A tangent: Granola Shotgun is one of my favorite blogs and Johnny has a unique viewpoint on many issues like urbanism, homesteads, town planning, etc. A quote from him that summarizes his writing to me: "So this is what America is actually like. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Look out your window. Take a drive down to your local big box store. Walk around your neighborhood. This is reality. Just sayin’."
I have little specific interest in these topics but love his storytelling and detailed posts.
Not Just Bikes is a great channel on urban development, and he did a series on Strong Towns' ideas specifically. I like this one, "How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer".
I always laugh when watching his videos because it feels like his go to bad example is London Ontario. I recognize it in all the bad example B roll he uses.
Granola Shotgun reminds me of blogging in its prime. Maybe 15 years ago? I had a big RSS feed of several blogs like this that I really loved. Over the years I’ve either gotten worse at finding them or the average blog has gotten much worse.
Yes, I miss the days where independent blogs ruled the web. Everything has transitioned to social platforms optimized for instant gratification where there is no room for deeper thoughts. Or lives on a 3rd party like Medium. Most of the blogs I used to read daily have transitioned to being people who tweet a lot and rarely write longer content.
Glad to see there are other fans of Granola Shotgun on HN. Most of the titles Johnny uses are probably too vague to capture interest here, but a few submissions have made the front page:
The guy comes off as a somewhat of a jerk in those examples, I don't think I will be subscribing to his RSS feed.
In the first one, he seems to keep getting in conflicts with people about his photography of their property or community, over and over. I'm reminded of the phrase "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole".
In the second one, he starts off with, "I visited friends" and then proceeds to go on a rant against those purported friends, criticizing the fact that they bought a bunch of stuff from Julia Child's estate and display it as artwork on the wall rather than I don't know....baking stuff with it or something? Not a friend I would want. I'm starting to see a pattern here.
The third one is just "Levittown sucks revisited", not a very good introduction to Levittown. The pictures emphasize "all of these houses look the same", which well duh. They were one of the first examples of mass produced housing in the US so of course they were built off the same blueprint. More interesting takes on Levittown look at what happened to the houses and neighborhoods as the place got older.
But yeah, I guess I've got to agree with the "this is America take a look" part. I'm a fan, he's not.
I have little specific interest in these topics but love his storytelling and detailed posts.
A few of my all-time favorites he has written:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/26/not-for-camera... https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/the-show-hor... https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/levittown/