Zompist Bboard Again

From National Geographic magazine, an illustrated article about the Russian Far North:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/maga ... e-feature/

(Found on Twitter)

Random question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments? Personally, I've mostly spent my life in more or less suburban or exurban neighborhoods so far, but I've also lived in inner-city neighborhoods for a few years, and while I was growing up, I also visited places in the city pretty often. But I've also visited some places in the countryside a lot while I was growing up, I lived in a hut in the forest for a while, and the suburban and exurban places in which I've lived have often been physically pretty close to the countryside. However, being an introvert, I don't think I've ever been really a part of either a city or a rural community.

I bring all this up because I've heard that there are people who are either so completely used to city surroundings that they'd be completely confused and disoriented if they'd find themselves in a small town or village or in between small towns or villages, or so completely used to rural surroundings that they'd be completely confused and disoriented if they'd find themselves on a busy sidewalk next to a busy road in a major city. And that's something I can't really relate to.

I live in Paris which is about as urban as it gets. It's a 'love-it-or-hate-it' kind of place, and certainly you'll find people feeling almost physically uncomfortable there. I think it's a bit over-the-top, but it does happen.
Some people certainly feel lost in the subway which is fairly understandable.

I lived in the countryside as a child, and I still love it. It's just that, well, it gets boring after a while.

I really hate the way small towns have been emptied and the huge mazes of malls and road interchanges that grew around them. I'm sure Tolkien had something like that in mind when he wrote about Mordor.

A hut in the woods? Well that's something I'd love to hear about.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:48 pm A hut in the woods? Well that's something I'd love to hear about.

A weekend hut that belonged to my family from, I think, sometime in the 1970s until last year. Both my Mom and I intermittently used it as a main residence between living in other places. We had to sell it last year because we had neither the time nor the money to keep it properly maintained, and it had fallen into serious disrepair.

"Hut in the woods" makes it sound more rustic than it is; it has electricity, running water (though from its own well rather than the public infrastructure), and a phone line that now carries high-speed internet.

When I lived there, sometimes the radio would broadcast a storm warning, and the announcer would say something like "avoid spending time in the forest!" Good times.

I've lived everywhere from a rural route in the hills to a 200+ unit condo building in the middle of a metropolitan area of 9.5 million. As a child, I loved the country. We were basically free-range kids and it seemed like every day was an adventure. On the other hand, my mother often says she's amazed we all survived childhood with all the close calls we had. We still had fun living in the city, but it felt like we were a lot more cognizant of the risks. (On my ninth birthday, a stranger tried to abduct me in the parking lot across from our parish church, less than half a block from our front door. In the country, we were used to leaving our trikes wherever we wanted; when we did this in the city, they were promptly stolen.) We subsequently moved back to the country, this time to a small town of 2,600 and it sucked. I felt like I had nothing at all in common with the farm kids who loved dove hunting, muscle cars, and drinking cheap beer; I couldn't wait to get back to the city. We moved back when I was in my mid teens and I haven't left again since.

I'd be really screwed if I moved back to a small town or even to the suburbs (at least in this country) since I don't drive. It would be more doable in parts of Europe, but I would still hate having to bike 20 minutes each way if I ran out of milk rather than just walking a block to the market. Not to mention that meeting interesting new people is a piece of piss when you're in a city of millions. I belong to a grief group for LGBTQ widows and it seems like many of the most frequent posters live in rural areas where they encountre lots of hostility and can't find many people to talk to. Even the ones who live near college towns are starved for interaction and cultural stimulation. It's a nice break to visit the country for a week at a time, but I am definitely not one of those folks who wants to retire there. Even on vacation, I'd rather explore a new city than get a cabin in the woods or a hut on the beach.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:48 pm I live in Paris which is about as urban as it gets. It's a 'love-it-or-hate-it' kind of place, and certainly you'll find people feeling almost physically uncomfortable there. I think it's a bit over-the-top, but it does happen.
Some people certainly feel lost in the subway which is fairly understandable.

I lived in the countryside as a child, and I still love it. It's just that, well, it gets boring after a while.

I really hate the way small towns have been emptied and the huge mazes of malls and road interchanges that grew around them. I'm sure Tolkien had something like that in mind when he wrote about Mordor.

