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silence_kit posted:people are crapping on the relatively less wealthy, but still actually pretty nice places to live, Fremont/Milpitas and Gilroy/Morgan Hill areas of the San Francisco Bay Area. I haven't spent time in Gilroy in about a decade, but when I was growing up it had a reputation of constantly stinking of garlic because it really did, the whole town was based around garlic farming on a huge scale. Like even just passing through on 101 it was a really strong smell, and I like garlic but I wouldn't want to live in that smell 24/7 its probably all malls now though Earwicker fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 23:56
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It still smells like garlic.
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Sep 29, 2017 07:39
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Earwicker posted:I haven't spent time in Gilroy in about a decade, but when I was growing up it had a reputation of constantly stinking of garlic because it really did, the whole town was based around garlic farming on a huge scale. Like even just passing through on 101 it was a really strong smell, and I like garlic but I wouldn't want to live in that smell 24/7 It has a lot of malls now, yes, but it still reeks of garlic at all times. When they say the Garlic Capital of the World they are not in any way joking
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Sep 30, 2017 15:33
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I lived on Long Island for 27 years. I really like Long Island, probably because all my friends and family are still there. Also, LI has pretty much everything from beaches to nightlife if you're into that sort of thing. Being close to NYC means that you'll never miss a concert from your favorite act/band, because anyone who's anyone swings through NYC at least. The one major downside to LI is that it's expensive as gently caress. Like, super loving expensive. Look it up. Young people are leaving in droves because who the gently caress can afford $1400 a month for a one bedroom apartment? Go rangers. I moved to the "Capital Region" late last year, and honestly it kinda sucks. Funny thing is, it's like everyone up here KNOWS it sucks too, they just don't wanna say it. When people on long Island crack jokes about lovely stuff they have to deal with or don't like, there's at least a certain sense of pride behind it. When people up here crack the same type of jokes, it's the epitome of 
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Oct 1, 2017 06:43
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I moved to Philadelphia almost 2 1/2 years ago after spending the 27 years before that bouncing around Midwestern college towns. This has been my first time living in a city of >125k and it's been pretty alright. Good: The food is amazing here. This is probably typical of a big city but there are a ton of good restaurants of all kinds, and if you don't want to eat out then places like the Italian Market and Reading Terminal provide lots of different fresh ingredients to cook with. Also I love sandwiches and Philly is among the best sandwich places in the country (not just cheesesteaks either!) Lots of stuff to do on any given day/weekend. If you're bored around here you're not trying hard enough! Some cool stuff outside of the city too, if you can get there (more on that later). Easy to get around. It's a great city for walking or biking around due to the straightforward street layout, and driving in the city isn't actually that bad if you avoid Center City. Philly has a reputation as being a "mean" city (especially its sports fans) but everyone I've met has been nice to me. Granted I live in one of the nicer parts of town but even South Philly lifers that I've met have all been decent people. Bad: Housing prices suck but that's to be expected. Our current rent is triple what we were paying before we moved out here and I don't know how any single person can afford to live in this city. A number of neighborhoods are rapidly getting more expensive (or are about to do so) right as my wife and I are looking to buy our own place. Driving outside of the city is a nightmare. I-76 is notoriously bad but it's the only direct route to get to any of the suburbs. I-95 is usually OK but it hugs the Delaware River and you can't really use it to get to the 'burbs, at least not without taking a bunch of winding state/county highways to do so. Commuting into/out of the city for work is also terrible, I've known that I hate my job for over a year but I continue to work it because I have a 10-15 minute commute each day (going east into NJ, the only non-poo poo direction to drive out of here) and I know that I won't find anything better. The schools in the city are supposedly awful but I don't have kids so I can't say for certain. Wife and I are thinking about having one in the next 12-18 months, so they might become a problem for us soon! I've been a runner for a long time and Philly is a poo poo city to run in. There's one good place to run in the entire city (Schuylkill River Trail) but it's flat, constantly full of bikers/other runners, and last year had a serious problem with gangs of pre-teens cruising the Trail on bikes and harassing or even mugging a couple of people. The Wissahickon Trail outside of the city is really nice but you have to drive to get there and again, gently caress driving out of the city. Philly is huge (area-wise) and it bums me out that there are large sections of town that I will never need to see or get to see. That's not really a knock against it though, just a personal lament. The sports teams are mediocre to bad but I'm originally from Detroit and their sports scene isn't much better these days! Overall there's some stuff I don't like about living or miss about living elsewhere but Philly has been awesome to us so far and we love it here.
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Oct 2, 2017 04:07
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:I moved to the "Capital Region" late last year, and honestly it kinda sucks. Funny thing is, it's like everyone up here KNOWS it sucks too, they just don't wanna say it. When people on long Island crack jokes about lovely stuff they have to deal with or don't like, there's at least a certain sense of pride behind it. When people up here crack the same type of jokes, it's the epitome of I think its good and that it doesn't suck, and that the Rangers are garbage
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Oct 3, 2017 20:16
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I think its good and that it doesn't suck, and that the Rangers are garbage It has a lot of parks and trails which is pretty cool. Also, being only an hour away from Saratoga/Lake George is pretty cool too? Edit: I just read your previous post and it seems like I might not have been clear enough. I moved to the "Capital Region" of New York State. I live right outside Albany. chocolateTHUNDER fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Oct 4, 2017 |
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Oct 4, 2017 02:47
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:It has a lot of parks and trails which is pretty cool. Also, being only an hour away from Saratoga/Lake George is pretty cool too? Aha, that makes way more sense. I don't know anything about Albany so I'll take your word for it. Still not a fan of the Rangers.
