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I am not sure why I am continually fascinated by this place. I suppose, having written the old Mac computer game Glider, it might be obvious why I am drawn to
by JKCalhoun 2y ago
I am not sure why I am continually fascinated by this place.
I suppose, having written the old Mac computer game Glider, it might be obvious why I am drawn to it since it kind of looks like an insanely large "house" that someone might have created for the game.
On the other hand I feel like I have had dreams in spaces that I imagine are like this — and I feel like these dreams may have pre-dated the game I wrote?
Or maybe it's a kind of Blade Runner vibe of the future that the city gives off — or like the early police chase scene in Chung King Express ... [1]
I imagine it as having both good and bad qualities. I imagine crime is always present — but that too exploration is always there too. A younger me would have loved to try to get lost, try to find my way home.
[1] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI
- kiba 2y agoI think of kowloon as a preview to the hyperdense cities of the future in a way. Acrologies would be a more workable vision of hyperdense cities, as you also need green spaces rather than just a bigger version of dense concrete jungles that is defacto state of many cities. Right now, space is criminally underused in cities or allocated so inefficiently that we don't really need acrologies yet. We can get more green in cities and making these places more pleasant and human space to live.
- 6510 2y agoIt to me feels more like generation space ships. The more interesting question is why so many people feel this place in the first place. Why this puzzling fascination? I don't have this with any other place. Why do the pictures feel like home? While I shouldn't, I remember it as people struggling to make ends meet but also as an incredibly happy place because of the tightly knitted social fabric. The need to help others and the need to be helped creates top notch relationships.
- kibwen 2y ago"Dense" cities are necessary for achieving the efficiencies of density, but "hyperdense" cities are not. You can have a city where all residential buildings are five- to six-stories, with ample green spaces and every street lined with trees; that would be a dense city, despite being less dense than Manhattan. I don't foresee a future where any city feels the desire to model itself after the Kowloon Walled City in terms of density, because in order for that to happen it would have to imply that physical space itself is the bottleneck for the population, rather than things like the availability of energy/food/water (which was true for the KWC for historical/political reasons).
- bergie 2y ago> You can have a city where all residential buildings are five- to six-stories, with ample green spaces and every street lined with trees; So, essentially Berlin inside the ring. Each "kiez" (a neighbourhood) is sort of a village of its own.
- KMag 2y agoNote that the walled city is just a small part of Kowloon district. The famous Kai Tak Airport was also in Kowloon (now converted into an event space), where airliners flew scarily close to buildings on final approach. I lived in Hong Kong just under 10 years, and a friend of a friend grew up in the walled city.
- wkat4242 2y agoAnd the walled city is long gone :'( There's just a little museum left of it. As far as I understand this happened even before the handover.
- jprete 2y agoAccording to Wikipedia, China actually handed over sovereignty of Kowloon to the British to facilitate demolishing it. They must have really hated the place.
- treprinum 2y agoYou mean hyperdense as in Chongqing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJOJGT00TlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJOJGT00TlU
- mbrubeck 2y ago> I am not sure why I am continually fascinated by this place. Nominative determinism?
- jl6 2y agoIt’s the sci-fi death star cyberpunk dystopia aesthetic. The place was demolished before most of us ever heard about it, and yet we feel like we’ve been there, crawling through its air ducts, picking up a health boost at its meat markets, buying ammo from its shady traders, escaping from the cops through its windows, getting an achievement for doing it all without injuring the civilians… By the way, 8 year old me loved Glider! Nice work.
- creer 2y ago"Death star"?! To me that evokes "designed", "manufactured" and "no need to think too much about human scale". See Seattle Central Public Library - especially at night when it's open to interstellar space. https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5749/23487975024_13a1504a6b_c.jpg https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5749/23487975024_13a1504a6b_c... https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1584/24008226682_5f6c6d1f6c_c.jpg https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1584/24008226682_5f6c6d1f6c_c... https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1570/23820565720_559b380eb2_c.jpg https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1570/23820565720_559b380eb2_c... ("Stormtrooper!") As opposed to cyberpunk, because yes on that: spend money on wiring, computers and noodles, not on wall paint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmqlxjTSc8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmqlxjTSc8w
- jl6 2y agoTrue. I guess the “Death Star” aspect came to me in the sense of dense construction in all directions around; a place where flat maps may fail you.
- creer 2y agoOkay. It's interesting that most of the Death Star's interior views failed on that. Yes a droid is useful to make sense of the plans but most of it seems... flat floors and vertical elevators and "vertical" shafts. Even the Seattle Central Public Library - a real building - did it better, with tilted multi-floor window planes, escalators, multi-floor corkscrew walking path with numbering on the floor, unexpected openings overlooking big open spaces, etc.
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- martiancookbook 2y agoMaybe it's non-normative ways of living? In many places, people are not allowed to live in whichever way they please - there are rules and regulations, mostly in the name of safety (from crime, fire/flood, infection, etc). Kowloon seems to exist outside/before these restrictions, and might therefore feel more "free" in some way. It might also be why fantasy/science fiction fantasy tends to take place in a slightly more "lawless" and uninhibited world.
