The Magic of Alleyways

Saigon, Vietnam is a massive massive city with something like 8m+ people living there. When I was living there and couldn't sleep at night, I'd hop on my motorbike and just go explore all the little back streets and alleyways that cut through the whole city.

As a foreigner, it is relatively safe to do this. Most people are just busy living their lives (or sleeping!), but seems super sketchy if you think too deeply about it.

I never really saw anything too crazy (beyond the absolute poverty a lot of people live in), but the occasional illegal cockfight or overhearing screaming and yelling was always entertaining. One time, I had a gang of hookers on bikes chase me around for a bit, but eventually they realized that I wasn't interested in being a customer and left me alone.

I'm sure in a few instances, I could have stopped and had drinks with the more than friendly locals. From what I understand, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to leave until properly lubricated. I never worked up the courage for that one though, mostly because of the language barriers.

I went wandering the alleyways in my small town in Alberta recently during the summer. And I was pleasantly surprised by how many garages had been turned into makeshift bars and patios. There were myriad garage sales and such but so many people had full on bars for themselves and guests.

It was like discovering a hidden world where the rules that prevent businesses from forming were all tossed out and people could just do as they wanted. In toronto, this style of business led to so many of the street front businesses that are literally impossible to do in any city now.

This reminds of that delightfully charming episode of "Japanology Plus - Tokyo : Backstreets and Alleys":

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7nkz3a

Gumball Alley in San Luis Obispo, CA is equal parts magical and disgusting.

Chicago has great alleyways. On my block, we have a few alleycats that keep it clear of rats. There's a troop of raccoons that come thru every once in a while looking fo food. A scrapper comes around every week or so to haul away big trash items in his truck. And there are a couple regular dumpster divers looking for cans. It's a really interesting ecosystem!

Celebrate your cities laneways

https://www.visitmelbourne.com/regions/melbourne/destination...

Are there equivalents to alleyways in software? Things that were meant as pragmatic ancillary solutions, but have taken on a life of their own?

For me, vi's ! springs to mind.

Came here for a story about my favorite Game Boy launch title.

Lovely article. I wish the author would have spent more words explaining why he is so against laneway houses, though.

“Liminal spaces” are another kind of alleyways, through which one ordinarily just passes through:

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Liminal_Space

That kind of space the FTL drive in Event Horizon passes through:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_(film)

I kinda wish there was a separate news feed for these long, meandering but often interesting stories (I propose we call it hacker news after dark). over 3k words is kind of a big commitment for the kind of bathroom breaks I am normally reading hacker news on so wish the main feed was kept to sub 2 k word stories/news. The other problem also happens where I sit down to the kind of epic bathroom break where I could enjoy a longer form item like this and then only run into said longer form item after chewing up most of the time on 10-15 shorter articles (on second thought, we could rename the original feed to normal dump and this new feed to epic dump).