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Oct 4, 2017 14:03
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So which SUNY school did YOU go to? NCC FTW for me and my dad, my sister went to FIT, and mom got her degree at Stony Brook. Woooo state sponsored learnin. Another thing that makes New York with a drat is that pretty much all the colleges are cool and good. You can get your first two years of credits at Community College SUNY Podunkia, and that poo poo'll transfer to CORNELL. Suspect Bucket fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Oct 4, 2017 |
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Oct 4, 2017 16:43
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silence_kit posted:To see an example of this, check out the California thread in D&D where people are crapping on the relatively less wealthy, but still actually pretty nice places to live, Fremont/Milpitas and Gilroy/Morgan Hill areas of the San Francisco Bay Area. Milpitas literally smells like sewage or garage most days.
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Oct 6, 2017 07:00
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I grew up in a town of ~8,000 people south of Kansas City, MO called Pleasant Hill. It is a horseshit racist hell-hole, but I didn't realize that until I went to college two hours away in Columbia where I had to learn how to not be horrible to other people. I never went to the city because my mom is afraid of traffic and black people. I guess the only perk of my hometown is that I was able to find a great handful of friends that had similar thoughts and interests to me; we still keep in touch. Oh, and SA was headquartered there for a few years. That blew my loving mind when I was visiting from college once, and I saw a blue hand grenade sign above a dinky office office structure. Every church lady was trying to get them kicked out of town (idk how that works) by telling everybody it's a forum for porn. Columbia, MO is what I think you'd call a quintessential college town. Lots of young people living in one spot make things interesting. The university has fallen on hard times recently after all of the racism poo poo that went down in 2015. Enrollment is way down, and they're renting dorms out as hotels during home football games, which have been rear end-terrible in recent years. I moved to Kansas City, MO-proper when I graduated for a job, and lived in the city for six years. The city was growing the entire time I lived there, which was cool to be around. Even in that short time, I saw more events/concerts find reasons to move back into the city. The downtown loop is mostly active during business times, which kind of sucked when I lived in the middle of it. There just wasn't much to do besides walk around and look at vacant buildings. The Westport neighborhood is where I lived and spent most of my time. Lots of bars and entertainment. I think I'll always like visiting Westport. KC is also home to Troost, which is a road that literally serves as a race-divider for the city. I hate to bring up race so much when talking about Missouri, but I feel obligated to because the NAACP LITERALLY ISSUED A TRAVEL ADVISORY FOR THE WHOLE STATE. Kansas City Pros:
I currently live in a suburb south of Boulder, CO. I moved out here for a job in August, and the two months I have spent in Colorado/Boulder/Denver have been excellent. The climate is exactly what I was looking for, the mountains are gorgeous and offer hundreds of hours of free entertainment if you're into hiking, and it is as liberal as I wanted. The Denver metro houses more tech jobs, which is the industry I just got into. I worked in Manufacturing just outside of KC, and a ton of my coworkers had not visited the city in a decade or so, literally. So many people confessed that they hadn't left their lovely burb to visit the city in years after the Royals had their celebration in the city in 2015 when they won the world series.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:44
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I grew up in Perth in Western Australia which is sort of like the nation's ultimate suburb: safe, pleasant, isolated and dull. It's probably a great place to raise kids but if you're a young person yourself it can feel stagnant. That was when I was a kid though, maybe these days everyone is hooked into the internet 24/7 so it doesn't really matter where you are. Mediterranean climate, so 300 days of sunshine a year, 40 degrees in summer and 20 degrees in winter, and believe me that endless weeks in the high 30s without a cloud in sight can be just a bleak and depressing as grey, drizzly skies. An exceptionally car-dependent city, quite conservative and parochial, the world's most beautiful beaches, reasonable employment opportunities but not a place anyone goes to chase a dream. Full of British retirees and white South African migrants so it has a bit of a racist vibe. Oh, and this never seems to matter to anybody else, but the city really only grew after WWII and also demolished a lot of heritage architecture so much of it can have a Ballardian, soulless modernist vibe, to my eye anyway. Now I live in Melbourne on the east coast which is big but not too big, has a much livelier nightlife and cultural atmosphere, and is full of crumbling old Victorian era buildings so that walking down the street is actually an aesthetically pleasing experience. I will never buy a house here unless the bubble pops (in which case the country is hosed anyway) but rent is way more affordable than Sydney. Excellent public transport (even if the Melburnians think they live in Mogadishu) and while the weather is bleak by Australian standards I quite like it: you get to wear a coat in winter but it's never actually painful to be outside, and it's not too hot for too long in summer. The beaches suck compared to anywhere else in the country but they're still amazing by European or North American standards.