- bluGill 2y agosort of - most of the people there also didn't have good options to leave. I suspect most would leave if given a better option. Note however that better option needs to somehow include your friends and family.
- martiancookbook 2y agoAgreed! Fantasy tends to assume your basic needs are satisfied, especially the unsexy ones. E.g. you rarely see someone use the restroom in space, and I bet that the “fantastical” nature of Kowloon is interrupted in reality by waste management When I say “free” and “uninhibited”, I am talking only about the mind playing with fantasy, not the actual lived experience of residents
- wkat4242 2y ago> I bet that the “fantastical” nature of Kowloon is interrupted in reality by waste management And the resulting pest presence yes. Yuck :)
- 5040 2y agoMany did not want to leave, for want of having better options. The dentists were especially attached to the place. >Medical and dental care were no problem at all: many of the residents were doctors and dentists with Chinese qualifications and years of experience but lacking the expensive pieces of paper required to practise in the colony. They set up their neat little clinics in the City, oases of cleanliness and order, and charged their patients a fraction of what they would pay outside. Source: City Of Darkness: Life In Kowloon Walled City (1993)
- bitwize 2y agoIt's basically the inspo for every cyberpunk dystopia ever from Blade Runner on forwards. Right down to the black markets, prostitutes, drugs, unlicensed doctors and dentists plying their trades, etc. Most recently, the setting of the video game Stray is basically Kowloon with the serial numbers filed off.
- KMag 2y agoNot just the Kowloon Walled City, but other locations in Hong Kong inspire lots of cyberpunk scenes. After living in Hong Kong for a few years, I re-watched Ghost in the Shell and was surprised to recognize the final scene as taking place under the circular pedestrian overpass on Queens Road, just east of Victoria Park.
- satvikpendem 2y agoSadly all the neon (and other noble gas installations) in Hong Kong and elsewhere is going away. It is sometimes but not always replaced by LED which doesn't necessarily give that same aesthetic.
- creer 2y agoAnd one thing that was great in Blade Runner was to recognize "the tyrrany of weather". Instead of erasing that from their source material. Because many Los Angeles concept teams might not even understand that. The designers cherished it and made us of it, for lighting, for mood, for how the business stalls might be set up. Still great to this day.
- fuelfive 2y agoThanks for writing Glider! I adored that game as a kid and was part of how the possibilities of computing began to captivate my attention.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoMake no mistake, there were others (for starters, whoever wrote the TRS-80 version of "Trek") that had first inspired me.
- thworp 2y agoIt‘s because to the domesticated observer, the walled city symbolizes an idealized vision of chaos. A place you could have inhabited where you would finally be free from the dictates of society. The ideal space of opportunity where you could have forged your own path, the realities of KWC be damned. In the same way that people living in Chaos yearn for a Franco or an old King because they symbolize order, regardless of the realities of their reign. Just a projection space that is sufficiently ill-defined that it becomes a canvas.
- ClassyJacket 2y ago"I am not sure why I am continually fascinated by this place." If you're into technology - like anyone on Hacker News - you're probably fascinated by seeing high complexity in a small space. That's one of the things about tech that makes it exciting to me. Look at my smartwatch - so much complexity crammed into something so small. Such high entropy. It's just fundamentally interesting because there's so much there. I know it was no treat for the people that lived there, tho. Conditions sucked. (Bit of a tangent, but I also wonder if there's a link between this and my (very bad) social media addiction. There's just so much stuff to look at on a place like reddit or tiktok. Such high information density.) This diagram sort of reminds me of playing Sim Tower, or those books of cross sections of things that were popular entertainment when I was a kid. I guess they hit the same part of the brain.
- adolph 2y agoYes, I’m rereading Young Lady’s Primer right now and although Dr. X’s lair is far northward, my mind’s eye sees Kowloon photos tinted by Kar-wai and Doyle’s works.
- k12sosse 2y agoIt's where the kumite was held. https://youtu.be/smGHdOU4Qu4 https://youtu.be/smGHdOU4Qu4
- nreilly 2y agoThank you for glider!
- MontagFTB 2y agoThank you for Glider! I enjoyed it immensely as a kid.
- nxobject 2y agoNothing can beat a Glider PRO house in terms of surrealism and trickery, though! And cozy charm. In fact, I think it's time I downloaded a copy of SheepShaver and reinstalled it – and all the extra houses...
- readingnews 2y agoWow, how much fun times my friends and I had with Glider. We probably could not possibly thank you enough for making something that caused us to spend so much time together. If only I had more rubber bands...
- JKCalhoun 2y agoNo need to thank me. I enjoyed writing it. When I first wrote it it was both a personal challenge (to write a game) and also kind of fun for me to play as well.
- wkat4242 2y agoI think it's because it's inspired so much fiction. Blade runner, there's references to it in Ghost in the Shell, in the game Stray, and many others. Many people are fascinated by it.
- michaelcampbell 2y agoI share your fascination and perhaps from the same genome; I haven't figured out what yet, but I've always thought some MMORPG game based on the city would be spectacular.