NOT TO MENTION the fact that the prohibition against direct images in Islam was actually the reason for the development of the incredible advances in higher mathematics of the Islamic Golden Age because they were required to create these structures. The Islamic World basically took the ban on images as a “hold my beer” thing and created an entire artistic culture based on mathematics and architecture where art and science fed into and glorified each other, 700 years before the Italian Renaissance.
In conclusion
i will say that islamic art drove me nuts as a kid because i did not have the math knowledge or capability to create such geometric patterns. it may have been the art of my people but by gOD it was difficult and unnecessarily difficult. however my pride in islamic art is neverending. it was frowned upon to be vain in the house, so artists would deck out the places of worship - but places of worship couldn’t be too garishly decorated, or it might detract from worship! the compromise? calm blues and greens, intricate details hidden into the complex patterns. carefully mapped out and planned patterns that were beyond complex and straight into deliberately confusing and practically impossible to replicate. not only that, but verses from the Quran were hidden along the walls, asking god for blessings and care.
muslim art is stunning and i’ll fight the bitch that says otherwise.
Also something underappreciated about the Islamic art is that not only is it geometrically incredible, but the geometry and structure of it has a purpose. In the niches and ceilings, the cascading ornamentation is used for acoustic purposes. In many of the mosques, they are so well laid out and designed that a single person standing on a specific spot can speak/sing/pray and be heard in every single part of the building.
Also, while this is less important, some Muslim regions still do representational art. In every religion there are people who will interpret prohibition’s differently
Every time you see a train, imagine how much more your drive would suck if every one of those people riding in it were behind the wheel of yet another vehicle.
A specially-outfitted winter tourism train that travels across ~210km from Xi'an, Shaanxi to Qinling, Shaanxi, for the Chinese New Year holiday season.
The train has been refurnished to include cars with mahjong tables, KTV, massage chairs, a movie theater, and other leisure activities. There are 12 train cars in total, including a dining car and two activity cars, with a passenger capacity of around 1400.
The train began running at the end of December 2022, and is 118元/person (～17.39 USD).
Jersey City and Hoboken are what I like to call Schrödingers suburbs. Because they are towns that depend of people who want to live outside NYC and commute in daily, but they are far to dense and urban to be real suburbs.
Now this is not a complaint, they are really good dense human scaled cities which are incredibly Walkable, it’s just funny how they exists in a weird grey area of being not New York Proper due to being outside Manhattan and the western parts of Brooklyn and Queens such as Long Island City or Downtown Brooklyn and yet are considerably super urban and therefore aren’t really suburbs of New York
Hoboken is literally the 4th most densely populated city in the US, it is denser than NYC it self and if I showed you a satellite photo(picture below) of it, it looks like San Francisco and yet I am expected to call it just a suburb of New York
the population distribution on this planet is so wild. over a third of all humans alive today live in either China or India
when i read about geography i’m consumed by two questions - one is about the range of human experience, and so i poke around at the edges of small towns and rural expanses and island micronations. but the other question is about the modal human experience and that seems like it sits squarely in Asia
The dude who built my childhood home died there in the 90s and then his widow let my parents buy it cheap because she liked my mom and also wanted to get the hell out of there. She left most of her husband’s stuff in the house when she left and that was, I shit you not, roughly 200 hand carved decoy ducks, all of his decoy duck carving materials in his shop, several dozen books on antique duck decoys and around 50 high quality full color books on American made muskets and rifles of the 19th century. His son is apparently a renowned Star Wars prequel trilogy memorabilia collector. Really glad he’s carrying on his dad’s legacy of obsessively perusing his hobbies to the detriment of his marriage.
Actually, it kind of made us sad that his wife didn’t value things that seemed to mean so much to him. She abandoned his two elderly cats when she left too so we inherited them. We ended up displaying some of his best duck decoys in the basement but the majority are still sitting under our shed. You could feel his ghost so keenly in the house, I don’t mean that negatively, he just seemed like a very nice man who was meticulous in his interests and in the construction of the home. Everything reflected that. He also loved Colonial Williamsburg so my childhood home was built with unique Colonial Virginian design details. When I was about 9, my dad found some tapes in the attic, played them out of curiosity and they were footage of him playing with his kids in the snow back in the 70s. I remember that moment because suddenly the specter of the man who designed the house I loved and grew in had a face.
He put so much thought and love into the design of our house, planned to grow old there, raised his children with every advantage he could give them and died of a heart attack in his bathroom while in his early 50s, never got to see the fruits of his labor. But I think me growing in that house, the time my parents and I were happy, I think that honored him. A mean ghost is sad enough but the ghost of a good person is far sadder.