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Oct 6, 2017 20:53
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I live in Hattiesburg, MS. Literally everywhere in the country is better than here except maybe parts of west virginia
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Oct 7, 2017 01:19
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empty whippet box posted:I live in Hattiesburg, MS. Literally everywhere in the country is better than here except maybe parts of west virginia Go to Clovis, NM. I saw suicide rates go up dramatically when the USAF base there was "saved" from closing. Divorces, suicide, and alcoholism are just the thing there.
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Oct 8, 2017 08:32
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Glasgow, Scotland Pro's The people: People in Glasgow generally have each other's back. If there's someone acting like an idiot, it does not take long for someone to tell them to gently caress off. That goes for racism, homophobia and all that too. The dialect: We sorta have our own wee language that anyone outside of Glasgow doesn't really understand. Swear words are used as commas. It's probably one of the only places in the world where is someone calls you a oval office, it's most likely a compliment. Transport: Public transport in the UK is great at the best of times (we still moan about it though) but because Glasgow is actually a relatively spread out city, without a good transport system you'd be hosed. Can pretty much get anywhere in Glasgow within 15 minutes via either bus, train or subway Cons Religion: Glasgow is historically divided religiously and the two biggest football teams in the country don't help the problems. Rangers are historically the Protestant club and Celtic the catholics. We've moved forward loads in the last ten years compared to how it used to be. But if you're not streetwise, you can get yourself into trouble by wearing the wrong colours in the wrong place. Violence: Again, certain parts of the city require a stab vest to walk through past a certain time. Transport: As above, we like to moan about it just for the sake of it. Like try getting on a bus during the day going through The Gorbals, it'll open your eyes to plenty Hills Have Eyes types.
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Oct 8, 2017 14:56
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empty whippet box posted:I live in Hattiesburg, MS. Literally everywhere in the country is better than here except maybe parts of west virginia Disagree. I aim to retire back to Hattiesburg one day.
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Oct 9, 2017 21:08
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zfleeman posted:Oh, and SA was headquartered there for a few years. That blew my loving mind when I was visiting from college once, and I saw a blue hand grenade sign above a dinky office office structure. Every church lady was trying to get them kicked out of town (idk how that works) by telling everybody it's a forum for porn. lol I knew that SA was based in a Kansas City suburb but I had no idea there was a local church lady campaign to run them out, did they put up flyers or anything?
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Oct 9, 2017 22:23
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I currently live in Redmond Oregon which is a city about ~10-15 miles north of Bend Oregon , but I can speak in relativity about most of central Oregon and the pro's/cons. Redmond/Bend is a semi small community that has grown exponentially in the past few decades from many out of staters coming here for the outdoor things to do, atmosphere and beer culture. The good Amazing place to do outdoor stuff -The good things about central Oregon is there is never a lack of things to do throughout the year. The summer's are beautiful, dry and warm which allows for amazing hiking and biking on our seemingly endless miles of singletrack and trails that are super easily accessible. If you want to get out of town to some more remote area's to hike and bike you're close to Smith Rock State park, a few hours away from Crater lake and the Deschutes National forest which of course is filled with tons of hiking and mountain biking trails. -Cycling here is pretty big, lots of open roads and hills to climb around, a decent amount of competitive cycling events such as weekday criteriums, tuesday night time trials, thursday cyclocross races in the fall and groomed fat bike trails to bike in the winter. -Smith Rock State Park has some phenomenal rock climbing in the area. I don't rock climb but my friends who do say it's very, very good... -Winter sports include multiple area's to ski at Mt. Bachelor, an hour and some change away from Mt Hood, multiple groomed nordic skiing trails, snow shoeing, backcountry skiing.. I would say most cars you pass on the road will have ski racks on the car in the winter, bike racks on during the summer... The beer is really, really good You have Deschutes brewery, Worthy Brewing Company, Crux Brewing Company, 10 barrel brewing co, Boneyard Brewing Co, Silver Moon Brewing Co, Immersion... There's a lot.. On top of that, there's a plethora of breweries/brew pubs that don't distribute like they do, but have a fantastic selection of beer. Moving here from Southern NM has added 10 lbs to my waistline and I consider myself to be a pretty active cyclist... So it's either a blessing or a curse depending on your love for beer. Also: Distilleries are starting to become more of a thing around here, so finding local spirits is also common place these days The town is pretty easy to navigate through The people who grew up in Bend/Redmond aren't a fan of the influx of people because of "traffic woes." However, the traffic really isn't all that bad in comparison to a big city. Rush hour traffic will definitely cause a bit of slow down but I have yet to see gridlocked or standstill traffic unless a vehicle accident occurred and our big 6 lane highway has been reduced to 4/3/2 lanes... It happens from time to time, and in comparison to other cities of similar population size it's noticeable but nothing I'd consider to be a huge issue. All in all, the city has done a decent job at keeping traffic flowing and I think continued planning as the city expands will keep traffic from turning into a nightmare... The deschutes river runs straight through the city, and you can float/paddle/swim in it Pretty much as stated, you can hang out on the river and float through town. It's