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### Topic

#### Leap before you look: or, a sense of place and housing

... so I've been feeling for some time a vague sense of loss from the new housing, and it's taken some time to put my finger on it, but the whole notion of brain housing has ultimately left me feeling really disconnected with the world. when I lived in Shimla Mirch, or Alakol, Pants Place (!) or Lem Hill (!) I could leave my house, pick a direction and start wandering through the world, and I felt like there was somewhere in the world where I belonged.
but now with brain housing, I have to intentionally pick a location and go there in order to re-enter the world from home - but sometimes I don't have a particular destination in mind, I'd rather just wander. this had led me to get in a bit of a rut in which I played with my pickle over and over again hoping to get a random teleport back into the world or otherwise just popped back and forth into the same few bits of the world to collect img or currants.
I think there is also something in this that's related to my love of narrative and the lack thereof in the current setup, and so with all this in mind, a proposal:
if street backgrounds were loosely tied to the parts of the world that they match up to, we could think of them as sort of floating above the world. perhaps the giants could be involved with this somehow, if street background styles and/or regions were also somehow affiliated with giants?
a new chat command could then be made available to /leap - this would let you leap back into the world, landing in a random street out of the set of streets affiliated with your street style.
housing, tower and furniture elements could also add to this affiliation, so if you had uralia furniture and a firebog background, maybe you might get a chance of landing in either of these regions. this might lead to some interesting possibilities, if, for example, your hell furniture gave you a (very small) chance of landing in naraka / dying.
thoughts? other ideas that housing could be reconnected with the world somehow? thanks for reading!
(ps: glitch dream zones!)

Posted 4 months ago by katlazam | Permalink

### Replies

- Ooo... I like. I would still want the option to go back to the last street I was on (/leave). But I like the idea to add a /leap command so that if you don't necessarily need to go back to the same street you can get a random area. Awesome!
  I don't like the idea of furniture increasing changes though. These are just cosmetic. I for one would have all Hell decor if I wasn't poor and I don't think I should have the slightest chance of dying because of it (unless it's a chance of just going to the hell streets without losing energy/dead status. Then that would be cool.
  Posted 4 months ago by Kaelyn Renai | Permalink
- I agree that with housing in the head the world feels somewhat less unified or more abstract or something I can't quite put in to words.
  Your idea of street backgrounds corresponding to your leap result is promising. Perhaps players could be more specific, in the Cultivate menu, and choose a region (Shimla Mirch, Ix etc) where they like to leap back to. Specific streets in each region could be designated as Leaper's Lanes (which would hopefully allow us to randomly see/congregate with numerous Glitchen in Ur).
  Setting a Region would cost iMG and changing to a different region would cost additional iMG.
  Posted 4 months ago by The Cat Face | Permalink
- How about a game wheel type of thing? Maximum 3 spins with a choice of saying "spin again" if the region doesn't appeal. The 3rd spin would auto send you to the last region that comes up. Get the wheel from the Rock - he's not busy with anything else.
  Posted 4 months ago by Patricia | Permalink
- If the basis of this idea is the desire to have a connection to a specific location in Ur, then devising a function that allows a random teleport to someplace among a quite large number of options doesn't do anything for me. I'd rather have an upgrade card (like reshuffle) that allows me one random teleport, limited to one per day.
  To create a sense of location within Ur, front and back yards would have to match each other and an Ur location, which means having yard options limited to subscribers would really stink, and non-Ur locations like Toxic moon would be hard to deal with. Changing this location would have to be expensive, similar to the effort it took to move to a new region in the old housing system. Otherwise people would simply change the connection whenever they wanted, and it would become a way of avoiding teleportation or the subway.
  It could be interesting if changing your location connection was a new type of expensive street project that you could get friends to help with. That might recreate some of the sense of neighborhood that people want, if a group all changed their connection to the same place and helped each other with their projects.
  Posted 4 months ago by KhaKhonsu | Permalink
- I have more neighbors that I am close to with the new housing. I visit their streets and wander from sign post to sign post. This is often social, because I meet glitchen in their towers and streets. That is nice.
  What I miss, though, is the sense of walking out into UR and the feeling of walking back home. When I lived in Kajuu, I would TP to Chakra Phool and walk home, taking several days. The feeling I had was of a connection to a location in the world, a spirit of place. That is the only thing I miss.
  Posted 4 months ago by harriette | Permalink
- I agree!
  though as a bandaid...buy/make door drinks :) Solves the 1st part...though not the second.
  Posted 4 months ago by M<3tra, obviously | Permalink
- What if there was an extra sign at the top of the sign post that would allow us to pick a street in Ur to automatically walk to?
  Posted 4 months ago by Muncey Mango | Permalink