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I will live in a pod
I will eat the bugs
Stop spending all your money on microtransactions!
wwWwwWWWOOoooOOOoooooOOoo
There’s something deeply unsettling about American suburbs, rows of identical houses, and not a human being in sight, no noises, just this artifical maze, my Uber took a detour though one once and I looked up from my phone and saw that I didn’t realize where I am and it all looked so identical it was disorienting and I freaked out a bit, had to open Google maps to realize where I was. The movie Vivarium captures this feeling well. Why don’t y’all get out and go for a walk and talk to your neighbors.
I am an American, and I once found myself far from home traveling through what I later learned was a ‘bedroom community’ in New Jersey just trying to find a place where we could all pull over and eat something, but apparently “restaurants” were just supremely exotic anywhere within in those, Idk, 300 sq miles.
It was EXTREMELY unsettling… even for an American!
The suburbs are bad enough but what really gets me when play Geoguessr type games is how much of towns are just a highway with a strip mall and parking lots. Gives me a weird dread-like feeling, kinda like being inside a dying mall right before it’s closing.
Yeah separating commercial and residential zones so much creates such dead zones, and a huge car dependency. Where I grew up everything I needed was in walking distance, from the optometrist to the bodega, never needed a car and my neighborhood felt so lively.
No noises sound like heaven.
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Even in the deepest suburbs it’s not that hard to form community and connection with your neighbors.
I get that it’s less “fun” to go out and make friends if you don’t got a riverwalk and cafes, but the most important ingredient is still there, which is other people you just need to step up and make things happen.
There are so many angles to why isolated people don’t “just go out and talk to people”, though I will spare the rant as I live in an area likely much less densely populated than a suburb so I’m not sure how well my experience would map to what you’re saying.
Well, other than it’s a lot easier for some people than others due to many aspects (like the bit you mention about dogs will work better for someone who also has a dog) but those are already the sort of things that are the difference between someone with some sort of social life vs someone with none.
Don’t police stop people that are walking? I heard this from multiple people. It’s so unusual to not be in a car they investigate.
I’ve had people in cars shout at me as they pass by and I’ve had a cop drive up to me and ask me where I’m headed, dependes from location to location, but walking is just seen as an odd activity in this country for some reason lol
This kind of “societal pressure” for lack of a better term is probably discouraging people. At least for me it would be.
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I have darker skin color so I avoid cops like the plague. I was walking home at 1 am in the rain and a single cop drove up to me and asked me where I was going and I wanted a lift, I picked a random apartment complex and said that’s my home and just pretended to go in there till he drove away
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the aetheric monotonous nightmare of commie blocks, with absolutely zero advantages, high cost, and HOA control
You ever seen Vivarium?
Yeah I mentioned it in my original comment, nice movies
Oh word. My bad.
talk to your neighbors
That shit is WOKE.
Most places don’t actually look like this. You see stuff like this when a single developer buys up a bunch of land and stamps down a bunch of houses with the same 2-3 layouts. It’s pretty shitty and I’d eager most people don’t actually like it.
Most suburbs here are much more heterogenous as the houses are added incrementally over time.
These types of identical house suburban hellholes are the exception, not the norm. Mostly it’s the newer developments being built out in the middle of nowhere that look like this, and presumably so the builders can skimp out on construction costs by making (or attempting to make…) everything the same for each one. Plus the HOA, “but muh resale value!” factor.
I live in an American suburb. All the houses in my neighborhood, and all the others in town, are different. We don’t have an insane HOA and I can paint my house whatever color I want. We have quite a few services, shops, and various eateries (to be fair, three of them are fast food joints) well within walking distance. With sidewalks. And in some places, even a bike lane.
This area was built up in the 1940’s through the late 1950’s in the post-war boom.
Do they not change them over time in the US?
It looks like a new build estate here, but over the decades people redecorate, some might paint them differently or get an extension. Add a driveway, convert garage into a home office, plant a tree or hedge. After several decades the houses start to show their different unique traits. If you look closely (we saw 5 houses in the same area before buying) you can see how each was originally the same but has been changed over years.
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Why are HOA so common? I only read about how annoying and sometimes borderline illegal they act
Also houses with an HOA are worth less money.
I think because for most Americans their home is their single largest asset - usually their only one with any resale value. So they jealousy guard against anything that might reduce the value, like a neighbor who does anything out of the blandest, most ordinary things.
… or a neighbor who does something that actually reduces resale value in the neighborhood.
I think we’re agreeing. I mean, if your neighbor paints their mailbox with a rainbow then that’s something that will make your house harder to sell.