pretty neat The food is really good You can find near whatever type of food you're looking for in Bend/Redmond. Some of it is upscale and delicious or you can hit up the food trucks at Wild Ride and get some great taco's or gyro's. Also, there usually parked near outdoor breweries so you can drink while you eat good food. I don't think Bend Oregon will ever be a food paradise but you won't go home unsatisfied with wherever you decided to eat. The weather is awesome Sunshine throughout the summer, the winter's are usually not brutal and you'll experience a few snowstorms throughout the 6 months of "winter." Although last year saw record snow falls in the city and it kinda sucked... So mixed bag depending on what your preference for seasons are. We get all 4 of them here, with cold weather being the dominant type. The bad Everyone is loving moving here As mentioned before, the city is crowded, and the city just recently allowed for zoning of houses to expand, which is going to bring in an estimated 30,000 people to this city of ~90k people. With that, housing is expensive in terms of cost of living... Kinda. The median price range for a house is around 350k, but you're looking at a 1,350 square ft house that was built pretty cheap on a small plot of land.. Small enough that you don't have a backyard and if you open a window on the side of your house you may end up being able to touch the neighbors house if you reached your hand out. Land in Bend/Redmond is very, very expensive... Finding a house on a nice half acre will run you around 500K+, and you may end up with a manufactured home sitting on it... I know that it's nowhere near as expensive as one would find in Portland/Seattle but the job market isn't terribly ideal unless you are part of the tech/medical industry and have some decent specialized education. It seems like every job that you apply for you'll have 5-6 people applying for the same one, and this goes with entry level jobs all the way up to the more skilled jobs.. It's definitely a renters market, and you're looking at $1,200 for a 2 bed 2 bath apartment.. Houses go for $1700+, pets usually not allowed and most property managers require a security deposit equal to one months rent. Also: if you have any blemishes on your renting record, good loving luck. I found my house that I'm renting on Craigslist for $1500 a month and I e-mailed the guy literally an hour after it was posted with a completed resume, I.D and check to run my credit report. I was number THREE on the list. You have to be aggressive as a mother fucker to find a place to live, and prepare your rectum for the pounding it'll take to jump through the hoops to secure a place to live. It's crowded.. even worse in the summer Tourism is huge here, the summers get a HUGE influx of people and your local hiking/biking trails are socked down with tourists from all parts of the country. If you want to beat the crowd you gotta get your fun in early in the morning. Your favorite bar will be full of drunk tourists by noon and wont let up until they close. The best time in the town is definitely the spring and the fall/early parts of summer, where the volume of people hasn't increased and you can generally enjoy everything you want to do in peace. The job market kinda sucks There's a small but up and coming tech industry that's coming here which is bringing some decent-ish jobs, but it's not going to provide jobs for many.. The biggest employers around here are the city/county, St. Charles health system, the school district and tourism jobs. If you have a specialized degree you could possibly find a job if your niche/degree is here but finding work isn't the easiest, at least one that would sustain someone to be able to proliferate around here. I work as a registered Nurse for the St. Charles system and while I make a decent wage, it would be a bit difficult to afford a 400k house on my salary in bend, thus I am somewhat relegated to living in Redmond to afford a house and live the non lavish/cycling lifestyle that I enjoy. YMMV depending on how you like to live. There's a significant difference in political views between bend/redmond and inside of the cities Driving to/from bend and you'll see trump signs, confederate flags and people driving trucks with U.S flags waving from the back. At the same time, there's a bunch of people who have bernie sanders stickers, Obama stickers and live the "progressive left" lifestyle. It's not bad, and I kinda enjoy having a mixing pot of different political views personally, but i suppose for some people that's a bad thing. Some people are dicks There's definitely an ego that comes with being from bend I think. Maybe it's because I moved from the Midwest/the southwest where usually people err'd on the side of being friendly to strangers but there's a lot of people here who are generally just lovely people.. Some people drive like idiots, and the whole "friendly oregon" driving has definitely lots its meaning apparently. All in all though, it's kind of a mix bag.. You have a lot of really friendly people who will strike up a conversation with you at the brewery and they're genuinely good people.. And then you have assholes who get pissed when their beer has "too much foam" on it... I know there there's a huge stereotype against people from California that moved to central Oregon for being complete assholes, and the unfortunate thing i've noticed is that they usually are.. Most of the people who get irate over small things like what i've mentioned above get huffy and storm out to their car sporting California plates. While I know it's not the standard for all Californians they seem to be the one's that stick out the most... Overall it's a pretty great place to live. You get to do a lot and have a lot at your disposal when it comes to being outdoors and other things that young professionals do. If you're looking for that "small town" feel it's probably not here, there's definitely more hustle and bustle/things going on than you'd find in a town of similar size, but you get a lot of nice perks of the area that you find in big cities without the big city headaches. Nice and hot piss fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Oct 10, 2017 |
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Oct 10, 2017 00:41
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big trivia FAIL posted:Disagree. I aim to retire back to Hattiesburg one day. If you're into boring college towns with nothing to do except drive to other places then this is the place for you!
