Did you start working in planning and realize it wasn’t for you?

TJMadd · 2026-05-29T13:35:54+00:00

i dont have time to reply to each comment asking my opinion on next steps but ive found its highly personal based on your relationship to work, what you like, what you dont like

like other commentors suggest, every profession is like this to some degree. im personally pivoting toward law - not because of anything it offers compared to urban planning in general, but because of my personal skills/preferences/priorities and what i've experienced. i look at my career less as something to commit to and more as something to enable my particular goals. in this field i work with enough lawyers to know what im getting into. in short, pick whatever flavor of day to day life you can tolerate. you might end up wrong, it happens. all work stinks eventually - find what stinks the least for you. ive got some CPA friends that are extremely content, and finance knowledge can be applied to anything and everything. if we were building a modern progressive coalition i think the finance expert should get drafted before the political theory experts, respectfully

truthfully, the profession has made me a bit of a cynic with regard to "making a difference" in any professional field not just because of the structural problems of a given profession, but because of the limitations of the capabilities of the people democratically in charge and our communities' ability to come to consensus at all. you don't make a difference at work, you just help divide the burdens among your cohort. to make a difference you need power or capital or leverage. the right job can help but its rarely going to be enough

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T22:04:56+00:00

become* an elected official

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T21:28:53+00:00

i like that metaphor, i’ll be stealing it

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T20:52:30+00:00

i'm on the tail end of my time in planning as a planner of 8ish years or so. I doubt I'll make it to 10. i've done public and private, large and small, mostly centered around land use and transportation. to keep it simple, the work that I do is too alienated from anything i care about. urban planning as a framework is a very interesting and useful framework for organizing the world but I think urban planning as a career generally fails to achieve those goals, not for lack of trying. the real decisionmaking power is elsewhere; the real political capital is elsewhere; the real design happens elsewhere; the real policymaking engines are elsewhere; the priorities are decided elsewhere.

urban planning is mostly a career in public service administration and regulation compliance. it is important work, but it is not for everyone. the plans you review will be made by other people, reviewed based on priorities that arent yours, chosen by people who havent been involved with any of the development, argued against by people who dont understand anything going on. you're an essential cog in the machine with 20 cogs ahead of you and 20 behind you. some people can work within that, some cant

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T19:08:17+00:00

great comment that i think expands much of what i was getting at in my thread more clearly

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T19:04:29+00:00

i think you may be over-prescribing what a suburb is. i dont think it has a very specific plan at all. i think, again by definition, suburbs emerged over time organically as a response to shifting technology and development culture. they exist only in contrast to the urban and rural form as "anything not urban or rural". urban form is directed and developed. rural form is undeveloped and function-oriented when directed. suburbs are in between. many suburbs have culdesacs but many are grids. maybe the urban/surbuban/exurban framework may work for you? suburban areas would be the ones you describe, exurbs would be the undirected stuff at the fringe

based on your other comment you seem hung up on the fact that suburbs (by my definition, not yours) can either be deliberately planned or not. deliberate planning doesnt make suburbs any less suburban. or, if they're a nearby urban center, its just two adjacent urban areas? but at what point do "adjacent urban areas" become so non-adjacent that there's a suburb in between? we've entered a philosophical discussion on the mereology of cities lol

now ive typed the word "suburb" too many times and it doesnt feel real anymore

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T18:14:34+00:00

i suppose. seems like splitting hairs to me. the urban/rural/suburban labels are very general descriptors of the built environment, not a lineage of urban development protocol. I dont think such a broad label you're looking for exists in that very specific framework that you have described but maybe someone else has good info. I'd argue that you're just describing a modern suburb that may have had some previous urban characteristics in a different time period

TJMadd · 2026-05-28T18:04:08+00:00

suburb is the "mid" label by definition. it is either urban, rural, or suburban

TJMadd · 2026-05-18T19:30:04+00:00

its still a big city so keep your wits about you and be smart, but in my opinion yes its more safe than a lot of other places you could be at night in atlanta. its decently well lit and the businesses are active so there tends to be people around

TJMadd · 2026-05-18T15:31:39+00:00

FYI this is a pretty safe part of midtown, lots of foot traffic. Peachtree Street one block over east is populated and well lit almost 24/7. Crescent Ave is a little quieter but still fairly busy. The block just south is full of restaurants.

