#living in the city

[vintageshits]

I hate spring in my city, as it’s damn hot, but, man, oh, man, I can’t help but be happy whenever I see jacarandas at main streets and public spaces 😭😩💜

[wordsofash00tingstar]

i don’t wanna go back to that small, oppressive town,

but i do wanna go home.

partially, i am home.

i just wish the two things coincided.

[moonauu]

🪩

[a-really-tired-cinnamoncupcake]

There is beauty in the city

There is a beauty in following an aimless path. In taking a stroll without a point, just looking at the glassy shopwindows, filled to the brim with colors and shapes, designs of all kind. There is so much to see and so much that will forever stay ignored. And there are times, when you are far enough from the bustling of the air conditioners, from the traffic and the noisy stores, when cars seem to evaporate in thin air, where you find yourself momentarily, suddenly, surrounded by silence. Just the rythm of your crunching steps, of the brave birds that dare to live despite the smog and noises, just the soft whisle of the wind as the soundtrack of your journey. Those moments that come and go so rapidly but make you feel like all civilization, all the life has stopped and its just you, existing. You, enjoying the long buried youth inside your body, hidden in your bones. Those moments where you can't contain a smile towards a stranger, with no other purpose than smiling and, when it's returned, it latches onto your face and just wont let go. Thats why I think there is a disguised beauty in the cities. An attractive that is not worth comparing with the one from nature, because of how different they are. Though they are simmilar in how small and part of something bigger (so out of your control as a mere individual) they make you feel. I found the cacophony of smells a fun adventure, to try and guess, to cathegorize. I found the noises, sometimes overbearing and dizzying, to be stimulating and a way to fall in the present. I found the sound the leafes beneath my feet to be grounding, a reminder of the body I have, of the muscles moving me. I found the wind, cooling my fingers and my runny nose, to be a pleasing physical sensation. The tenseness of my neck, the burn of my legs from walking so much over the concrete, all sensations that i never would have thought as "nice" to be pleasing. A reminder that i'm alive. That regardless of how some days the city can be infernal, others it can be an adventure, a fond memory to look back to, a happy day.

[oldertumbler]

Staying in a city alone, with so many people, with so many people eager to be with you, but connecting with none of them, with such huge crowds of friendly attractive people but none of whom i know. With so many places to visit and hang around but i don't have the money or energy to go. With so many chances to get physical but i don't want to take any of them.

At such a weird place geographically or metaphorically where there are so many chances or opportunities for a lot of socially exciting things to happen but taking none of them, getting none of them, because of who or how I am.

 

The struggle of socially anxious people is tossing between wanting to be social but not having the ability or resources to do so. 

Oh well. That's living an introvert life in an extrovert world.

[martinahavlova]

vidíš mě vidím tě 2023 Plzeň

[lunamikk69]

SCANDAL - Living in the city (Digital Single)  /2020.06.03/

[ai-dream]

[enigmatic-lizard]

I want to take a vacation from all this breathing shit

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[perfectlyripeclementine]

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

[refugeed-kim]

YES YES I NEED THIS SIGN IN EVERY SINGLE PARK PLEASE

This is my daily struggle, I had so many arguments with people with off-leash dogs (in a mandatory leash area!!!). Thanks to this behavior I'm struggling with Kim being anxious/aggressive with other females as she often gets involved in unpleased interactions with free females while on leash. And every single time that I ask for the dog to be at least recalled, I'm being called names and insulted of course.

Also 9 out of 10 their dog isn't really that friendly at all.

[maeamian]

Part of the reason that Republicans are so desperately acting like they will never lose again is because they are deeply terrified that this is their last real chance to win. The big orange dipshit came in and gutted the party of everyone who wasn't a loyalist, which left it full of nasty little gremlins who have gaping voids where charisma and human decency is supposed to go.

They still hold a lot of power, but if we stop them this year the next presidential election may not be the Most Important One Of Your Life™, that's not a guarantee or anything, but if they don't win here and now their future looks grim, this dipshit is the only guy they have left and he's extremely diminished and has his brains leaking out of his ears at this point. We can beat him into the ground.

So that's what we're gonna fucking do. We're gonna break these fucking fash. They will crash upon us and we're gonna break their fucking necks. When they come for us they will lose because they're fucking losers and we have each other's backs which is something they fundamentally are incapable of comprehending.

[deep-space-netwerk]

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.

[isawken]

was recently having talks about saving up for a several-week vacation with my partner and he said something that i seriously cannot stop thinking about and i need to Ask The Audience

this is not cumulative, you must have spent over 14 calendar days outside of your hometown in one stretch to be able to hit Yes

i’ve never asked for this before but if you could rb for reach that’d be cool, this is a straight up potential worldview-shattering revelation right here and i need data if im gonna shatter my dang worldview

[soapdispensersalesman]

Beautiful and insightful video about loneliness in New York (and cities in general as I can relate to this in Berlin as well) with some great tips for both dating and even just platonic friendships, generally a YouTube channel to keep an eye on!