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Oct 10, 2017 04:05
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N. Senada posted:I had a Bi-friend of mine tell me they were moving to Kentucky and I asked them why they would do that. She was going to Louisville which apparently has a decent LGBTQ scene but I think I convinced there were much better ones in many other places. We were one of the first cities in the south to pass a non-discrimination ordinance in '99, have more gay people per-capita than LA or NY (although less in raw numbers obviously), have an openly trans-gendered police officer, offered domestic partnership benefits to gay city employees four years before marriage equality was legal in Kentucky and we received a perfect score from the Human Rights Campaign for municipal laws recently, so your friend's not wrong. Louisville's pretty great, there's a lot of historic architecture, good restaurants, its cheap, and its big enough that we have a lot of big city amenities but small enough I'll run into people I know on the street all the time. Bad parts: Louisville's pretty insular: when you meet someone new you ask them what high school they went to, the roads are filled with potholes because all of our tax money goes to propping up dying coal towns that thank us by giving Governor Matt Bevin, and people like your friend who know about Louisville's counter-culture are moving here and raising prices and rents for locals. It's not that bad yet but we are in the beginning stages of Nashville-ization.
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Oct 10, 2017 19:32
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Earwicker posted:lol I knew that SA was based in a Kansas City suburb but I had no idea there was a local church lady campaign to run them out, did they put up flyers or anything? I emailed Lowtax after I saw the sign, and he just forwarded me an email that was being passed around about how horrible SA is. All generated by my former church, which makes it much more funny. He also asked if I wanted to participate in a video, which I declined because I also didn't really know what SA was at the time... ...but I made it up later by visiting during one of the meet and greets in which he made me read Dontrel on stream. 
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Oct 11, 2017 00:53
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Vanagoon posted:I live in Memphis, TN and no, it's not worth a drat This is all accurate as gently caress but you left out the best part. For decades we've had a big shiny pyramid on the Mississippi River. Until recently we used it as a sports arena. I say "until recently" because a few years ago the city sold the pyramid to Bass Pro Shops, so now there's a GIGANTIC Bass Pro logo on the Pyramid greeting people as they cross over from Arkansas, as if to say "you never actually left Arkansas"
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Oct 11, 2017 21:09
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disjoe posted:This is all accurate as gently caress but you left out the best part. My father used to call it "The big tin shed down by the river". The people of Memphis did what zero-class losers do and turned it into this monstrosity: 
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Oct 12, 2017 06:11
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Houston, TX (born and raised, 1988- present) Pros - Cost of living/housing/rent: although the cost of living has increased over the past decade, this is still a pretty cheap place to live. - There is something for everyone here, even if you might have to hunt to find it. People who complain about Houston being boring are often people who don't leave midtown/the suburbs and who don't look for the events put together by the small businesses and local community. Using Google, Facebook and Meetup can find all kinds of weird little niche stores and hobbyists. That said, this is definitely a place where you have to make time to meet people and look for fun if you don't already know people in the area. - This is a weird one, but people seem aware of sharing public spaces with others here in a way that I don't sometimes see in other metropolitan areas--like there's an understanding about waiting in an organized line (except maybe on huge things that inspire inexplicable chaos like black friday in the suburbs), not blocking doorways or entryways for other people if you can stand somewhere that's out of other people's way, etc. - Tons of great, relatively cheap restaurants. - Job stability--I can't confirm this because I've never lived anywhere else, but I'm told that it's easier to find jobs in Houston than other cities because the medical center might still hire even when the o&g industry is suffering. This is the main thing that makes me afraid to leave Houston. Cons - The summer humidity is completely brutal. - Besides Galveston and some small hikes in parks, there isn't much in the way of mountains or geologic oddities within an hour's drive of city limits. - Limited public transportation. There are good commuter routes between the central areas and the suburbs, but the system is much more limited outside of downtown or if you don't want to go to downtown. I live within city limits but 12 miles away from my office in the Galleria, which is still considered central houston even though it's about 10 miles from downtown. I've used the bus system to commute but I have to wake up at 5am because our station is a 20-minute bike ride from my house and there's limited parking for my car if I arrive later than 5:30am. I usually get to my job by 8:30am if I take the 5:30am bus, and I'll be home by 7pm if I leave around 4pm. I've fallen back into driving because you have to wake up super early to take a 75-120-minute set of connecting bus routes when you could easily drive to the same location within 30 minutes since you've woken up before rush hour anyway. Despite everyone hating commuting, our bus system is still poorly developed and some people will drive 90-120 minutes from the central city to the suburbs because so many people are weirdly convinced that it's dangerous to ride the bus. - Horrible central congestion from 6am-10am and 3:30pm-8pm. And the traffic has only gotten worse after Harvey. I don't think I like it here very much, even though there's so many fun things to do.
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Oct 13, 2017 17:16
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Vanagoon posted:My father used to call it "The big tin shed down by the river". This is so 'MERICA it transcends it's trashiness in to amazing. I can't picture what the Florida equivalent would be, but I'm positive there are more than one.