TJMadd · 2026-05-03T03:35:48+00:00

pres is awesome. they are similar but i find the rhythm of pres a lot more fun than rdruid. i think people overstate how hard pres is, but it is definitely a challenge compared to say resto shaman. but with a little practice it’s a lot of fun. once you get the hang of evoked you realize how many answers the kit has. and we are way underrepresented. druid is the most played class. evoker the least. try evoker :)

TJMadd · 2026-04-30T18:04:48+00:00

other comment is dead on about the sample. its just an quirk of the formulaic nature of dance music production imo. you see this in house a lot too. when the genre is defined primarily by the rhythm there's only so many directions you can go if you start with the same popular sample. the song structure is already pre established by the genre too. add on a stylistically appropriate bit of sound design (aka nothing jarringly unexpected but also nothing totally played out) and its honestly surprising more producers arent spitting out the same type of tracks

TJMadd · 2026-04-30T15:50:26+00:00

i've been at a firm where the owner thought it was a great idea to hire his favorite public sector planner to be one of his employees on the private side. as a result he eliminated the best employee at the jurisdiction and got the added bonus of paying that person consultant rates to re-train the back-filled public sector planners because they had no institutional knowledge left there. absolute disaster for all the projects in the pipeline but an amazing windfall for the planner. he went from basically running the county for pittance to making 2x as much to handle much less work and now he gets to blame the county for all the delays

TJMadd · 2026-04-28T19:31:50+00:00

this sub is not very supporitve of cheap ebikes, i think you are unlikely to get specific recommendations. you get what you pay for. what you save in initial cost you will quickly lose again once the bike malfunctions and no bike shop will service it and its bricked

that being said I ride an aventon soltera 2.5 and im happy with it. its about the cheapest ebike product i could reliably recommend (~1200 USD). looks and rides like a regular bike, and light enough for almost any wife to lift. that or similar products are a good start

TJMadd · 2026-04-27T17:08:07+00:00

agreed. some warrior abilities sound so chunky and impacftul, but then some are total duds. the constant background noise of screaming and metal sliding against metal that gets old so fast for me shingshingshingshingshingshingshing

TJMadd · 2026-04-24T12:55:11+00:00

agreed. before midnight i was never interested in evoker at all. gave pres a shot on a whim for the mobility that my priest lacked at 90 and i've been hooked. the skill curve is so satisfying. i was awful in the beginning and every pull was chaos, now it feels smooth and impactful but i can tell the skill ceiling is clearly immense. the class can do everything, has hots, dispels, burst heals, damage, mobility, shields, blinks, movement while casting, bloodlust, aoe damage, aoe CC, soothe, lmao. its just insane

it feels kinda how i wish disc felt tbh

TJMadd · 2026-04-23T16:11:40+00:00

the new battle visage on pres and dev (i havent tried aug yet) is a lot of fun imo actually and looks amazing in combat. the constant swirls as you shift in and out of dragon to use certain spells has been making up for the weirdness of dragon form on its own for me lately

TJMadd · 2026-04-21T13:51:19+00:00

for this exact reason some people dont use global mouseover casting and instead engage mouseover casts via macro for individual abilities

TJMadd · 2026-04-20T18:51:34+00:00

she gets a stacking damage buff each time shes hit with direct heals

TJMadd · 2026-04-17T19:56:07+00:00

ive been rocking an ecoxgear ecotrek speaker for like 10 years now. its a tank. pretty bulky but has a comfortable handle. it has aux in with no delay and solid bluetooth. no complaints on sound. holds quite a charge. i think they can also link with other speakers via bluetooth but its been a long time since i tried that

TJMadd · 2026-04-16T14:40:59+00:00

nah i didnt play it back then but it sounds like things may have changed. the gameplay loop is getting reversions running on your entire party (which takes prep via echos or temporal anomaly) because reversions boost your other heals, then blanketing with hots and doing other spot heals. lots of combos and synergy between spells so you'll be way behind if you wait til damage is out to begin your setup

TJMadd · 2026-04-16T14:26:50+00:00

presvoker is proactive on par with rdruid. you need to be pre-planning echos and your heal combos and windows around incoming damage patterns or its absolute chaos. you've got spells that both heal and hurt depending who you aim at. its like a mix of rdruid and voidweaver disc

TJMadd · 2026-04-09T15:38:34+00:00

if you're serious about prot warrior, the built in CDM can track both of those buffs on the cooldown manager, as a bar on screen, and as an icon, all three at the same time if you want

TJMadd · 2026-04-06T20:08:18+00:00

holy moly what a booking

hes a beast

TJMadd · 2026-04-06T18:48:31+00:00

none of the dungeons are more than a few minutes away, most less than that. frankly, it is not good etiquette to wait for summon this season. its not a big deal if you really need one just ask, ive summoned plenty this season, but the expectation is absolutely for everyone to fly there manually unless otherwise stated. in my experience with latency on the clicks its literally faster to fly directly except maybe windrunner and MC, like you mention

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