I have discovered a subreddit called Abandoned Porn. This is very much my kind of porn : photos of old, crumbling, abandoned buildings. Very romantic. So tempting. I made a kind of Homer gurgle when I stumbled across it.
Imagine the spiders in there! I want to go exploring…this summer, I hope. I have to get over this annoying tendinitis (I can walk without pain now, I’m just at the stage of having to be very careful not to worsen anything), and then start casing a few joints in the region. Then, new spider survey! In empty buildings where a pandemic can’t bring everything to a screeching halt! I’m going to have to put this in my to-do list:
- Get strong.
-
Wait for the snow to melt.
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Rummage through the wreckage of ancient days.
I’ve got a couple of hardhats with helmet lights, and a collection of bright portable LED lights. I should probably get some nice steel-toed boots with good ankle support.
I should also stake out some sites that aren’t abandoned ruins for comparison.
Also, goggles, black leather, ornate brass and black iron widgets. Might as well go full Goth/steampunk here.
Hey, by all means, go full steampunk. Sounds like fun.
I noticed you have adopted French interpunction rules — a space for an interpunction mark that has two elements. But, I guess, that doesn’t count as a spelling error.
Also: I’m am not a native speaker. I pick up quite a bit of new English vocabulary on your blog, thank you. I wonder if it would be possible to have a Merriam-Webster dictionary entry displayed when hoovering over a word I didn’t recognize immediately? I’m sure I have seen that on some websites. Can’t remember where.
Hovering, dammit.
If you like Abandoned Pron, you’d love this YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCihNn2dPyhMa7c_OXJ7v8kg
Dustin Porter explores all sorts of abandoned sites in British Columbia, Canada. Now he’s travelling down the west coast doing the same in the US.
There are a few sites on faceache as well.Don’t know how healthy it is to go around old abandoned buildings.
What with the mould and dust you would disturb.
I don’t know about real-life, but these places are invariably haunted in video games. Stay safe out there!
larrylyons@4
Thanks for the link. Very interesting.
I love the first photo above. I’m dying to know why there are two front doors. Could one lead to the living room and the other to the kitchen? (Country farm houses would often have really big kitchens, and that’s where you’d entertain close friends and family because it’s more intimate.)
And what’s the extension on the back? Could that be a nice big room for my
man cavecomputer room?8 billseymour
Re the two doors, the layout is different than I am used to in Ontario but I think you are correct.
Re the extension, it could be anything but again going by Ontario practice it possibly is a woodshed and summer kitchen. It was common to move the kitchen stove (wood-fired and never really went out) to a separate space in the summer.
Before I nuked my Facebook account, I used to follow these guys who would explore abandoned buildings in my old stomping grounds of Western New York.
But it totally wasn’t because I was hoping they’d go exploring the now-closed Catholic elementary/middle school I went to, so I could look at pictures of it in ruins and point and laugh. Totally not. Not me.
Add a Victorian style turret to that first house and you’ve got the Addams Family house. You go ahead and poke around PZ. You may find Wednesday’s pet spider Homer. Hope it’s not still in the box.
@2 René I think you can get a browser add on that does dictionary lookups.
I think the Peacock family from the X file is still living there.
OT
Carl Sagan died 25 years ago today + one day.
I never thought I would get nostalgic about the 1990s, but things just get stupider.
And Sweden got a big xenophobia party, so we are not in a position to mock you.
birgerjohansson@14 RIP Carl Sagan 25 years on, though I connect him more with the 80s and watching Cosmos as a teenager.
I’ve been nostalgic for the 90s since around 2000. At the time, I actually thought the US had recovered from Reaganism and we were starting to move in the right direction. Bill Clinton was, of course, no progressive, but I thought that if we could just get the deficit off the table as an issue, then maybe we could get serious about social spending. (This was naive and stupid, as I later understood. Nobody cares about the deficit except to attack the other side, and from Republicans’ view our crappy social safety net is a feature, not a bug so it’s irrelevant whether we can “afford” it or not.)
Then everything got derailed and I should have seen it coming. But it was the peak of optimism in my life.
One thing that’s still an improvement in my view is that a lot of tech jobs opened up that have nothing to do with the defense industry. I’m not a huge fan of internet advertising, but I’d rather work on that than weapons system. I am (to be honest) kind of a huge fan of biotech and I have been in and out of that industry over the years (as a software engineer).
(I was just thinking about the defense industry considering Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternative future in The Gold Coast. It’s set in 2027 and largely unrecognizable, but at the time he may have put more stock in the Strategic Defense Initiative being funded for years to come.)
Obligatory relevant comment: Abandoned buildings are pretty cool. Though it’s clickbait, I like the post-apocalyptic look of abandoned shopping malls. My interest has nothing to do with spider collecting.
My late godfather’s abandoned dairy farm is a creepy sight, its only product now is entropy. I had not seen it in many years, so the impact of the accumulated years came as a shock. The deserted milk barn, the empty corrals, the odds and ends of wrecked equipment — a disturbing overlay to the images stored in my brain.
Most important piece of safety equipment- An extra person. Handy for helping if you get into trouble, calling someone if you get into big trouble and taking photos in the ideal and likely scenario that you don’t get into trouble and have a great time!!
Ooooooo… Just the thing for my Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green games!
Having had a tetanus shot as a kid (following an encounter with a rusty nail), it’d be a “No” from me.
This scene from “The Money Pit” also comes to mind.
If you enter one of those buildings, bring a field telephone and trail a wire behind you so you can keep in touch with those waiting outside. Too bad if you meet Nyarlahotep.
anthonybarcellos@16 I’d rather see an old farm in decay than replaced by a development of ugly McMansions, which seems the usual fate everywhere I have lived.
If you want houses for comparison, consider talking to local realtors. Ask if you can look at new listings that have basements or attics which need to be cleaned of spider webs (before they are cleaned). Hey, if nothing else the realtors can say to the cleaning company, “We had an entomologist in here, and he says the spiders are all harmless.” Well, when there are no black widows, or brown recluses present…
Except that if I found Latrodectus or Loxosceles in a house, I’d write a glowing report and suggest that the house is clearly undervalued.
grimlock@22 That sounds like a lawsuit in the making if anyone actually does get bitten by a widow or recluse.