Colby Brown @colby@transportation.social

Kane's most recent video series, "The Oldest View", is also a liminal horror masterpiece, but it does not take place in "The Backrooms". Rather, Kane chose the setting of the Valley View Mall (or rather, an immaculate digital reconstruction thereof), recently torn down in Dallas, Texas, and now inexplicably located a mile underground down a long, very spooky (also CGI) staircase. The monster? A digitally re-created puppet that inhabited the mall in its latter days before total destruction. (6/n)

Enter Kane Pixels (Parsons), whose take on the Backrooms reinvigorated the genre, ignoring some elements of the plotline and adding others, most notably a corporation called A-Sync who accidentally open a portal to The Backrooms and then make the unwise decision to keep that portal open in order to explore its development potential (entities be damned). In effect his story is about much bigger things: colonization, greed, hubris, willful blindness to the mysterious origins of the world around.

"No-clip" is a gamer term, but more specifically it originates from the classic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D (a close cousin of DOOM). This is micro-fiction written by and for a generation that leaves home far less than previous ones, that gathers on Discord rather than at a local bar or coffee shop. For them the experience of the IRL built environment can feel especially surreal, uncanny, and difficult to process. (5/n)

Imagine being a teenager and for some reason encountering that kind of space and wondering "what the heck was going on here? why was it built at all, and why like that?" This kind of built space feels at once familiar and yet totally out of place, because it is obselete and anachronistic. Hordes of office workers used to wander windowless corridors in downtown buildings; not so much anymore. That the abandoned emptiness of such a space might feel scary is unsurprising (see: "eyes on the street")

What intrigues many, myself included, about this creepypasta is that, ominous allusions to other hostile entities notwithstanding, the space *is* the monster here. And it's a peculiarly abandoned kind of space that we've all seen before, which is probably growing in abundance in our downtowns as the office/commercial real estate crisis worsens. (3/n)

It all started with the following text: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."

I think I've posted here before about the "Backrooms" online cultural phenomenon and how I think it ties into theories about the psychology of urban space. The teen prodigy of the #backrooms genre, Kane Parsons, posted a new video this week which tells a liminal horror story that stands apart from his backrooms canon and in so doing makes the connections to urban development even more clear.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wWNMsZ44ooc?si=9LIybMz40PLZ-n4H

Gonna try to unpack this in a little thread, bear with me!

(1/n)

MTA Privacy Issue Potentially Exposed Months Worth of Trip Histories to Stalkers

https://www.404media.co/mta-disables-another-privacy-invading-feature-after-404-media-investigation/

A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo's public transport system

https://minitokyo3d.com

BBC Gives Up On Threads (By Instagram), Sticks With Mastodon — Darnell (Seize The Day)

https://darnell.day/bbc-gives-up-on-threads-by-instagram-sticks-with-mastodon

I routinely get asked to consider crime data in land use models. Part of why I lean against doing that is because it's inherently difficult and nonlinear, even on longer time scales. Yes, it's something that firms and households look at in location decisions, but we don't have good models of how it changes over time in response to environmental factors and transportation policy. In the absence of those, we'd just be plugging in unreliable data from the base year and assuming it holds constant...

Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes – The Markup

https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes

There are ghosts lingering in any human settlement--whether you welcome them into your community's life and honor them determines whether your city* develops a soul or becomes a ghost town itself, haunted by failed ambitions.

*this is true of towns and smaller communities as well as cities--it applies at any scale of settlement TBH, even individual houses

The beauty in cities comes not only from visionary architecture and planning but from the many layers of a kind of palimpsest made from rebuilding and revision. This doesn't have to take centuries--even in a brand-new development it can be achieved by incorporating elements of the natural landscape that existed before humans moved in.

So many wealthy people these days want to build utopian cities of one sort or another from scratch. The green rhetoric behind these projects is commendable, but almost universally the proposals fail to grasp what makes a city livable: organic human community and character.

Not new, but this is a great critique of The Line project in Saudi Arabia: https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o?si=mfMd-U-CtV1RX3Oh