I’m sure there is something for everyone to love about specific times of the day. There is, however, something to be said about the way seasons and weather impact those times of day.

For instance, one of my favorites happens to be in late Spring/early Summer. There is something magical about being awake right as the sun is rising. With no clouds in the sky, light filling the world so early in the morning, all while most people are still asleep. It almost feels like walking through a dream.

At the height of Summer, right around sunset, there is another magical moment, but it also requires the right kind of scenery. It all happens at an hour when it would normally be dark. You’re sitting around a bonfire in your driveway, cold drink in hand. Across the road from you is a tree looming over a lit streetlight. Leaves and branches create a space around the light in such a way that it feels like it’s wrapped in darkness, but you can still see the light of the setting sun on the outside of the leaves, creating two separate worlds.

Similar to the Summer Sunset is the Autumn Sunset right around Halloween, but rather than at the beginning of it during Summer, this is at the end of it. With just a little chill, few clouds in the sky, and the scent of burning wood drifting through the air. As the shadows take the world around you is a near perfect moment that gives the impression of magic and darkness. It can be made especially more ominous if there is no one around.

Of course, I can’t forget Winter. Winter can actually have a couple of times of the day I enjoy, depending on weather conditions, but I do prefer one. In the dead of night, huge snowflakes floating and falling lazily. The sound of the world is softened and muted. If you’re in a city, the light pollution bouncing off the cloud cover overhead can add to the effect, but I prefer watching the snow fall under a tall streetlight. The cone of light directed at the ground becomes filled with those pillowy snowflakes and gives the appearance of a Christmas tree made of light.

There’s something to love and enjoy at all times of the day.

I feel like this question is asking a lot of us. There are so many professional fields required to design a city and make it WORK. Water, power, construction, all kinds of engineering is required to do justice for a functional city.

Putting some of that aside, I’d also like to point out that something important to consider is geographic location. What is the typical weather like in each season? What about geological or environmental disasters that have any sort of frequency in the area? Oh, and what about the kinds of technology that would be available? Am I designing it strictly on current standards and trends or can I try to design it to be future proof in the event we somehow get flying cars?

Alright, enough preemptive questions. I’ll just start sharing my actual vision and some logic behind my decisions.

The first thing I would try to solve for is transportation and logistics. Currently, we treat things almost entirely 2-dimensionally. Flat. Sure, we have the overlapping of roads via overpasses and underpasses, or stacked tram/train setups, and a limited capacity for external vertical travel through aircraft and internally through elevators/escalators. There is also the factor of capacity and efficiency. In the USA we have a LOT of personal transportation, which can be highly inefficient and congestive. So, bolstering public/high capacity transportation is necessary. I would also add more layers. I’ll get into that in a bit after I solve private housing.

Again, covering the idea of a mostly flat spread of area, private housing is typically just ground level homes, though we do have condos, apartments, highrises, etc. and I wouldn’t want to just arbitrarily dot the landscape with these flat communities and rob the environment of viable land for other uses or just leaving it as natural. We COULD build more skyscrapers, depending on the geography and environmental concerns, which would solve the urban sprawl issue a little. Then we get back to transportation. Interconnecting the buildings every so often would create interesting layouts and routes of travel for people. Skywalks, aerial trams, things like that could then make a difference.

Then there is the matter of business. In lots of major cities across the USA, businesses are ground level. So, next would be to find a way to blend the businesses into the new “vertical neighborhoods” so that markets and other goods-focused businesses are still easily accessible.

Let’s not forget about schools either. They’ll have to have places that make sense. Schools could probably stay ground level for the most part, and I say this because I’m taking sports and activities into consideration. We don’t currently have anything like Blitz Ball from Final Fantasy X which would have more 3-Dimensional movement. (Granted, when you played Blitz Ball in the game you still moved characters across a flat plane within the giant floating orb of water, and the only time you saw vertical movement was one of Titus’ special moves.)

Alright, I’m realizing this is getting a bit longer than I originally intended, so I’ll cut it off there and just summarize: less horizontal spread, more vertical (but not unrealistically or extreme), and more transportation options that don’t require cars. That’s all, with my limited experience and knowledge in civil engineering and city planning, I can think of when looking at a “city of the future” without flying cars (for now.)

How detailed do we want to get? My first name (Taylor) comes from old English/French. As for why my parents chose it? I couldn’t exactly answer that, but I could tell you that my siblings and I all start with the letter “T”.

From what I was told, my parents hadn’t intended to have all our first names start with the same letter. My two older siblings might have been intentionally picked that way, but I think mine was supposedly a coincidence. After they realized what they had done, my parents decided to just stick with the trend.

I believe I’ve talked about my middle name here before, and it comes from my maternal grandfather.

My last name is supposed to come from Hungarian origins, as my great grandparents (or great great grandparents, I forgot exactly which generation) came to the USA from there, though I can’t confirm that offhand. From what I CAN tell offhand, though, is that it must have been changed prior to arrival in the USA.

