Five Nice Things An Article by Siobhan O'Connor forge.medium.com At our dinners, we sometimes played a game we called Five Nice Things. It is what it sounds like: You take turns naming things that are nice. Five is the number. It can be a thing that makes you happy, a compliment for the other person, a win at work, “This broccoli is tasty,” whatever. It’s a bit sappy, but it’s not the sappiest, and the rules were: Don’t overthink it, and be specific. If I had The Sads happiness
Drawing pictures of cities An Article by Noah Smith noahpinion.substack.com This is a famous picture by the artist Imperial Boy (帝国少年), who works in the anime industry. I sometimes claim that the entire genre of solarpunk is simply a riff on this picture. If it’s not just “trees on buildings”, where does the Imperial Boy picture get its magic? Looking at it carefully and trying to analyze what I like about it, I think that much of it is about architecture, and even more of it is about the use of urban space — about how the structures in the picture shape the kinds of things you’d do if you were there. For example, here are five things I like: Open, walkable multi-level retail River with low bank Walkable streets Varied architecture Shade 251. Different ChairsSuburban NationTowers in the Village urbanismpatternsstreets