small enough to not get mainstreamed to the same degree as in the "big" cities
The joke the article references seems to think this too, saying you'll find real subcultures in Albany. For some reason the article thinks Albany is the county, despite the fact it is a city with a population of 100k and a couple blocks of skyscrapers downtown.
100%. Lately I'm kind of obsessed with cities "in the middle". I don't really know what the definition is exactly, maybe like "you have a pretty big train station" or something, but yeah something where you get all or most of the benefits of a city without the bonkers downsides of "world cities". I think there's a lot to be said about housing costs for sure--probably the main issue but I think it's downstream of a lot of liberal culture that was very OK with building a wall between the and poor people while their housing values skyrocket--but what TFA calls out is also a pretty succinct way to say what I think a lot of people are nibbling at the edges of: there's a single Airbnb/Instagram aesthetic everyone's pursuing and the mechanisms we have for honing whatever we're doing to more perfectly match that aesthetic are so powerful they're blanding things faster than we can create a backlash.
When I rented my first apartment in NYC I needed to buy a shower curtain, and I was in a very "don't use Amazon" mode, which meant I was about to discover how little choice you really have when it comes to buying one locally. I got one home I thought I liked, but hanging it up I discovered it had totally trite _words_ on it like "Happiness" and "Sunshine" or whatever. It was so cringe and not my personality even a little, and I cursed God for saddling me with a lot of unpleasant options at that point (throw it away immediately and create waste and go through the whole rigamarole or getting a new one blah blah). But for some reason I suddenly had the thought that this was really enriching my life. It was so totally unlike me it weirdly stretched my experience in a really refreshing way. It was a low-key funny story. It does actually put you kind of in a good mood if you're not actively resenting it while showering.
Secondary cities are like that, but for your whole life. It might not be your choice, you might not have access to everything you need to sculpt your life for maximum clout or virality, but it turns out that's an insidious kind of poverty. We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.
Some examples of this:
- local restaurants take pretty bonkers chances with their menus and change them seasonally, so it's possible you just won't like anything at a place all winter, but then the spring menu is amazing
- there's a gas station a few blocks away from us which isn't that pleasant on paper (traffic, odors, light pollution, though we don't experience this from where we live) but for some reason it makes me super nostalgic
- we used to do a swim class with our oldest every weekend, but there really isn't one here (in English), but the music class we just found is also very fun even though we really wanted a swim class
I could go on. Maybe I'm aging, maybe it's becoming a parent, but the thought of moving back to an NYC or even a Chicago feels deeply uninspiring and exhausting. I want the weird decor/playlist choices. I want the people who only run their shop 2 days a week. The constraints big cities labor under have become too intense for them to really be surprising; they have to be so efficient they can't be robust.
This is a recent problem with big cities and it primarily concerns the price of real estate. New York in the 60s was a truly counterculture place because with a little bit of money you could live downtown and afford to do your art.
Now if you want to be an artist in New York City, you have 2 options: be a full time artist but completely aligned with wealthy gallery culture (i.e., be appealing to "mainstream") or work in finance and do art on the side.
This is why NYC produces no actually interesting culture anymore.
Same is true of Berlin, CDMX, etc. such places are maximally interesting within the constraint of "must be wealthy" which necessarily excludes lots of cultural expression. They are also riding on the interestingness that was generated decades ago when the financial situation was different.
I think you're right about all this. Fundamentally, world cities have just become too expensive. If you want to live in them you have to be wealthy or earn a high income, neither of which are historically associated with culture generation.
When I moved to NYC my cohort was initially a lot of former SF residents, and their main reason by far for leaving was that there's more than just tech people in NYC and that's so refreshing. Some of that has to be a bubble effect, because NYC isn't tons better: you're looking at lots of people in tech and finance.
None of this is conducive to creating the kinds of environments where art thrives: low cost of housing, sufficient part-time day jobs, and weird, diverse, inspiring milieus.
I think the fix is really simple: build more housing and build more public transit to get there (more or less the Tokyo model, structurally). Unfortunately the US seems to be uniquely trash at both, so my guess is the big cities' loss is the middle cities' gain. And this is maybe healthy: big Emerald Cities domiciling a huge percentage of the professional/managerial class along with a similarly huge percentage of artists has created all kinds of cultural and political problems.
living in another insanely high rent city, people talk about the cost of housing a lot, but one thing that doesn't come up enough is the cost of commercial real estate. you simply can't afford to run a small business that caters to a minority culture because the rents will kill you, not to mention the precarity of never knowing how much they will be jacked up the next time your lease is up for renewal. that has a chilling effect on community diversity as well.
Absolutely yeah, this is why you get loss leader prestige stores and dozens of clone businesses because that's what unimaginative banks will finance. It'll give you expensive salads, but that's about it.
Where is the actually interesting culture coming from? I'm in my 40s, and a parent, so I feel like (at least for now) I've lost the ability to tell and the inclination to seek it out anymore anyway.
Being a seriously big city, NY must still have "home-grown" art and culture, like its hip-hop scene or the modern equivalent? Kids are still growing up in rent controlled apartments surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other kids, even if starving artists aren't arriving from the outside like they used to.
Culture grows at boundaries, in places of uncertainty and chaos. Culture tests the limit of what is acceptable.
As we start building permanent structures (such as a family) we naturally start avoiding these zones of turbulence because they are challenging to navigate and we need the energy elsewhere. It's ok.
> Where is the actually interesting culture coming from
Your kid's bedroom (if your a Gen X parent).
