#Also it is a weird feeling to be droped in a posh neighborhood in an imperial core city after being on rural byways and towns elsewhere | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

screambirdscreaming · 26 days ago

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It's actually wild how much playing geoguessr for hours last night stabilized my brain out of spiralling.

I've been SAYING to myself things like "the world continues to exist and you have to stay grounded in it rather than spiralling about problems you can't in any way reach to push back against, and certainly doubly so if you are stuck spiralling" and also "the perspective from the place you live is so skewed from the material reality of most of the world and you have to account for that when informing your political stances" and other such things. But it hasn't really been getting through the immediacy of panic and dread.

And weirdly what did get through was spending hours clicking along a road through a place I've never been in a region I've never heard of, looking at how people build their houses and the structures along the roads where they sell various things to passersby, squinting at the signage to try to figure out which words might be place names, looking at all the unfamiliar plants, street dogs following the car.... that's the world the whole world is out there with more depth and detail than you can imagine. It's all out there.

#I don't know how long this effect will last or if it'll work another time. But it is nice.#to feel grounded in the world.#Also it is a weird feeling to be droped in a posh neighborhood in an imperial core city after being on rural byways and towns elsewhere #The degree of social control present in the streetscape is so jarring once you've been away from it #which I've also experienced irl but the suddenness of the shift when you're dropping into places is striking.#the site I found to play it is 'world guessr dot com'#The first set of 5 places it gave me were all famous landmarks which was eh. But after that it started dropping me on random roads.#Also even with the landmarks it was kinda interesting to see how little I know about the regional context actually.#I spent quite a while going in circles around the taj mahal complex trying to get out into the city to look for context clues #But every time I found a gate leading out there was no arrow to keep going through it....#trapped in the taj mahal.#I had to ask a housemate if they knew what region the taj mahal was in and they remembered the city so I was able to find it eventually #I don't play by strict no-looking-up rules but I'll only let myself look up indirect clues. Or ask people.

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