Elmkast @Elmkast@refactorcamp.org

#introduction

Hello new site I don't understand! I'm currently studying Urban Planning at ConU in Montreal but grew up in hardcore red/trump land. Been following Ribbonfarm since November. Every Cradle a Grave and Tempo were some of my favorite reads of the past few years.

Interested in urban planning, making electronic music, video game design, and trying to get maximum life satisfaction out of a baseline level of laziness.

The segregated community aspect of Mastodon instances is interesting, but it still just feels like a Twitter fork that has a line of defense against corporate brands and blue checks.

There are people who do deep dives into countries they visit, and the added difficulty leads to a greater sense of immersion/distance. I respect that. But maybe most of us should treat international travel less like a Quest and more an opportunity to R E L A X

being a tourist is underrated. Get drunk, eat an above average meal, learn some history (that you will immediately forget) and see some cool views. You now have something to make small talk about for the next month and your instagram got an upgrade.

Or, go live in fake poverty for a while in India. We all know your newfound humility is bullshit!

reallly liking the "uspol" CW. at this point US politics are so mentally corrosive that it's only polite.

Would love a brainstorming app that allows me to give separate ideas/notes some kind of proximity without actually drawing a direct connection or putting them into a category. Like a soft link, that suggest possible correlation or relevance.

The classical solution here is just using a physical notepad, but I've been having too many ideas while walking/driving recently for that.

Maybe not often have, but can and do have

Maybe in the deep south? But I haven't spent much time there, and in Texas people with strong accents often have a ton of multi generational wealth

The weirdest part about the UK is being able to know someone's socioeconomic class after just three or four words. Don't think I can do that with any accuracy in the US.

I've got some family living in a majority afro Cuban neighborhood in SE London. It's easy to think that my white male experience is the norm, but I'm actually a fucking alien. The woman working the counter at the market would probably laugh at how isolated my family and I are in what is basically *her* neighborhood.

(@vgr goes into this in a great Twitter thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1010379160810708992.html)

Anyway, this is probably old news to anyone reading this. I'm wayy behind, and that's basically my point.

Sometimes I think about how an East Asian woman might experience moving to a city like London and I'm just so clueless! But it's exciting to me because they are stories that I haven't heard before.

And then it took me longer to realize how immigrants from different countries experienced city life in different ways. It's way more nuanced than just "non white immigrant experience". From a white perspective, the difference in experience between a Haitian and East Asian immigrant seems negligible.

Not only could that be farther from the truth, immigrants literally preserve social structures and culture from the countries they left!

I became an "urbanite" a few years ago, and it's taken me much of that time to realize how significantly my all-white Midwestern upbringing influenced how I experience cities.

Specifically, I had no clue how differently people of colour (especially first gen immigrants) see and interact with cities.

(disclaimer, I'm mostly talking about the three cities I've spent the most time in: Montréal, Los Angeles, and London)

I grew up in an all-white (like 99%) town in rural Michigan. Life there was very homogeneous, the only variables really were how wealthy your family was (still, most people were middle class ish) and who you knew. 95% of the population guaranteed to be at *least* a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. Most people went to the same parks, restos, schools, etc as everyone else.