A hut in the woods? Well that's something I'd love to hear about.

I'm reading a book about Germanic influence on Tolkien, and it says he basically was influenced by industrial cities in England in contrast to the countryside (more like the Shire).

Spotted in the wild today: writers trading advice on how to write fantasy language dialog.

The guy who invented Dothraki for the GoT series has some really good info on conlangs. He did a youtube series on it, too.

He did it. He has made himself the entry point to conlanging for normal people.

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:14 pm Random question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments? Personally, I've mostly spent my life in more or less suburban or exurban neighborhoods so far, but I've also lived in inner-city neighborhoods for a few years, and while I was growing up, I also visited places in the city pretty often. But I've also visited some places in the countryside a lot while I was growing up, I lived in a hut in the forest for a while, and the suburban and exurban places in which I've lived have often been physically pretty close to the countryside. However, being an introvert, I don't think I've ever been really a part of either a city or a rural community.

I bring all this up because I've heard that there are people who are either so completely used to city surroundings that they'd be completely confused and disoriented if they'd find themselves in a small town or village or in between small towns or villages, or so completely used to rural surroundings that they'd be completely confused and disoriented if they'd find themselves on a busy sidewalk next to a busy road in a major city. And that's something I can't really relate to.

With having a father in the military, even if I did live next to a bigger city, it was almost always at arm's-length. For example, from 2 to 6, I lived next to Tacoma, Washington, but in a military base that was much smaller than the city, and Tacoma's not very big, either (200K). The exception was Corpus Christi, Tex-ass, where, at the time, it was about 250K, but we were in a part of the city that was physically separated from the main core... so, again, it was still arm's-length. Same, to an extent, with Swansea, where I spent a semester: that was also a city of about 250K, but with being at the University there, it was still a bit at arm's length.

For me, while I'm pretty good with navigating (I've driven in and visited Toronto without issue; I've been to and liked Paris and Tokyo...), there's a point where big cities feel pretty overwhelming to a point, moreso that it feels a bit like a sensory overload. At the same time, I'm not a fan of extremely rural areas like where my mother lives (she lives in a town of ~1100, give or take), but I like the slower pace. Luxembourg City, oddly enough, felt perfect in all of those regards, as did Clermont-Ferrand (France): big enough for me where it felt urban and lively (okay, Luxembourg's special, but still, lively enough), but small enough where you can easily navigate and you don't feel overwhelmed by crowds. Bigger cities are, to me, nice to visit, but definitely not places I'd want to live.

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Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:14 pmRandom question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments?

I grew up in a suburb: to be precise, one of the "New Towns" planned by the French government in the 1960s. So, the typical cookie-cutter suburb without any local identity. And when I say "cookie-cutter", I mean it: they had 4 ground plans for individual houses and 1 for apartment buildings, and repeated them over and over for several square kilometers (at least they didn't align everything on a grid, so the street layouts are somewhat distinctive). Also, unless you have a car, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do except school, a local bakery, and the occasional gym.

I went to Paris for college, and enjoyed it immensely: I love being able to go to the supermarket on foot, and to be one bus or subway away from a library, a music shop, a rehearsing studio or a restaurant. The lack of space doesn't really bother me. By temperament, I'm a city-dweller through and through. This isn't the case for my parents: my father is completely lost in a subway station. I usually travel by train and he travels by car, so we have a different vision of our region's layout. (I often see two towns as more distant than they actually are, because they're served by distinct train lines.)

I have never lived in a rural environment, only going there for holidays.

Ryusenshi, I get you. I am a city girl, but my parents see the big city as just a place to store extra crime and noise.

I lived in a big city for years where I never once drove a car, and once my friend drove us around a few parts of the city and it blew my mind. You get used to treating the subway like a teleporter: go in the hole at point X, pop up again at point Y. I was shocked to see that certain neighborhoods were connected directly by one road, or that certain stations on separate lines were within walking distance. It's a totally different mental landscape.

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 5:31 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:14 pmRandom question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments?

