Links: finding better paths

[sonia]

Feline Grimace Scale by Université de Montréal, 2019. How to quickly tell if a cat is in pain by looking at the ears, eyes, muzzle, and head position. Links to a one page fact sheet and brief training manual.

Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners by Ellie Violet Bramley. This is from Oct 2018, but I had been talking about desire paths with someone recently, and then ran across the link. Desire paths are

described by Robert Macfarlane as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”; he calls them “free-will ways.” [...]

Rather than dismiss or even chastise the naughty pedestrian by placing fences or railings to block off “illicit” wanderings, some planners work to incorporate them into urban environments.

Indigenous American Nations, c.16th Century

This map aims to show the approximate locations of the Indigenous nations of middle North America around the 1500s CE, labeled in each tribe's own language when available. Care was taken to include as many nations as possible, but many are surely missing due to the difficulty of confirming them in multiple sources. Anyone with additions or corrections is encouraged to build upon this copyright-free map, or contact me with sources I can use in future editions.

Contempt Culture by Aurynn Shaw, Dec 2015.

Work to change your community. Ask people who try to pay for their membership in contempt to stop, or to leave. Make it unacceptable to use these behaviours as a means of obtaining social wealth.

The best advice we give programmers is to leave things better than how they started. We do it with code, why don’t we do it with communities? Why don’t we do it with people, colleagues, friends?

Comments

Oh that contempt culture

[jesse_the_k]

article states the issue so well. I've been part of other communities where shared contempt was a membership requirement. In addition to being unwelcoming, the cranky-pants context undercuts community-building and shared support for members.

Re: Oh that contempt culture

[sonia]

*Nods* My parents ran the family as a contempt culture too. I’ve worked hard to unlearn that.

[silveradept]

An interesting and useful thing, the Feline Grimace Scale. Might help us understand our own cat better about whether or not something is bothering her.

Desire paths certainly say something about the use of a space and what a planner can do better to make things more pleasant for those users.

The map looks fantastic and goes to show just how much there was in the North American space before the arrival of the colonists.

And yes, contempt culture is still very present, especially in places that prize certain toxic forms of masculinity as their primary or secondary currency along with contempt.

[sonia]

Glad you liked the links!