Keeping Portland weird isn’t as easy as it used to be as the city grapples with the same struggles related to change and growth that Seattle confronts to the north. But a Twitter bot called “Wow So Portland!” serves as a nice reminder that weird still works in Oregon’s Rose City.
Created by artist Darius Kazemi, the feed might have 1,900 of the most boring images you could imagine coming out of a city celebrated for being, as Digg calls it, the “twee capital of the West Coast.”
Forget everything that comes to mind when you picture Portland — including the giant White Stag neon sign or the bridges or bookstores or the food trucks — and instead, check out these Google Streetview photos of parking lots, alleys and warehouses. The simple phrases juxtaposed against the images seal the comedy deal.
those unbelievable Portlanders are at it again pic.twitter.com/Uypnk6gNNw
— Wow So Portland! (@wowsoportland) March 12, 2017
hipsters are ruining Portland pic.twitter.com/9RwowdkmEq
— Wow So Portland! (@wowsoportland) March 19, 2017
gosh so Portland pic.twitter.com/rxEH52DxOc
— Wow So Portland! (@wowsoportland) March 20, 2017
only in Portland pic.twitter.com/Q5DkTxz84c
— Wow So Portland! (@wowsoportland) March 20, 2017
lol Californians are changing Portland pic.twitter.com/Z7NRU4IYen
— Wow So Portland! (@wowsoportland) March 10, 2017
Straight out of post-“Portlandia” Portland and seizing on the backlash that inevitably came from that show’s popularity, “Wow So Portland!” is a perfect response to tech-fueled towns that are being dotted with same-same apartment buildings and overrun by too much traffic and … love them or not … Californians!
Kazemi says in his Twitter bio that he makes “weird Internet art” and another of his projects, @NiceStatistics, finds “only the nicest statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.” The bot in this case tracks down the number 69 whenever it shows up in random reports.