Youth culture is now heavily social media or short content based, making it easier to reach out to large audiences while staying at home.
You can build and manage an entire community of friends just by using Discord or other similar products, so you can develop a network effect without having to be in-person.
Take a look at SoundCloud Rap, TikTok shorts, Gamer Youtube, Podcasts, ASMR, etc.
Also, a lot of us younger people had some of our most formative years during the lockdowns, which turbocharged online culture.
For me, the size of the seat area is probably the biggest nuisance on a long flight. I'm not super tall, but above average and depending on my body position, either my knees or shins are always lightly pressed against some hard plastic or metal from the seat in front of me. Not painful, just a constant discomfort, especially if the person in front moves a lot.
The biggest quality-of-life improvement for flights, for me, was paying up each way for an emergency exit seat. A secondary benefit that I hadn’t initially considered but turned out to be huge is being able to get in and out of my seat at any time without making the entire row get up or having to get up for others.
I agree, and I would also add that the great thing about sketchy hand-drawing is that it keeps people focused in discussions, making it clearer what they should be judging.
As soon as you have something that looks remotely like the real thing, people will get distracted. Why is this yellow not our brand yellow? What is this font? Those two boxes don't align! etc. While those details do matter, they are not important in the early iterations of a design.
A functional gui framework, rendered in realistically chaotic pencil style where nothing is perfectly shaped, the same size or aligned, with only 3 or 4 unalterable pencil colors, would actually be useful.
Separate visual function design from visual style.
Balsamiq had (has?) something like this. You could mock up in whatever fidelity you wanted, but you could switch view modes and it would look like a sketch. Great for ensuring people didn’t get hung up on minutiae prematurely. It was wonderful.
But I’m imagining what you’re describing as another level, where one would draw relationships and behavior … and visual presentation would be like textures applied to a scene’s wireframe.
Don't know if it is still used much. There is SecureDrop to facilitate communication between investigative journalists and sources/whistleblowsers via Tor that was at some point deployed by several prominent news organizations.
I stopped reading news around 2012, while working at a large newspaper in Switzerland. Or maybe better put, replaced it with slower forms of information.
Instead of doom scrolling news sites and social media for things that happen right now, you wait for some people to actually have time to investigate, synthesize, etc. There is just little to no actual information in the former way of consumption.
There is a good The Guardian article from back then.
“News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier” (2013
Yeah I've done something similar, I just buy and read the go-to books on the topic I want to know about now. Although I somtimes slip and end up scrolling through some news sites, I've churned through a lot of actual books related to current geopolitics.
I had a couple of such sessions as part of accessibility certification when rebuilding a largish government website years back. It's definitely worth it for understanding the why of the accessibility recommendations, rather than just following a checklist. And if budget allows to do website improvements that go beyond.
The experience was also humbling in an awesome way. I think I still haven't seen anyone navigate the web as fast as this one blind person was capable of, due to the mastery of his tools.
Indeed. I am reminded of the major catalyst that got me to become serious about learning vim: I saw a senior developer flying around in his text editor, editing things like a ninja, and I had to learn that skill. I've been extremely glad I invested the time.
Had the same feeling now three times while watching vision, impaired people using accessibility tools. They can absolutely fly through things much faster than a typical user can. Aside from the general awesomeness that is taking something that most people would consider a disability and turning it into a superpower, it makes me think that I am really missing something by not having that skill.
Has anybody done this before and can offer some advice for how to start, and where to go with it? I am a Linux-only user, which I assume is going to matter for the tooling.
I use the Firefox screenshot tool quite a lot, mostly because it automatically snaps the region to DOM elements. This makes it less fiddly to take cleanly cropped screenshots of sections, especially if they don't entirely fit on the screen.
I'm not that knowledgeable about the screenshot tooling space, but I feel all my needs are covered with the default system one plus the Firefox screenshot tool for convenience in some cases.
Maybe it's not the exact use case and maybe you know about this already but just in case, in the dev tools, if you right click on a node in the inspector you can directly take a screenshot of that specific node.
For me, it’s realizing that I can’t achieve mastery in even a fraction of the things I’m interested in. However, I don’t need a very high skill level for many activities to be enjoyable and/or useful to me.
I feel you just need a couple of months dedicating some time most days to get to a basic level, or a bit beyond that. It’s only when you reach intermediate levels that you start to see diminishing returns from the time invested. So, I define 1-2 things I want to focus on for the next couple of months and ignore all the others. Then, depending on how things went, I continue with the same or move on to others. I have an hour reserved each to day to do whatever the current focus is.
For example, a couple of years ago, I spent a good amount of the year learning to play guitar to say a advanced beginner level. I know I’ll never become a virtuoso, not even will I be able to play most of the things I like to listen to. But that doesn’t mean it’s not immensely enjoyable to just sit down every now and then and noodle around on the instrument for relaxation.
As someone who has done the informatics apprenticeship when I was 16, I don't think it is too early. I don't know many people that significantly changed their minds on what they want to do between 16-20. Only after several years of actual work experience in the field in their mid 20s or later.
I think the benifits of earning some money starting at 16 and losing most of the anxiety of getting your first real job (almost everyone I know got job offers at the company they did the apprenticeship at) outweighs the risk of making a "wrong" career choice early on. Also there are several common ways people adjusts their career over the time. E.g. studying at technical universities and doing second, shortened apprenticeships in related careers.
From vague memory, images of buttons were indeed used, but tables or other tricks were necessary to dynamically adjust container size to its contents, e.g., for internationalization.
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