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Oct 15, 2017 11:18
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I grew up in Fresno, CA Pros: -Cheap -Good Mexican and Vietnamese food options -The county fair is fun, I have good memories of the ag exhibits -uhhhh it's close enough to Yosemite that our entire public front is about how close we are to Yosemite Cons: -hot -hot -hot -pollution -there's nothing to do in this godforsaken city. People still talk about the time the Plain White Tees had a free concert in the Walmart parking lot. I hope you think a swanky night out is eating at a chain restaurant slightly better than Applebees and then wandering around Best Buy because that's about what this shithole of a backwards nowheresville has to offer. God bless the people who live in Fresno, particularly on the south side, but everything north of Shaw and west of Blackstone is a suburban hellscape where you go to the strip mall and eat microwaved jalapeno poppers until your useless life comes to a pitiable end. I now live in Seattle, WA Pros: -The best weather on the entire planet. It's amazingly temperate and we get just enough of each season to not get really sick of it (though the heat waves bite because we were inconveniently built without air conditioning). You kinda do have to love cloudy days, though. -Lots of stuff to do. We're a smallish city so there are a lot of really cute neighborhoods with awesome mom 'n' pop stores, but we're big enough to have all the good "city" things (museum, film festival, opera). There's always something happening and it rarely feels like the product of a conglomerate putting on a cultural activity face - lots of labors of love. -Really nice geography, both in the city and around the city. We're a fjord city, which I love, lots of hills and greenery and deep bodies of water, and not only are we surrounded by forests, mountains, and rolling grasslands, we have Mount Rainier, which isn't the biggest mountain but it does have an awesome amount of prominence and I love the slight shock of seeing it on a clear day. The way it catches sunsets is beautiful. -Liberal as heck. -Amazing food scene. We have our own Asian district and there's loads and loads of cuisines around town, even some decent Mexican places. -Very good public transit. People complain about it all the time, but most problems we actually have are mostly due to how the city is designed. Sure, we voted down a light-rail system in the 70s (OOPS) but in the few years I've been here the amount of improvement to the actual bus system (not to mention development of a new light rail system) has been absolutely astonishing. It can be weirdly difficult to move laterally across town, and due to our geography there are some dead zones, but honestly, it's mostly great. -Honestly I'm probably missing stuff. I really like living here. Mostly. Cons: -The techies are taking over. This is good in some ways, it's always nice to have money moving around, but it also means massive gentrification and loss of identity. Huge swathes of the city have been torn down and replaced with the Disney version of themselves - if you ever walk into a Starbucks and feel tired by how arid, generic, and mockingly faux-industrial it is, thank Seattle, because that's our entire city. We're not as bad as San Francisco, which is an unlivable tech gulag now, but it's pretty shocking in some respects. -Rents and cost of living are both rising rapidly. Our minimum wage is also going up, which is good, but there's a lot of conflict over how to approach housing people who don't make gobs of money. The answer is mostly to push them out of the city, thanks to a lot of NIMBY-ism about putting up apartment buildings. -Our weird geography can make it hard to get around the city. On the one hand, I love all the little communities spread around that feel like cozy mountain towns, like Wallingford, but mixture of sprawl, tiny roads, and weird, hinky connections means that not only is the amount of congestion insane, but it's hard to just walk around sometimes, unless you really like climbing giant hills or wandering through endless suburbs. I was always vaguely aware of this but visiting Toronto really demonstrated what a walkable city means (also it clowns all over our transit). The worst aspect of the gentrification is the replacement of real urban density with bigger, spendier, and more lifeless corporate shops and restaurants. -People in Seattle are awkward and passive-aggressive. I've never encountered so much quiet hostility, from nervously pushy people at the supermarket to the way everyone turns into a clammy pod alien on the bus and will just stare at you as you have to shove past them to get to the back doors. -We have a terrible homeless problem, and this isn't a criticism of the homeless but of the city's incredibly lovely and ineffective response to it. We could do something about it, but we don't.
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Oct 15, 2017 17:55
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anyone here want to do Marseille?
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Oct 15, 2017 18:24
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I live in Long Island City, NY. It's the nearest neighborhood in Queens to Manhattan going by subway travel time. Pros:
Cons:
On balance I think this is a nice place, and the trend is definitely improving, but that probably means it'll get more expensive too. Maybe it's time to look further out in Queens. ultrafilter fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Oct 15, 2017 |
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Oct 15, 2017 18:44
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freebooter posted:Mediterranean climate, so 300 days of sunshine a year, 40 degrees in summer and 20 degrees in winter, and believe me that endless weeks in the high 30s without a cloud in sight can be just a bleak and depressing as grey, drizzly skies. I didn't mention this in my Fresno post but yes, this, constant blazing sun will crush you into a miserable heap of emotional dead-ends. Everyone goes "ah, but so much sun!" and it's like yeah, great, sun forever, just a hot orb burning down from a disgusting white sky. Even in winter it's incessantly sunny - bleak, dry, cold, blue sunshine.
