[rarecoil]

> I have made many interesting and creative friends here who are from all over the world. I get to work on mobile games, but there are many other opportunities around. Among my coworkers are digital artists and painters, musicians, engineers, hip hop dancers, drag show performers, people who party all night in the Castro, a muay Thai boxer, mixologists, and more interests than I can list.

Being mostly in Seattle for about 6 years now, this is what I enjoyed the most about being based in SF and is what will likely make me return to it.

Seattle feels to be a town now comprised of corporate campuses and the suburban neighborhoods in between. It's also great if you love outdoor hobbies, but I prefer the vibrance of cities. The creative culture here feels substantially more lacking than it is in SF, and it feels extremely challenging to make new friend that aren't in technology. Of course SF has its tech-bro startup culture; here it seems most people that live around me work for Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook. At least there were easy outs in going to galleries or clubs or art/makerspaces or various meets for non-tech things in SF and I have never been able to find enough of those in the Seattle area. The COVID-19 crisis will likely choke them out further.

[akhilcacharya]

> . At least there were easy outs in going to galleries or clubs or art/makerspaces or various meets for non-tech things in SF

I hear the same thing about New York and to that I wonder:

1) Do people actually like these things

2) or are they a just a way to virtue signal their cosmopolitan bona fides to the other graduates of selective universities?

Perhaps I'm just an unsophisticated public school grad, but I've never met anybody that actually takes part in these things even when they live in New York, etc.

[rarecoil]

I'm sure I'm less sophisticated than you are. I wouldn't consider the university I went to selective by any means. But I have had a lot of friends that are musicians, and with that came a lot of hanging out with them at random venues, and from there going out to hear live electronic music became a dominant theme of most of my life in SF. Whenever I find myself back in San Francisco who's playing there while I'm around is one of the first things I look at.

[mav3rick]

Your friend circle must be pretty non-diverse then.