Note: Most of these articles have been moved to my Wordpress blog. (I also have to figure out to get the hidden text scripts at the end of the article to work on the blog, so I have left them here for now.
The transition of the urban scape to the JETSONS
NY-Springfield by local bus
LA Pacific Electric Subway
Alexanders hanging goods monorail system Forgotten Milepost: Clemente Travel Center Flowers brands; Shake Cakes, Drakes, UPC Codes link, etc. Ridgewood Rant Flowers brands; Shake Cakes, Drakes, UPC Codes link, etc. Ridgewood Rant
Willy B map (combination bus and Subways in "the Map" style)
7 segment display
Why do I care so much about this? What difference does old buildings make?:
This is a combination of introverted Thinking with its inflated tertiary defense, introverted Sensing. The internal Thinking focuses on technical details, and creates models and frameworks of how things are. So when young, it picked up the differences between New York City (which had the fire escapes, and often more ornate masonry and interiors) and Springfield, MA (which had the wooden porches serving as rear exits). I felt so homesick in this strange city that looked so different from home. About 13, I had a dream that I was up there, and encountered an apartment building that looked like one I had seen a block away from my other grandmother here in Brooklyn; one of those 1920's buildings with the sprawling ornate marble lobbies. I then realized that this was one of the things missing in Springfield (almost all apt. buildings have different looking masonry, and small, wooden hallways, in addition to the porches; and all are detached, unlike NYC's adjoined tenement rows), and then architecture became another big interest. I then became interested in what other cities were like as well. I began exploring in college (Norfolk, VA and all the cities inbetween), and then crossed much of the country at one point. That also prompted me to more recently finally do the NY-Springfield-by-local-bus trip discussed next; to see the architecture gradually change as you go further up into New England, and find a possible leverage point, where you have crossed solidly onto one side or the other. (You can get some NYC style buildings as far up as New Haven, and apt. buildings with wooden back porches come down as far as McLean Ave. Yonkers, just one block beyond the NY city line!)
So architecture became a framework of location. And introverted Sensing deals largely with memory and the past. (And of course, auxiliary extraverted iNtuition is also involved; in exploring the possibilities in new cities). However, tearing down old buildings, and building new ones (most in a "corporate look";' that is the same, everywhere) erases this! There also appears to be a very shadowy introverted Feeling involved (the INTP's eighth function, and the most negative). I just get so upset when old stuff is destroyed. (The same dynamic would also seem to figure in the essay on the entertainment page, dealing with unfairness in cartoons and feeling sorry for bad guys, as well as the "Ridgewood Rant" (below), Rap, and parts of the Filmation essay, and my defenses of Scrappy Doo on the Scooby pages). This might be described as part of a "daemon" archetype, or it just might be an "undifferentiated" form of the Feeling function. Some theorists will note that our dominant function (whatever it is; not just Feeling itself) gives us emotional attachments to things.
I did find another person who really likes old architecture. INTP Ben Kovitz (who does the Lenore Thomson wiki) prefers San Francisco to San Diego and other parts of California because of the architecture. I'm not that attached to SF because it's mostly wooden, and I prefer brick masonry. (SF did apparently have much more brick architecture before the great earthquake, which is what prompted them to build mostly wood afterward). I did remind him about the Gaslamp district of San Diego (Which is brick, and reminded me of Richmond VA's Shockoe Bottom; passed through there on the trolley to the Mexico border), and I also liked the Greyhound station building, which was done in the art deco style found on many Brooklyn apt. buildings.
I've determined that there is a deeply symbolic, archetypal significance of the entire Delmarva peninsula. I had gone off to college in Norfolk, hoping for a better social life (inferior extraverted Feeling), but still had very poor luck in that area. Now I was stuck in dorm rooms with hard to get along with people! Plus, the city was at that time very drab and depressing (compare with today!), they were tearing down everything old (see discussion on buildings, above), and I had simply become homesick (Including, no Drake's; see next! —tertiary introverted Sensing, greatly kicking off at that age!) So when my father would drive down to pick me up, we would go over this incredibly long bridge over the open sea, and the other side would be a totally different setting; the peaceful and serene looking Eastern Shore, with its small, quaint towns and stores (many in what look like little tin shacks, with large handpainted signs over them, usually reading "FIREWORKS"), different, odd looking snack cake labels (since that's what I was comparing; see next), and being the first leg of the trip home. It really doesn't seem much different from any other rural Southern area, but it's something about the remoteness of it, being a thin isolated strip of land between the Atlantic ocean and Chesapeake Bay, and being flat, not as wooded as inland areas, and having only the one main thoroughfare, along which all the towns line up. I can just hear "Gorrreeen Acres is the place to be...". It's like a thin slice of old time traveling, before the interstates were built, since one wasn't built on the peninsula. So you usually don't see all this on through trips. I also like it for part of the same reason I like Super Mario Bros. with its serene looking "overworlds".
It came to symbolize greener pastures across a long chasm, and I used it to symbolize events in life that I hoped would mark a division between less fortunate times and better days ahead. Hence, a product of extraverted iNtuition. (They even had some sort of walkathon over parts of it in '04, which I always dreamed of doing, but I missed it).
It also looked like a nice place to have a honeymoon, and thus also involves the anima somehow (which is a complex involving our connection to life, and associated with extraverted Feeling for my type).
The Clemente Travel Center was simply the other end of this stretch of land, and when coming from the north, its "gateway" and first stop. While that was a busy area, it still seemed to retain some of it's serene atmosphere, like in the surrounding countryside.
Why am I so into this stuff; isn't this weird and meaningless?:
This is a combination of extraverted iNtuition, which explores possibilities (such as which Flowers sub-brand or strange other cake company a store in a new place I pass through might have, or where exactly Drake's would begin appearing inbetween home and the south), and Introverted Thinking, which creates a model of things. In all of this (during college) I learned a bit about corporate structure and product distribution. (The limit of Drakes and other companies' distribution is also a leverage point in the transition between different areas, which my Thinking focused on). Similar to the whole NY-LA TV station thing, above, it also involves symmetries, in this case, competing cake/bread brands. (In NY, Hostess/Wonder vs Drakes/Taystee). One may think all of this logic involving "symmetry" is inefficient, but [external] efficiency is the domain of the opposite extraverted Thinking; the dominant function of society. Introverted Thinking deals with internal efficiency (hence, models such as symmetry), and was described by Jung as "thinking for its own sake". These symmetries and other frameworks do come in handy in solving many problems.
The colorful labels appealed perhaps to a "comedic" extraverted Sensing (which is in the shadows for an INTP, and normally very "tricky", but it's good side is 'comedic'; hence my being clownish with colors at times, and also liking the brilliantly saturated colors of LED's, as discussed on another page). A childlike introverted Sensing is also involved; in remembering all the stuff I had seen and tasted. Particularly, longing for the Drake's in college, which was part of a nostalgia for home that was developing at the time; which was the typical age for tertiary function development.
's World of Ideas: Various Interests
Clemente's Travel Center