I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
Makes me happy to see people learn about the culture of my country :D
Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top.
Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others.
The thing is that I don’t want to be employed but I also don’t want to be unemployed. I actually want our entire economic system to explode but that’s not really a feasible option right now
My ideal street layout, wide sidewalk, wide bike lanes, and a 2 lane road that only allows streetcars on it. Yes I know this a bad drawing, I made it in a hurry
Are those (black circles w/ small things) supposed to be eg cafe chairs?
If so, they’re posing an accessibility issue due to blocking the sidewalks. Recommend your street layout allow for outdoor seating without blocking sidewalks.
Agreed. The foundation is sound, but there needs to be plenty of space to walk by seating without getting run over by a bike. Seating that hugs the walls of the nearby structure, and open storefronts that let people and services flow seamlessly between the commercial spaces and the sidewalks would be an improvement here.
I actually shrunk the seating to make there be more space for pedestrians
If the tracked area is for trams/streetcars only, may I recommend that you make it green track?
Not only does it add much needed greenery to public spaces, but it also reduces heat at street level, reduces the running noise of trams and dramatically improves water drainage at street level. It even goes as far as reducing the damage to the tracks caused by the material expanding and buckling in high heat by simply keeping the rails cooler and better displacing heat.
It doesn’t even have to be grass! Different species of plant, local species or hardier, low-maintenance species can be used, and furthermore, it tends to reduce maintenance costs of the tracks, as soil is easier to dig up than concrete or tarmac, and so the tracks can be accessed and worked on easier.
Obviously, if you want the street to be able to accept buses along with trams/streetcars, or other rubber-tyred vehicles, then a hard surface is necessary, but if it’s light rail only, then green track gets my vote.
Already made the edit, I hope you enjoy the green tracks and their flowers. This image is very green
Redoing the color of the bike path to make the street less fucking green
I love the idea of green tracks, but in this case they are not a good choice:
You still need the possibility for rubber based vehicles like Fire Cars or Ambulances to pass the streets.
You can’t just put them on tracks because they need to be as mobile as possible to allow maximum efficency.
Okay removing the grass due to firecodes
Urbanism pride flag lol
we still need green so maybe put flowerpots in the middle of the sidewalk? Like rectangular ones that only take up maybe a fifth of the sidewalk width, and their intermittent, maybe one between every other set of trees.
The street planters have come in
Honestly if you want some good green space you should consider bioswales between the bike facilities and the “street”, which would help replace some of the lost drainage/filtration function from de-greening the track
The bios have been swaled
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@puddlebrigade Okay the tables have been moved and reduced to be more accessible and some planters have been moved
I remember someone saying “mad scientists in fiction aren’t scientists because there’s never a control group”
I think if you’ve created an elixir that turns people into goat men you have sort have gone past the need for a control group. The control group is not going to placebo themselves into goat men. You can probably not run the control group, and safely assume that none of them would have turned into goat men. That said, having a control group for that would make the mad scientist seem extra crazy and be really really funny, especially if he was carefully testing them for goat like features from the dyed water they drank instead of the elixir
It’s not just the lack of a control group. Where’s the peer review? Where are the replication tests? Where’s the collaboration with the rest of the field? Where’s the publication of results? All of that shit is out the window because Doctor Frankenshmirtz wanted to get away with doing this shit in a dank basement without telling anyone. You call this science? This is TINKERING!
“LOL. You think your vote matters? ROFL and LOL.” Yes, I am aware my vote carries less and less relative power the more people I’m voting with, but unlike your glorious violent revolution, it actually exists.
The Glorious Violent Revolution fantasy is the Rapture for leftists.
i see a post talking doom and gloom about how we’ll never escape toxic masculinity. i think about back in 2017 when american girl released their first boy doll, and a review for him went viral in the collecting community. the review was written by a mom, who said they went into the store to get their daughter a doll, only to see their son’s eyes light up like fire when he saw a doll that looked like him, and now every night he puts his doll in pajamas and rocks him to sleep. i think about the toddler in my daycare room a few years back who was obsessed with baby dolls, carrying them everywhere, and his mom proudly told us he uses his sisters’ old baby dolls and wants to be just like them. that toddler saw another toddler crying one day and gave her the doll he had to cheer her up. i think about the eight-year-old boy i saw a few years back, excitedly waving around raya’s sword in a target checkout line like all his dreams were coming true. there was a video on my instagram the other day of a little boy at disneyworld crying with joy upon meeting his hero, mulan. i think about the voice actor for bow in the she-ra reboot saying his nephews only wanted adora action figures. celebrity men are wearing dresses on tv now. last halloween i saw a little boy dressed as elsa. i went to go see spiderverse over the summer, and in the line ahead of me was a boy who couldn’t be older than twelve or thirteen, bouncing and beaming, giddy with excitement over getting to see the female-led romance movie elemental. i think about the five-year-old boy at my library who breathlessly asked me where the pinkalicious books were, eyes widening when i had more on my cart, his mom explaining that he is all about pinkalicious and fancy nancy. i saw so many pictures online of boys and men dressed in pink to see barbie. teenage boys are gonna open their phones and see the man who wrote fucking game of thrones dressed in pink to see barbie. when i was a kid, a boy dressing in pink was practically a social death sentence. there are boys running around in pink on my street right now.
some dipshit uploaded my book to an AI site, so suffice to say, I will fucking kill them
emailed my agent cuz our contract states she has to protect me from shit like this, so we’ll see what she says
but I will still kill these ppl
LMFAO THE SITE IS BEING TAKEN DOWN
hey so, just so there’s no ambiguity about what just happened– this was about Prosecraft, a website that would help you compare your writing to your favorite author by analyzing the “vividness” of the words used, passive voice vs active voice and the number of adverbs used in a given section.
unfortunately, the service is dogshit for various reasons but that’s not the issue here.
the issue is that the website had trained an AI on 25,000 books, one of which included mine. and i definitely did not give anyone permission to use my work to train an AI. it’s literally stated in my contract.
and if i didn’t give permission–i can imagine quite a number of authors didn’t give permission either. (oops, i don’t have to imagine–because hundreds of authors came forward and said they didn’t give permission either!)
so i emailed my agent about this. my agent directed me to my publisher which has a legal department that looks into piracy on this scale. all of those authors did the same, emailing their legal team, getting The Authors Guild involved.
EVERY AUTHOR pretty much roasting this guy named Benji Smith on Twitter for claiming to “support authors” yet clearly using pirated work to train an AI.
of course, he decided to take the website down. authors are now talking about getting AI protection clauses in their contracts going forward. i already have one with my agent, but I imagine I will have to get it instated into every publishing contract moving forward.
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