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Oct 15, 2017 21:07
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I didn't mention this in my Fresno post but yes, this, constant blazing sun will crush you into a miserable heap of emotional dead-ends. Everyone goes "ah, but so much sun!" and it's like yeah, great, sun forever, just a hot orb burning down from a disgusting white sky. Even in winter it's incessantly sunny - bleak, dry, cold, blue sunshine. Returning to Fresno from Humboldt, adjusting to CONSTANT SUN and the AIR SUCKING MOISTURE FROM YOUR BODY was huge. I have adjusted, but it was a harsh few months.
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Oct 16, 2017 04:08
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I've lived in Tulsa, OK my whole life. You know, Tulsa used to be pretty nice, with a kind of small-friendly-town vibe to it, but then the '90s happened and it's been downhill ever since. Pros:
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Oct 21, 2017 22:27
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Mirage posted:I've lived in Tulsa, OK my whole life. Lived in Tulsa for a bit myself. I can confirm it's a surprisingly decent place to be. I was pretty surprised I enjoyed it there. Way better than the other mid-west places I had lived.
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Oct 22, 2017 02:47
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Funny, I was browsing this thread wondering if I should post. I lived the first 12 years of my life in Tulsa and then moved to South America, to the pleasant little country called Uruguay! Where I am now going to university. Uruguay is pretty rad. This Quora answer covers a lot of good statistics: corruption is low, we have the most extensive middle class in all of Latin America, the country is growing, a lot of its energy comes from renewable sources... Beyond that, it was the first country in South America to legalize same-sex marriage, the first country in the world to fully legalize the consumption of cannabis (I'm a registered grower and everything), to have an openly transgendered senator, etc. The public education varies from great to decent at primary and secondary levels and the country's public university is considered more prestigious than many of its private institutions. Healthcare is effective and extremely affordable. (a lot of these areas, education and health etc, are socialized). As a young twenty-something from the States, it's great looking at the next 5-6 years of studying I have ahead of me and knowing that I will come out of it all completely debt free. Politically, even the most right wing party I would call pretty mild compared to the US. There are basically *no* crazy nutjobs or extremists here that I've come across: you're a lot more likely to find leftists leaning hard towards communism etc. My own adolescence was spent surrounded by these types and have definitely influenced my own politics and critical thinking about the world... I consider that a positive thing, but take from it what you will. I lived most of the time in a resort town called Piriapolis about an hour away from the country's capital, Montevideo. Now I've moved to the city because it's way too inconvenient to commute (I tried that for a year), even though public transport inside the city and to various other parts of the country is very advanced and accessible. People in Latin America are generally quite friendly. You definitely don't walk down a street in silence here: lots of people will say hello or good day if you just make eye contact even if they don't know you at all. People are for the most part very polite. Uruguayans and Argentinians (who together make up the 'rioplatense,' River Plate, cultural groups) have reputations for being colder and more European than other Latin American countries, but I'd wager they come across as very warm and friendly to anyone coming from a northern hemisphere first world country. It isn't perfect, of course. You lose out on a lot of first world comforts, though every year it seems like more are arriving. Technology is prohibitively expensive, quality clothes and other stuff like that too. Housing isn't that ridiculous compared to places I've seen listed in this thread, but the average household income is also far more humble, so it does seem quite expensive. There isn't much to do out where I used to live, but I've always kind of been a goon and much preferred chilling with my friends and smoking weed as a teenager than going out to the clubs that all play the same terrible music (Youtube "Damas Gratis" to get an idea if you want it). The beaches are amazing, the hills offer a lot to do for outdoorsy types, and if you need a change of space you can catch a bus to Montevideo for about 7 bucks on a comfy, air-conditioned bus. Uruguayans also have a reputation for never being content and always nitpicking the flaws in everything - the world's going to poo poo, you can't walk around without getting robbed, the health system is too slow, etc... But for the most part it's safe to say that, even though no system is perfect, they exaggerate a lot of negative aspects and make them seem bigger than they really are. Also, all of this is along the coast, which is where I've always lived. farther inland you get more rural areas, gradually increasing poverty and all that entails. Most young people move to the city to study if their lives given them the possibility. There are a lot of Americans and other English-speaking foreigners now, enough that my parents have kind of stagnated into an expat social circle and never really learned Spanish. I don't know if this happens elsewhere, but I also find that everyone is shocked when I say I have no real desire to go back to the States. So much American culture permeates the Internet and television etc that a lot of people really think it's a glorious land of fantastic job opportunities, cushy paychecks, and wonderful commodities that make life more meaningful. Also, if it isn't Miami, Los Angeles or New York City, they only have a vague idea of where it is, what it could be like, and generally populate it in their imaginations with redneck hick Trump supporters. Unless it's Texas, in which they do the same thing but they're also all fully armed and wearing KKK memorabilia.
