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AtticaFlinch

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Everything posted by AtticaFlinch

  1. AtticaFlinch
    It's hot too. But so what. That's a common template and a fairly generic complaint. The larger point behind that exercise is to get their reason, and it's almost always just some generic complaint that can be levelled on most cities in America. Then, once they've shown a complete lack of originality, asking if they've even been in Houston will dispell any concerns you may have whether or not the person is full of crap - hence my phrase banal ignorance.
  2. AtticaFlinch
    Don't take it from me that most people who denigrate Houston's beauty are ignorant. Try this little trick next time you feel a need to defend Houston to some troglodyte: Simply ask "why?". Nine times out of ten, that person will respond with something inane like "it's the armpit of Texas" or "it's sprawly" or "it's hot". Then ask them if they've been to Houston. Most of them will admit to never having even been here, and those who have are familiar either only with one far-flung 'burb or I-45 between IAH and Downtown. Seriously, try it if you don't believe me. It's uncanny how many people are so willing to make such ignorant claims, but they do. Oh, they do.
  3. AtticaFlinch
    Anxious as in the original sense of the word, meaning "full of anxiety", and yes, your posts ooze angst as well. But hey man, don't let my interpretation get you down any further. They're just non-verbal words. That's only like ten percent of communication. You could very well be a bright ray of sunshine in person and your anxiety could just be a false impression because either you failed to express yourself adequately or I failed to comprehend adequately. Who knows. Who cares. Yes, for attention. Yay for me, it worked. It drew attention to your misery. By the way, have you been outside today? According to weather.com, there are 59 bright, cloudless reasons to hate... er... dislike Houston so much. Enjoy!.. Or don't. It's your choice. And about the rail...
  4. AtticaFlinch
    So then I'm to take it you dislike the city of Houston because of the aesthetics or functionality of our nascent rail system? Because that's what this thread is about. This isn't "N Judah's Mopey 'I Hate Houston'" thread. Unless a mod renamed it, but I'm unaware of that.
  5. AtticaFlinch
    Or Indiana. What's up with those guys?
  6. AtticaFlinch
    No, not much. I'm sure I do a little. I'm sure we all do, but I'm not projecting my angst (or lack of it) into your general distemperment. Try eating icecream or doing something else that makes you happy every once in a while. Then you're bound to be a whole hell of a lot happier, and you may realize the reason you hate Houston so much has less to do with place and more to do with your anxiety. Or something. Of course you don't, because you're a nihilist. Oh, awesome. Congratulations. You can declare yourself winner all day, but you're still wrong. The statement is still ignorant. However, based on your simplistic declaration, perhaps we can now move beyond this little tangent.
  7. AtticaFlinch
    Did I? Or did I write exactly the same thing that you happened to agree with when samagon wrote it later? The guy wrote his "opinion" as a comparison, one which he didn't or couldn't substantiate yet stated it as an absolute. I guarantee that what you're referring to as an "opinion" is baseless and founded exclusively on things he'd heard in the past from people he knew, and not based on experience. Therefore, it's an ignorant statement. You're wrong this time, kylejack. Just let it go. Or, if anything, stop misrepresenting my "opinion".
  8. AtticaFlinch
    Trolling with poetry? If it was trolling, there'd be nothing pure about that. N Judah, it seems you never fail to miss an opportunity to write something angsty and bitter, and it doesn't appear to matter much the topic. The contradiction here, which I'm surprised I have to explain, is that you call on the TIRZ to do more one moment and then later complain there's nothing they can do. But hey, I thought I was providing you with an out by quoting Walt Whitman. I understand angst well as I was a teenager throughout most of the 90s, so I figured I'd provide you with the same built-in contradiction defense I'd been using since I first discovered flannel shirts aren't very comfortable during the summer in Houston.
  9. AtticaFlinch
    CVS is passing out half-off coupons for Aquanet in support of Rick Perry. ...or some other stupid nawn sekwitter that makes no sense and isn't even remotely relevant or true.
  10. AtticaFlinch
    Deleted non-G posts be damned. I think I've found a solution that would satisfy both your evil secret lair needs and citykid's signage-as-character needs:
  11. AtticaFlinch
    One of my favorite quotes is by Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. It's my go-to defense whenever I say something so blatantly at odds with something I've said before. N Judah, every time I read something you write, I'm reminded of Flea's character on The Big Lebowski: "I am a nihilist! I am a nihilist!" I don't know why...
  12. AtticaFlinch
    I had a professor in grad school who used it at least once a week during lectures. He was in love with the concept. Had he not already been married, I don't think it would have been too far-fetched to have expected him to take the concept on a nice romantic dinner and gotten down on one knee. I, on the other hand, used to sit back in class and wonder, "Who is this Occam, and how does his shaving implement prove anything?"
  13. AtticaFlinch
    An illustration to add to your explanation:
  14. AtticaFlinch
    It won't spill into the park. That area won't ever be anything but a park. If anything, it will expand, and already is expanding, south, east and west, and you may see even more development run-off trickle north of the park into the neighborhood Google Maps calls Binz.
  15. AtticaFlinch
    I'm waiting with bated breath for htownproud to define true rail.
