Caveat: Life in Sim City

I have been coming to realize that I live in Sim City.  For those who may not know, Sim City is a computer game where you pretend to be a city planner/administrator, which requires you to keep your residents happy by providing appropriately designed neighborhoods, with stores, public services, parks, etc.

Ilsan-gu has a lot of the characteristics that Sim City cities tend to have:  it's very regular, highly planned, architecturally bland, yet full of activities and busy ant-like residents.  I went on a long walk yesterday north to the "old" part of Ilsan, near the railroad station, and the contrast is notable.  Most of Ilsan, especially in the areas around where I live and work, is a highly predictable grid of blocks (if not entirely square).  Each block is about half a kilometer on a side – much larger than a typical city block.  It is penetrated by a maze of access roads
and pedestrian pathways lined with lovely trees and public art and small plazas and playgrounds.  Each block has a litter of high-rise apartment buildings, a la Le Corbusier, and if they were broken down and crime-ridden they'd resemble the public housing projects built in so many US cities or the banlieux of Paris – but they don't, because socio-economically, they're upper-middle class. More like super-high-density gated communities.

Along the major avenues are high rise commercial spaces, lined with massive quantities of neon signs and brightly colored billboards and signs.  Each block has a school, all look exactly the same – like Sim City.  Every 4th block has a post office.  Every 10th block has a police station, fire station, etc.  The grid is somewhat crooked, and there are hills poking through here and there, destroying the regularity.  And different areas have different feels to them:  my neighborhood, Ilsandong-gu, is more manhattany, with little greenery and lots of malls and commercial buildings, while the area around the school to the north and west is more like a university campus, long pedestrian paths through park-like areas, with identical-looking towering apartments.  But the Sim City effect is eerie.

Yesterday, I crossed the railroad tracks into old Ilsan-dong.  It was so different.  The streets stop being straight.  The sidewalks disappear.  Much older, one-storey houses (often with parts converted into small businesses) line the streets, and parking patterns dissolve into chaos.  It's not necessarily poorer, I don't think, but the less prosperous aspects are more visible – the broken washing machine sitting out on the sidewalk, the plastic tarpulin forming part of someone's roof.

It was grey and drizzling and quite beautiful.

Caveat: The Virtual Life

Well, I'm getting more and more fully "connected" from an online standpoint.  I have both Yahoo and MSN ("Live") Instant Messenger accounts, and found myself chatting online with a former coworker at HealthSmart the other day.  It's a great no-cost way to stay in touch with people.  Anyone who wants to interact with me can contact me under either username: jaredway{at}yahoo{dot}com or jaredway{at}hotmail{dot}com – I'm connected to both, simultaneously, whenever I'm on my computer, using Pidgin, an opensource chat tool that speaks both protocols.

Also, I've in the past experimented a bit with Second Life, and recently got the client for Linux  running on my computer (it's an alpha release, but to appearances pretty darn reliable).  I had a weird moment of synchronicity last night – I was experimenting with Second Life and at the same time listening to Minnesota Public Radio via streaming over internet.  Anyway, the radio show had well-known folk/rock/pop artist Suzanne Vega in studio, and were having a fairly broad-ranging conversation with her.  I've always liked her music, and she had several albums from the 80s that are among my top 50 favorites. 

And just as I sat there poking around in the Second Life virtual reality, the subject of Second Life came up during this interview:  it turns out Vega has been what you might call an "early-adopter" of this technology, having actually conducted concerts in Second Life.  Furthermore, she said that when she's "on the road" she often goes "on dates" with her husband (who's home) inside the Second Life universe, and she was extolling the amazing virtues of virtuality, and the weird feeling dream-like intimacy that it can provoke.  It was quite the endorsement, and I confess I spent too much time last night exploring this weird online world.  Anyway, if anyone's in there, look me up:  my avatar's name is Jared Eun (they let you choose a first name but the list of last names you're allowed is limited – so I opted for something nice and short).

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