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Oct 23, 2017 16:33
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freebooter posted:I grew up in Perth in Western Australia which is sort of like the nation's ultimate suburb: safe, pleasant, isolated and dull. It's probably a great place to raise kids but if you're a young person yourself it can feel stagnant. That was when I was a kid though, maybe these days everyone is hooked into the internet 24/7 so it doesn't really matter where you are. Mediterranean climate, so 300 days of sunshine a year, 40 degrees in summer and 20 degrees in winter, and believe me that endless weeks in the high 30s without a cloud in sight can be just a bleak and depressing as grey, drizzly skies. An exceptionally car-dependent city, quite conservative and parochial, the world's most beautiful beaches, reasonable employment opportunities but not a place anyone goes to chase a dream. Full of British retirees and white South African migrants so it has a bit of a racist vibe. Oh, and this never seems to matter to anybody else, but the city really only grew after WWII and also demolished a lot of heritage architecture so much of it can have a Ballardian, soulless modernist vibe, to my eye anyway. I grew up and still live in Sydney - namely the inner western suburbs. Pros: The harbour is truly gorgeous, commuting across the Harbour Bridge never gets old. The city still has plenty of older architectural styles on display, particularly in heritage areas and the suburbs - colonial, Victorian, Federation, art deco. There are lots of museums, parks, two botanic gardens, theatres, the Opera House. Melbourne probably has us beat on festivals and the like, but there's usually something interesting going on. At least in the city and inner suburbs, there's a great cafe and restaurant culture - awesome coffee and food to be had. If you go a bit further out you find immigrant communities with really great food as well - Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Lebanese, Greek, all within 10 minutes of where I live. There are lots of small bars starting to pop up outside of the city centre. There are plenty of jobs in a variety of industries. There are three major universities and a few smaller ones. The winters are mild - cool enough to be cozy, rarely uncomfortable. The beaches are pretty good, though there are spectacular ones within a few hour's drive north and south. There are also two national parks and the Blue Mountains nearby. Cons: Houses anywhere remotely near the city are very expensive, bordering on unrealistic for most young people. Rent is also pretty high relative to income. Bars and restaurants can also be a bit pricey. Public transport isn't great if you live away from a train line, although I think the rail network is generally pretty good - it's nothing like Melbourne's trams though. The traffic is pretty bad. Summers can be disgustingly hot and humid. The state government seems intent on squashing nightlife. Development is rampant - not that I'm against it altogether, but a lot of districts are transforming into forests of high density housing with no improvements to transport or amenities. For all that, I think it's a pretty good city.
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Oct 26, 2017 01:52
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Seattle, WA  I guess this is what growing up in Fresno will do to a person...
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Oct 27, 2017 22:21
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Morbus posted:
No, honestly, I love our weather. It's never too cold or too hot for too long, we have nice long springs and autumns, it snows just enough to be novel and fun and a little annoying without becoming a backbreaking miserable slog, and it rains a lot which makes the city cozy in the winter and brilliantly leafy and green in the summer. You have to really like clouds, though.
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Oct 28, 2017 07:46
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Magic Hate Ball posted:No, honestly, I love our weather. It's never too cold or too hot for too long, we have nice long springs and autumns, it snows just enough to be novel and fun and a little annoying without becoming a backbreaking miserable slog, and it rains a lot which makes the city cozy in the winter and brilliantly leafy and green in the summer. You have to really like clouds, though. Yeah I lived there for 2 years and the overcast-ness got pretty old, though I admit the summers we're glorious. Would return for the right job opportunity. Live in the DFW metro area now and it's very... meh (and the summers are the opposite of glorious). Sits on Pilster fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 20:30
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I live in Leeuwarden, a city in the north of the Netherlands. I grew up in a small town about 40km away speaking a minority language (Frisian) which is the only other official language, besides Dutch, of the Netherlands. Most of my classmates from elementary school either moved all over the Netherlands to go to college/university or stayed and started families young. Where I live now is pretty chill. The city looks nice and you have the benefits of city life with a lot of restaurants to choose from, but although there are a lot of bars, the night life is pretty one-sided and if you don't like clubbing you don't have many options. I live in a pretty decent apartment for dirt cheap so I'll definitely stay here as long as I'm in university (I'm in my second year), but I would rather move to a place like Groningen/Utrecht/Amsterdam because those cities are a lot more exciting and offer a lot more. It's definitely a nice place to visit though.
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Nov 7, 2017 12:31
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I Am Crake posted:I live in Leeuwarden, a city in the north of the Netherlands. Do you still have the opportunity to speak Frisian in Leeuwarden or is it mostly relegated to speaking with family and friends at home? What does generally happen to Frisian-speakers once they move out of Frisia, do they switch to full-on Dutch instead or is there a Frisian-speaking community in, say, Amsterdam?
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Nov 10, 2017 11:41
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Magic Hate Ball posted:No, honestly, I love our weather. It's never too cold or too hot for too long, we have nice long springs and autumns, it snows just enough to be novel and fun and a little annoying without becoming a backbreaking miserable slog, and it rains a lot which makes the city cozy in the winter and brilliantly leafy and green in the summer. You have to really like clouds, though. Yeah I have to agree. I'm from Arizona and it's a noce break from having almost the same weather year-round. Plus I get to experience snow in a fun and non-threatening way.
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Nov 17, 2017 03:19
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