The Death and Life of the City of Los Angeles

The Death and Life of the City of Los Angeles

This is what it must have looked like when the Roman Empire went into decline… living, breathing civilization replaced by barbarity and death.

Am I being melodramatic? Those dead streets produce none of the city life that defines ‘civilization.’ Think of the millions of people who can no longer hop on a streetcar and head to their favorite coffee shop, who can’t catch a girl’s eye on the street and strike up a conversation, who are denied the daily dose of incidental beauty that inspires great works of art.

This may appear to some to be just a sign of changing trends in architecture, but it is no less than the physical testament of the Century of Totalitarianism. Those behemoth concrete structures – intentionally meant to dwarf and awe the individual citizen – were dreamt up in the same schools of thought that led to Mussolini, Stalin, and Roosevelt.

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Aging Timelapse Simulation

Aging Timelapse Simulation

Watch a girl age into an old woman before your eyes thanks to this neat simulation. I don’t have details on how they did it, but it does get you thinking about how poor we are at perceiving gradual change.

Try this trick after you’ve watched the whole video: click back 30 seconds, and then 30 seconds before that, and so on. Your brain will have no trouble seeing the transformation when it is done in significant jumps.

This explains why hindsight is often so much clearer than the present.