So glad that we don’t have those here, its your house, you should be able to decorate it as you wish as long as it doesn’t get to a point of harming others. Generally that would be health risks or blocking out the sun for others. So no 2m pile of fish guts allowed.
Ah, freedom!
You can’t afford the pod and you can’t afford the bugs.
Red lobster couldn’t afford the bugs either. Put em out of business.
Well that was the excuse. Thy real reason was because the holding company that bought them out with debt also sold all the locations to a land lord and rented them back at higher rates.
Funny money fucked them.
It’s weird how the setback is so large that the houses are further away from the ones across the street than the ones on their back
Need space to park all those ridiculous cars
You could do a 4-wide parking area instead though. Instead of having to have people move their cars just for someone to leave. That wouldn’t help with RVs though.
But where would you put all that grass that needs mowing in the front yard?
In the backyard.
Yes, the tiny backyard compared to the big front yard doesn’t make sense to me
Curb appeal. ?
I can only speak for the Southern US but, developers want to build front-loaded units in subdivisions because they are more profitable. A rear-loaded garage costs a shit ton more in materials and labor, not to mention getting into impervious surface maximums vs lot size etc. I work in permitting/zoning, it’s always money, always. Heads up, y’all, don’t buy a D.R. Horton house if you can possibly avoid it, the more you know✨️
Heads up, y’all, don’t buy a D.R. Horton house if you can possibly avoid it, the more you know✨️
Not for nothing, but every home “builder” in America subs out to (multiple) General Contractors who sub out to their contractors work that gets inspected by the local municipality in stages. When people warn against particular builders, I always feel obliged to temper this by saying “they’re all actually pretty equally shit.” Residential building is complicated field work done pretty much by randos with varying levels of addictions, it’s not like a factory building cars. There’s only so much that can be expected.
Instead of avoiding particular builders, I would recommend buying a house that’s around 10 years old or so and which has been thoroughly inspected by someone who has been inspecting for more than 10 years (and who has been recommended to you by someone you know if possible). It will have had time to do any bad shit it’s gonna do (generally speaking). New houses are always a roll of the dice to some extent.
Appreciate the nuance! Also fully agree on the risk all new builds carry. I’m just salty because I spent all week arguing with them about the definition of the word façade lol
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I don’t get what you mean by front-loaded. Wouldn’t there be less impervious surface if the house was closer to the street/ driveway shorter?
If you play/hang out in the front area as a sort of almost communal space, it could make sense.
Except you’ll get shot if you step on someone else’s property.
Makes sense, since anything else would be communism
I would absolutely eat all the bugs if they weren’t prohibitively expensive.
Well you are in luck, in this case they are literally endless.
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The crabs at the beach are free. Sea bugs!
My mom’s childhood was partly spent in a war-torn country where they had no choice but to eat crickets for protein. Years later, I showed her an article about how some gourmet restaurants are experimenting with cricket preparations. She looked pensive, and said “They should harvest them from the rice fields. I think the rice-fed ones taste best?”
But there are a lot of places in the world where crickets are just part of the cuisine even when they have other food available
Aren’t crickets predators? They can be really good. I’m sure they weren’t great to your mom though, sorry.
Endless shrimp destroyed the company. So fuck it, eat the bugs you little pod child, EAT THE BUGS!
No, the Red Lobster insolvency was driven by declining sales and increasing debt, amid some shady corporate shenanigans with their finances. When they filed, they were about $30 million in the hole (even assuming their high valuations for their intangible assets).
Private equity owners (Golden Gate) made them sell off the land they owned, only to lease it back at above market rates. Then sold the chain to its biggest seafood supplier (Thai Union), who used the restaurant as an outlet for their wholesale seafood rather than as a standalone profitable business (which resulted in huge quality drop off and declining sales).
They were headed in the wrong direction, and the $11 million they lost on endless shrimp didn’t make a big difference. It was circling the drain anyway, based on big strategic errors (or just plain old private equity fuckery).
I mean yeah, of course thats very true, but it’s funnier to blame ot on the funny sea bugs.
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Resist change is pretty popular nowadays, at least in the US it is.
The pod is probably not so bad. I mean, you have to live somewhere.
Friend, do you have a moment to hear the good news of beans?
Imagine calling a house a pod.
Imagine calling one of those pods a “home”
Seriously? People live their lives in those houses. They sleep, cook, decorate, throw parties, watch movies, raise children. Just because the outside isn’t non-conformist enough for your personal tastes, that’s not a home?
There’s something wrong with that perspective.
Imagine calling a pod a house.
I don’t have to imagine it…
Ok fine, now when you say endless shrimp - I need an address.
Bugs crawling on the dirty gross ground, hell no. Bugs pulled out of salty water, im in.
Nagle not really.
