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A fun way to play with mindfulness in the urban world is to try and spot Thomssons. These are parts of buildings or pieces of infrastructure that are relics of
by ehnto 6y ago
A fun way to play with mindfulness in the urban world is to try and spot Thomssons. These are parts of buildings or pieces of infrastructure that are relics of a past use. A good example is a door that's too high to access, because there's no longer a staircase to it. That's an easy one, but also find things like inaccessible mailboxes, railings for no reason, utility poles with no utilities.
It's fun because it gets you paying attention to buildings you pass by every day, and you also get to think about the world around you in the context of the bigger time picture it is all part of. We can sometimes forget that things around us have often existed for longer than we've each existed.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago> Thomssons What is the origin of this term? I can't find anything with Google.
- ehnto 6y agoIt was coined by Akesegawa Genpai, in his 1985 book Hyperart: Thomassons. He got the name from an American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who was traded to the Yomiuri Giants where he ended up on the bench for a lot of the season. The general concept behind a Thomasson is that it is useless but still maintained, and so it's a sort of mean analogy based on Gary's bad season. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thomassons/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thomassons/
- frosted-flakes 6y agoAh, the spelling was wrong. Thanks, I'm going to keep my eye out for Thomassons in my area.
- ehnto 6y agoAh heck, my apologies! Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase.