I took the opportunity to get out of town for a needed vacation, and I’ve been 2 days driving from Portland to LA by way of Reno. Thoughts:

In the high desert and mountain towns, there’s a surplus of buildings so there are all these slapdash restaurants with no money for gut renovations so the bathroom’s somewhere real weird.

The valleys and basins have the national chains that build standardized designs new, though

Coming in from the north, Reno is like 40 villages orbiting a downtown that looks like a scale model even when you’re in it. Fuckin early-PS3 GTA knockoff-ass city.

Northwestern Nevada is like Red Dead Redemption with the ballsiest Golden Age of American Civil Engineering stuff built through it, it’s like scrubland and incongruous impounded lakes and meadows and Eero Saarinen swooping highways, there was a gratuitous monumental concrete bridge just so the freeway could take a “fuck you geography” foothill route

Also the cities there have these weird banlieue islands of dense multifamily housing surrounded by like half a mile of empty desert on all sides, keeping land and construction costs down but accomplishing no urbanist goals whatsoever

It’s true what they say though, Nevada is like a vision of an America that continued to build cheap, dense multifamily housing after WWII but built it into a car culture anyway

I hear all this about “bro country” but I’ve just been hearing a lot of ‘90s VH1-ass chick country on the radio. In fairness I do have '90s VH1-ass chick taste in music

Like, there was a duet with Sheryl Crow! And then the singer did an interview about how empowering it was to pose in Playboy!

In fairness she really sold it, referencing Dolly Patton’s cover in the 70s and how she had this all-female creative team recreate this 70s-80s country look, you almost forgot the point was to raise her profile by helping guys jerk off about her

This is Maren Morris we’re talking about. How do I know? Well…

Gardnerville, in the Carson Valley, looks like a gem that’s been discovered locally but not yet wider

Sierra Wave is one of the best radio stations I’ve ever come across.

So lately I’ve been warned that I’m losing my ability to focus both my eyes on the same point, which now that I think of it I’ve noticed a weakness in since childhood

At the end of a long day of driving it was getting to be kind of a struggle but when they deresolved I noticed I was seeing the road doubled but vertically, with one version “steeper” than the other to the furthest reflecting posts

I realized that’s because I was seeing two different focal lengths, because apparently I CAN do that pulp fiction assassin thing of focusing them independently, one was focusing on the road ahead and one on the distance, and by focusing I could even flip them from say L near/R far to vice versa

If that seems a little scary to work out at 70mph it did to me too at first but it was a straight, empty road and I calmed down when I realized that if I stayed between the lines in *either* vision I definitionally would in the other, and then it was fun to flick between them