Dallas is a soulless corpse where you can’t walk anywhere due to highways, but it you use the highways then it’s like trying to dodge clicking on sketchy ads trying to trick you to click them on PC, except the ads are toll roads. Also every car is trying to kill you.

I tried to go to a music show once. It was in a really run down part of town with sketchy people standing around staring at us. There was no signage. We weren’t even sure we were in the right place and no one looked friendly so we just left, and got hit by more surprise tolls on the way back. You can’t leave your house there without having to pay money. It is the most miserable place I’ve ever been.

Second runner up is Port Arthur, Texas. Going to take the scenic route down the coast, are you? Well it’s nothing but pipes and smoke stacks. You can see only a little bit of the marsh that used to be there. The city itself is run down, rotting houses leaning sideways with the pipes and industry always being in the backdrop. Clearly the town is receiving no tax money from the oil corporations infesting their coast in what would otherwise be a nice place. It was a mostly black population I saw outside. Inside stores the people I saw wearing plant uniforms were white or Hispanic and clearly didn’t live in the immediate area. The story writes itself.

I Google the town and it turns out it used to be a nice place with a little permanent carnival on the coast with a ferris wheel and rides with a flourishing tourist industry, but all those people who could afford it moved out when the oil industry moved in and drained the town. Now the only people there are the ones who can’t get out.

It was the most depressing town I’ve ever been through.

God I fucking hate Texas.

Dubai is the most liminal fucking city in the world. If a hospital corridor was a city, it would be Dubai.

The opposite of this would be Hanoi. That’s a city where each street feels like a living, breathing animal.

Glasgow in the 90s. I live in rural Scotland, but while studying in Edinburgh I used to travel through to see my girlfriend. As soon as I got off the bus I’d get this weird, hostile vibe. I was approached all the time by folk trying to hustle me for money or crazies just being weird AF. The city aggressively prides itself on being friendly, but I always found it intimidating.

Fucking Dallas, TX. Of all the major cities in North America, Dallas is the most devoid of culture. It is a city inhabited by cars, not people. If you took the average of all North American cities, it would be Dallas, but not in a way that derives any value from the cities included in the average. If you asked an LLM to generate an American metroplex, you would get a low-resolution, but otherwise one-to-one map of Dallas and Ft. Worth. Dallas is the backrooms except with a clear view of the sky.

Luton

Charlotte, NC. That place is still segregated

Me personally, I don’t like Irvine, CA. It feels fake, corporate, unnatural. It’s most likely because everybody there is high income and they’re just corporate slaves.

For me, Richmond, VA. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable for no reason at all than the 2 days I was in Richmond. Can’t explain it.

Wow, New Orleans? I love that city.

Downtown Clearwater FL has been pretty much taken over by Scientologists and is quite creepy now.

Bakersfield California, drive through it once. It was like someone was making the most depressing movie about drugs and prostitution and dilapidated infrastructure so they built Bakersfield to be the backdrop

Salt Lake City, Utah. Utterly gorgeous, but strongly reconsider moving there if you aren’t a Mormon. The whole valley/arguably state has a constant fog of oppressively bad juju looming over it, despite being truly breathtaking.

Council Bluffs, IA. I once had family there and there’s a story in our family. One of them had a radio of some sort that works on trucker frequencies and he overheard a conversation between trucker CBs that went something like:

• “I’ve never been to Council Bluffs before. What’s it like?”
• “Well, if the earth needed an enema, Bluffs is where they’d put the tube.”

It used to be a railroad town, but the railroad pulled out and left economic carnage in its wake. Meanwhile, Omaha, just across the river, is comparatively very affluent with skilled jobs in tech, so Bluffs is kindof “the slums” (casualties of the worst end of capitalism.) and Omaha is all gentrified and hip, which rubs salt in the wound, and those who are still in Bluffs are the ones who lacked the wherewithal (luck, credit (social, financial, or otherwise), mental health, etc) to move to Omaha. Last time I was in Bluffs (and that was even before I knew the rail background story) it really felt like there was just a pall over the whole place. The strangers you saw at the grocery store or whatever just seemed “down and out” in an undefinable way. The local government seems some combination of corrupt and incompetent and the few folks I know of who still live in Bluffs there are racists and MAGA nuts and grifters and (I say this with love) deeply mentally ill. It’s a disturbingly strange and depressing place.

Phoenix. Don’t ever make the mistake of moving there or you’ll have a hard time leaving. It’s the closest thing to purgatory I’ve ever experienced. I certainly aged, but I don’t think I matured a day while I was there.

Bellevue, WA. Very eerie and felt like a simulation.

New Orleans felt just sketchy throughout.

And then there are fun ones (mostly in Ohio)

• Random suburban road through the mixed woods / fields that suddenly slows down to 25MPH, with very neat lawns, clean buildings, but barely any people (usually there is a cop waiting for speeders).
• Some side road between an interstate and suburban development goes down into a valley to some creepy Lovecraftian old town
• In a middle of farm fields, a network of roads, clearly prepared for a residential development, but never finished, but they lead to a large patch of woods (yes, in middle of a farm field), and inside of it is a branch of a local university.

Stuart , Florida. Dark vibes everywhere. Even though it looks clean , and nice. It has a very seedy underbelly.