  16. AtticaFlinch
    Eh, whatever. Not all opinions are valid or right merely because we can affix the "opinion" appellation to it. It was an ignorant statement, I stick by that, and especially so in light of the comparison drawn. And for all of you running off on the natural beauty tangent, there's a reason why I excluded mountains and seascapes from any comparisons. Those are vistas that naturally appeal to the human eye. People don't think Seattle is prettier than Houston because of the city itself. The waterfront and the surrounding mountains distinguish it from Houston pretty well, but once you look past that, you see just another American city full of strip malls, dirty freeways and slums - the very crap the whiners so like to use as examples of Houston's perceived ugliness. That said, if you don't like it, do something about it. I agree we should always strive for progress, but rather than make mountains out of molehills, why don't you make real mountains (or whatever you find beautiful)?
  17. AtticaFlinch
    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all? Yes and no. Aesthethic subjectivism relies fully on the art or the object of scrutiny to elicit some sort of emotional response, any response. I'd take you all the way down this path of mental self-gratification, but rather than waste a ton of time, I'll stick with the basics: 1) It elicits an emotional response. 2) It therefore has merit. 3) It is beautiful. 4) It is simultaneously ugly. In a true subjective sense, all things are ugly and all things are beautiful so long as somewhere, somehow it elicits some emotional response from someone. But, we all know the world a little less subjectively than that. I'm confident the poster who wrote the ignorant comment meant his words in absolute terms (ie. A is ugly and B is pretty). Subjectivism is the opposite of this linear thought process. And therefore, to declare Houston as lacking in beauty in comparison to other cities is about as ignorant a statement as can be made. You can disagree with me, but you'd be wrong.
  18. AtticaFlinch
    I don't disagree, however I get annoyed with statements like this: This type of statement is a clear baseless assumption and demonstrates a lack of necessary relative experience. I guarantee anyone who'd write this has traveled very little outside Houston, and the travel experiences they've had were confined to small segments of wherever it was they went. Houston's pretty far outweighs Houston's ugly, especially "in comparison to many other cities". Am I the only one who gets so annoyed with such banal ignorance?
  19. AtticaFlinch
    LA, Dallas and Atlanta all suffer from the same affliction. Parts are pretty and other parts aren't. That's my point. So, so what? Even Austin, Denver and San Antonio have ugly sections. Ugly isn't unique to Houston. Nor is bitching about where the grass is greener. It seems to me the people who complain most about the city's appearance are those who only know the 'burbs and the freeways. In other words, the people who complain aren't qualified to give an informed pronouncement. They base all their opinions on hearsay and I-45, not experience.
  20. AtticaFlinch
    Most retail isn't permanent either. Why should we put off something good for the community, the city at large, because a company that won't be around in a decade anyhow is against it? What's the average lifespan of a company these days? Google tells me thirteen years. Retail's probably less and restaurants and bars are even less than that. Again, I don't mean to sound callous about the plight of these business owners. If such a solution existed that wouldn't burden the business owners needlessly but still didn't impede progress, I'd support that. But it doesn't exist. Besides all that, it's difficult for me to get too worked up about the plight of Jamba Juice or Starbucks. If you're worried about the already shrinking handful of independent mom and pop shops lining Post Oak, all I can suggest is that you should make it a point to continue shopping there regardless of how inconveniencing the construction is for you to do so. If your favorite business fails, your own culpability is just as great if not greater than the rail, though I do recognize it's easier to blame something more tangible than your own laziness.
  21. AtticaFlinch
    The movie Crazy Heart had a substantial portion of its running time set in "Houston". I use the quotations because excepting the establishing shot of the main character's Suburban driving down Memorial with a shot of the skyline in the background, I don't think any of the rest of Houston was actually featured. I think the actual filming was done in Los Angeles.
  22. AtticaFlinch
    Had I been arguing blanketly in favor of rail, then sure, I could have done a lot better. I agree. But that's not what I was arguing. Perhaps I'm a failure at adequately drawing distinctions among subtleties, and if that's the case, whatever. Anyhow, my argument was against rail obstructionism using the my-business-is-gonna-get-hurt excuse. Simply put, if your business is hurt, but a more economically beneficial business takes root in its place, then that's better for the community at large. The choice is a no-brainer if it's between unskilled retail labor jobs or skilled construction and engineering jobs. Arguing against the rail because it may hurt your profit margins or make impotent your consumers is less a concern to me than ensuring greater economic success for everyone else.
  23. AtticaFlinch
    Well... unemployed skilled laborers will be put to work... which again, is more valuable to the overall health of the economy than a few unskilled laborers employed at poorly run, barely profitable retail establishments. I'm not trying to be intentionally callous about this, though I can't understand how obstructionism can be justified in this situation, and I'm unfortunately backed into the polar opposite line of reasoning. All or nothing, right? There's no reasonable middle-ground?
  24. AtticaFlinch
    Doubtless you're correct in that. We all see our own individual problems as being bigger than everyone else's problems. We lack empathy. It's part of why we suck. Not disregard his business, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea to have planned ahead either. Rail on Post Oak isn't an idea that erupted from a vacuum. Agreed. Nor is it reasonable to say that light rail is the cause of a businessman's woes. Frankly, if a business isn't in a position to slog through a few bad years anyhow, they're either new or badly mismanaged. If it's a new business complaining about the rail, well... they're stupid for placing their business along the rail path which has been planned for some number of years. If it's a badly mismanaged business, if the rail didn't kill them, then surely the crap economy would have.The fact of the matter is, none of these business owners actually know what's going to happen. Comparing the red line and this is like apples and oranges. That construction is nothing like this. It's a different grid system. These are different types of businesses. It's a whole different animal.
  25. AtticaFlinch
    Regardless. For every business owner who stands to suffer from this project, there are two who will prosper. Whose needs do you put above the other and why? New construction will employ more people and better drive the economy than a handful of retail establishments will.
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