I grew up in a suburb: to be precise, one of the "New Towns" planned by the French government in the 1960s. So, the typical cookie-cutter suburb without any local identity. And when I say "cookie-cutter", I mean it: they had 4 ground plans for individual houses and 1 for apartment buildings, and repeated them over and over for several square kilometers (at least they didn't align everything on a grid, so the street layouts are somewhat distinctive). Also, unless you have a car, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do except school, a local bakery, and the occasional gym.

I'm a bit surprised to hear that. I thought that type of suburb would be typical for the USA, the UK, and some other places, and that suburbs in France would be places where poor people live in high-rise buildings.

Well, this sort of suburb also exists, of course: entire blocks of high-rise council houses, largely populated by immigrants (mostly from the Maghreb), and notorious for being poverty traps. The French word "banlieue" covers both.

doctor shark wrote: ↑Sun Nov 15, 2020 6:15 amthere's a point where big cities feel pretty overwhelming to a point, moreso that it feels a bit like a sensory overload. [...] Bigger cities are, to me, nice to visit, but definitely not places I'd want to live.

This is a good descriptor of it for me. I grew up in the middle of the woods; the nearest town was about 1500 people, and the idea of not knowing how to drive by your mid-teens was mind-boggling. To this day, although I've traveled plenty and driven in some large cities, I get very nervous when there's any amount of traffic. Tractors? Deer? Snow? That's all fine. Some other cars or construction, and I'm gripping the steering wheel with rigor-mortis-like intensity. I find cities quite fun to visit, but I couldn't bear to live in one. Way too many people, way too small of spaces, way too few plants.

Humorously enough, I realized not that long ago that I've never actually lived in a "real" town or city. In Michigan, everything is either a city, a village, or a township, each with different levels of autonomy and authority, and I have exclusively lived in townships. That being said, not all townships are fully rural; for the last four years I've been living in the suburbs of a not-that-big city (Lansing, Michigan; it has about 100k inhabitants although the broader area has about half a million). And I find I quite like it! It fulfills my demands to have both trees and Aldi within five minutes' travel.

(I've thought about living farther out in the country--it'd be great to be able to wander off into the woods directly from my back door--but the grocery situation is so inconvenient...)

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Nov 15, 2020 12:05 am Spotted in the wild today: writers trading advice on how to write fantasy language dialog.

The guy who invented Dothraki for the GoT series has some really good info on conlangs. He did a youtube series on it, too.

He did it. He has made himself the entry point to conlanging for normal people.

I think it has more to do with people's level of interest. You have to keep in mind most of the people that find his work do so through various TV programs and will never do more than a cursory google search about the lang(s) in question.

I'm quite sure that if Zomp was more public about his involvement with various projects, his name would be more widely known as well.

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:14 pm Random question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments?

I grew up in a suburb, moved to a major city as soon as I could, and ended up hating it. I currently live in a village with a three-digit population.

There aren't many interesting things nearby, but there weren't in the city either, so I don't care.

I could see the pros of city life outweighing the cons in Europe, but probably not in the US - definitely not east of the Mississippi.

Thank you for your feedback, everyone!

My girlfriend has a new account for bad Latin takes twitter.com/UngoodLatin

Sometimes I forget that people don't know much about typography.

I ask an employment advisor if my resume is good.
Advisor: the overall presentation is fine. But you shouldn't use Times New Roman.
Me: Uh? I know that Times is overexposed and that it's preferable not to use it. But this isn't Times, I chose something less famous. It's... wait, I can't remember at the moment...
Advisor (not listening): no, instead you should use something nicer, like Arial.
Me: Arial??? It's even more overexposed than Times!!!
Advisor: See, it's rounder and more readable on a screen.
Me: oh, you mean a sans-serif font.

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Fri Nov 27, 2020 3:24 am Sometimes I forget that people don't know much about typography.

I ask an employment advisor if my resume is good.
Advisor: the overall presentation is fine. But you shouldn't use Times New Roman.
Me: Uh? I know that Times is overexposed and that it's preferable not to use it. But this isn't Times, I chose something less famous. It's... wait, I can't remember at the moment...
Advisor (not listening): no, instead you should use something nicer, like Arial.
Me: Arial??? It's even more overexposed than Times!!!
Advisor: See, it's rounder and more readable on a screen.
Me: oh, you mean a sans-serif font.

I know. The lack of proper education given to today's young people is criminal.