Anyways, names are kind of weird. It’s also hard to come up with names for people and places in stories. I don’t know how some people do it.

I’m just like anyone else. The vast majority of my “motivations” are going to be the same as the next person.

Need to eat? Find food. Can food be easily acquired? Eat. Costs money? Pay. Need money? Work. And so on.

Too simple of an approach to this prompt? Well, maybe, but I didn’t want to overlook those basic motivations because to a certain extent they are what propels us all.

If you’re looking at this prompt and thinking more about life goals and achievements, then I can dive in a bit deeper.

Wants and desires. Or lack thereof.

Professionally, I don’t crave attention, nor have any aspirations/drive to climb the corporate ladder. So my motivations for work are simple. Keep my job so that I can maintain a steady income to pay my bills and feed me. I’ve found a comfortable and safe position to be in, and have no desire to climb higher.

Personally, I WOULD like to be a published author someday. That’s part of what is motivating me to write this blog. I know some of my shortcomings are related to habits and consistency, so I’m working to fix them, but that takes time.

So, in general, my motivations are fairly simple.

When it comes to movies, I’m not exactly fond of picking favorites. I just don’t find myself wanting to go back and frequently rewatch a lot of movies. That being said, I’ll still try to come up with ten regardless of “favorite” status, and definitely won’t rank them.

The first couple movies are ones I haven’t watched in a very long time, and that’s because they just don’t hold up (in my opinion) and the last time I watched them was probably 20 years ago or more. Anyways, in no particular order:

• Surf Ninjas (1993) with Ernie Reyes Jr. and Rob Schneider. I had a VHS copy of this movie, and my younger brother and I loved watching it for some reason. We still occasionally quote it!
• McHale’s Navy (1997) with Tom Arnold, Tim Curry, and Bruce Campbell (among others). Similar situation to Surf Ninjas. We had a VHS copy of this movie, but I think I was the only one who really watched it a lot. My parents had given my brother and I an old VCR for the small TV we shared to play SNES games on, so whenever we weren’t playing video games, we would just put on movies while playing with LEGO’s.
• Gargoyles the Movie: The Heroes Awaken (1995) was another VHS my brother and I watched a lot. It also included a boardgame of sorts that you played by watching a part of the tape after the movie itself was over.
• Skipping ahead to the present for a movie. Bullet Train (2022) on Netflix. I probably could classify this one as a favorite movie. I watched it a handful of times just this year, a few times on my own and then I got some friends to watch it with me over a screenshare. Every time I watched it I noticed new little details that are kind of “blink and you miss it” but are little hints or nods to things. The soundtrack is also great, and we took some clips to put onto a soundboard for ourselves.
• A list of movies wouldn’t be complete without referencing Nick Cage. So, I’m tossing in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010). Similar to a lot of the early movies, I watched it once or twice just to watch it, but extra viewings were done as background noise.
• Let’s add some Hayao Miyazaki to finish things off, starting with Princess Mononoke (1997). To my knowledge this was my first Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli movie, and one of my first DVD’s. I watched it so much that there ended up being a ring lightly etched into it.
• Spirited Away (2001) was not one I immediately got into, because it has a different style of action from Princess Mononoke but several years later I did come back around to enjoying it more when my “literary and cinematic palette” became a little more refined.
• Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) was another one of those late discoveries that ended up being watched several times and ultimately cemented itself into my memory. I probably didn’t get around to watching this until 2003? Hard to say, but that sounds about right, as I was in high school at the time.
• Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) would be right up there near the top (if I were actually ranking them) but probably because I read the book as well, and I greatly enjoyed both.
• Rounding out the list of ten will be Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). This was one that, when it was finally brought to DVD, I watched quite a few times. For an older movie, the English dub work is actually fairly good, which helps to enjoy it (I’m more okay with reading subtitles these days, but if there is solid dub work, I’ll watch it in English too.)

As I went through this trip down movie memory lane, I started to come up with more, but I’ll leave it at the ten because that’s all the prompt asked for, and I don’t want this post getting wildly lengthy.

Again, not a top ten favorite list, because I’m sure there are movies out there that are objectively better, but these are the ones that at the time I watched them I did end up watching repeatedly over the course of year (not daily, though).

Okay, maybe one more.

• Akira (1988, the year I was born) and it has an interesting history for me. I believe it was my older brother’s VHS copy, with English dubbing, that I watched so many times as a kid. I went back a few years ago to try and find a copy to watch, to relive some nostalgia, but I couldn’t find a version with the English dub I remembered. Turns out, there are two English dubbings. Given the fact I watched it on VHS, it was obviously the 1989 version and not the 2001 version. (Sorry Johnny Yong Bosch fans! No hate, the older version just holds a special nostalgia for me.)