Vice Blog about Austin being the worst place to live (Houston: college, maintenance)

[Jennibc]

I know they have these for so many cities, so I take this with a grain of salt, not getting my undies in a bunch. But what do y'all think? Legitimate gripes or is this guy just a whiny self entitled 20 something that lives in a very narrow universe?
http://www.vice.com/read/reasons-why...place-ever-512

[RoadWarrior12]

Whiny little *****.

[mark311]

Yeah, sounds like an entitled whiny kid. The only point that I agree with is how nasty the old Emo's was. I would purposely not drink any liquid before going to a show at Emo's to hopefully avoid setting foot in the men's room there.

[Idlewile]

Eh. Pi*s and moaner for the most. He really could have used a much worse weather forecast screenshot to illustrate how hot is hot. But I will give him the "traffic is way too bad for a town this small" and "you're still in Texas." Flat out truth.

[TexasHorseLady]

Whiny. At best. He had a couple of points but they were buried under the B.S.

[Cathy4017]

He does sound like a little whiner.

Austin? Abrasively cold? LOL!!

[twange]

Hilarious. As I was reading it, I thought this guy HAS to be from California…sure enough! (no offense to Californians - I love the state)

And my stars, his last name IS Winkie after all...

[JT-3]

I think he wrote it for shock value. The comments at the end are great...

He's "a resident of Austin" but is actually a transplant from California, and has only lived in Austin for 4 years. B**ches about the heat in summer of 2012 with too many days over 100. Has what, four summers under his belt? Haven't hit 100 once yet this summer. He writes a whole section about how nobody knows what there job is and calls someone out for being a "digital marketer" yet has his job listed as a "Content Manufacturer." B**ches about how Emo's sucks, but has only lived in Austin since 2010. Emo's opened in 1992 and closed and moved to a new location in 2011 - one year after Luke moved here. Has no real context of what Emo's is or was.

If you don't like where you live, Luke, they you should move! You are part of the problem, Luke.

I still really enjoy VICE, they have "grown up" over the years.

[homeinatx]

Loved it. Kinda hilarious, and its satire people! Read the other posts on why NY, LA and SF are also the worst places in the world. If the hippy or slacker incarnations of Austin had the internets, I suspect they would have been saying the same things. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

As far as I can tell, Austin for a very long time has been too special and too generic, too Texan and not Texan enough, too big and too small at the same time, too filthy and too clean; its racial politics, while marginally better, have always been appalling. As a former gardener here, it is indeed both too hot and too cold.

The moaning and whining about hipsters is the same whining and moaning about hippies and slackers. The baristas of today are the flower sellers of yesteryear, and I love both incarnations of Emos. The trough at Elysium is as charmingly gross as anything in the men's room at the old Emo's. And as this forum attests, Austinites, old and new, like to complain. The best Austin is nearly always the one when you arrived. In my time, the demise of Les Amis was the end of Austin, then the the truly disgusting Katz's closed, and now the vile egg-torturing Omelletry is priced out of its location, regrettably only to move to Airport where it will continue its long and honorable tradition of egg abuse. Barton Springs, which I love, has been ostensibly perpetually on the edge of ruin for decades now.

Austin has always been a place of frontier capitalism run amok with a quirky edge. If you want your institutions to endure forever, move to Boston or better Sweden - hyper regulated places with a profound investment in the maintenance of the status quo.

I think the writer of that Vice piece got it right. He whined like a real Austinite, and his whining was, at least, moderately entertaining. Those of you who say Austin is becoming like Dallas or Houston are wrong; spend time in those places, they whine about very different things! Austin's character is structured by the themes of Paradise Found, Paradise Lost, Paradise Redecorated. Objectively, they are all wrong.

Yesterday's booster is today's whiner, today's booster is tomorrow's whiner and on and on. When the boosters and the whiners agree, then the civic character of the city will be in serious jeopardy. I am not holding my breath, the city is fine. The upper deck of I35 ruined the city. The Armadillo closed. The Broken Spoke lost its bus, which wasn't theirs anyway etc. . .

I am not worried. Texas needs a weird city- a place where every smart teenage runaway comes to college or just comes when they don't have the bus fare to Santa Monica. There are no other contenders. Take a deep breath, preferably full of cedar or oak pollen, or mold or ragweed or Mexican agricultural fire smoke or African dust or Bastrop fire or I35 exhaust fumes and keep whining, it is going to be fine.

[usernamenottaken]

@ homeinatx - love it!