My city is the best city

I know everyone says that, but it's one of the nice things about human psychology that we can know it's not true but still believe it on a gut level, because we like where we are so much. I live in the South Denver Metro area, in an area called "DTC" (the "Denver Tech Center"). It's my favorite combination of density and nature.

As I've said many times before, I hate the suburbs. They sprawl and they're ugly and inefficient. Dense living, such as multi-story apartments, are far more efficient both for energy- and land-use. And by not sprawling across miles and miles, we reserve that land for ACTUAL natural wilderness, rather than the aesthetic horror that is lawns.

And just on an aesthetic level, I love large, imposing buildings. Sided in glass and given a decent architect to make them structurally interesting, it feels like living among giant cut diamond artifacts, gleaming in the sun.

The problem is that in many cities, the space between these soaring buildings is ugly. It's cracked concrete and sooty asphalt. It's chainlink fences and deteriorating lampposts. This dirty sterility drives me away from many highly-dense urban settings.

Fortunately, there is DTC. It contains towering glass structures, surrounded by corporately-maintained strips of well-mimicked wilderness. It's like someone took the best parts of our neon post-cyberpunk future, and blended them artfully with tolkeinesque elven forests. Here's a few pictures taken between my apartment complex and the Starbucks I walk to most days.

As one can see, even the deer were fooled into thinking they were in a pretty nature place. :) This is not a common occurrence, but man was it cool. I've posted a video below that shows how close they let humans get to them, they're mostly unconcerned with us. I could probably have touched one if I wanted to, but I think that's probably a bad idea. Plus, the three bucks with very pointly antlers made me cautious of scaring them.

[video width="854" height="480" mp4="https://deathisbadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/deer.mp4"][/video]