But the towering oaks, pines and palms that gave this sunny but flat, featureless city its character toppled like ranks of giant soldiers, dragging down power lines, wrecking roofs and blocking almost every road.
While Grandvalira is overdeveloped, with pistes packed into a rather featureless domain, Vallnord has character, thanks in part to its wooded slopes.
Instant Architecture Give character to a featureless room with this modern take on Colonial-style wall panels.
Then, with a suddenness that made me reel in my uncomfortable, undersized chair, there was a jump cut to a couple of animated characters - strange, featureless Morph-like creatures - humping and thrusting like there was no tomorrow.
So much so that the human characters often become part of a featureless foreground as the aforementioned matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs.
The alternative is a bland, meaningless existence in which we are reduced to the status of mere consumers, meekly leading our ordered, featureless lives, with all the human character globalized out of us.
The film also influenced American film productions: John Carpenter has suggested that the film inspired the idea of a featureless mask for the Michael Myers character in the slasher film series Halloween.
Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels... tacky.
The Karakum and the other featureless deserts enter, in part, all the above-mentioned areas.
