Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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What about destination patterns? Did you enjoy any of the random cities a bit more or less than you thought?
Your music point is heard. I incur some non-trivial costs for playlist creation and maintenance, but over the past decade or so I've built up a critical mass of 1-8 hour playlist collateral I can safely just hit "Play" on in shuffle mode and fit the bill. I think it's worth doing so for a couple of your favorite artists and genres to start at least.
(I should probably turn this into a longer effortpost. We'll see)
The homogenization of America is real. Several of my destinations we're B/C tier cities. As an example; Huntsville, Alabama.
These cities are NOT in decline or blight the way the canonical Gary, Indiana or East St. Louis are. In fact, many of them have experience real population and median income growth over the last decade. Visiting them in rapid succession, however, placed in obvious relief that there is a "book" for modern small city / large down development.
Easily 50% of my conversations with locals went like this:
Me: "What's a good neighborhood for a night out? Dinner, drinks" Them: "Oh, you've GOT to go to the historic district! It's so cool. Tons of great restaurants. Go to [Insert single first name like Jimmy's or Silvia's or Tom's] they the best burger! And there's also like three really good breweries there to."
Everywhere has the best burger. There are always three to a dozen breweries "that let it dogs! and have a great trivia night!." After a few of these same places, I developed a mental formula that involved number of coffee shops with young women outside of them around lunch, number of hand-chalked signs with puns on them, and if a place had a co-working spot with a name like "the railyard" or "brick factory." If yes to all of these - congrats, you're in the "hip, revitalized" part of town.
I'm being a little flippant as this isn't a real culture war issue (or thread). But I do bemoan, to some extent, that regional variety does seem to have slipped meaningfully. I can remember growing up with a friend who had been born in Pittsburgh. He was too young to have absorbed that city, but his parents were deep "Yinzers." In our teenage years, the Dad told us drinking stories about Pittsburgh that seemed like combat to my young ears. I've since been to Pittsburgh and though you can see shadows of the "tough Iron worker" culture, it has no teeth.
Another part of me, however, kind of appreciates this. Plainly stated, more small cities are safe, workable, and viable destinations for relocation for people who want to move. Using Huntsville as an example, if you weren't from there up through the early 2000s, could you ever actually fit in after a move? Or would Alabama Southern Society culture suffocate you? If you moved to, I don't know, Buffalo NY in the 1990s and picked the wrong street, would your car get stolen? While homogenization makes places look the same, it also makes them function the same to an extent. In a nation as large and diverse (
diversity is our strength!) as the US, an expectation of similar overall capability as you travel is probably a feature, not a bug.It's funny you pick on Huntsville, I have a cluster of friends there, and you're right that it's the same as other places. The good news is this was never as suffocating, culturally, as a place like Mobile or (god forbid) Montgomery.
I agree with your thesis completely. But what could be meaningfully regionally different for each city?
If you look at a Tier 1 city, I see better execution on some of these fronts, but that's it. There's a barcade, an escape room, and a go-kart track if you're down to trade money for an experience.
If I wanted to make a mark on a city to make it meaningfully different, I'd really struggle to come up with how. I feel like the only vector you really have is through jobs or maybe hosting a unique regular event. Maybe geography or architecture, but the latter gets more and more expensive to do so in a differentiated way every day....
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