Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Scribe]

Legendary LAN party. We'll never reproduce the conditions that produced this!

Brings back some true gamer degenerate memories. A lost age.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

When I ran tabletop RPG events at our local conventions, I always made a point to say to my DMs on the first day, "Remember, some people come here because, for their $50, they're guaranteed a table, and they have sufficiently annoyed every gamer they know with their odious personalities that nobody they know in regular life will play with them. If they're too much for you, send them to my table. I will deal with them."

Did you swat them on the nose with a rolled-up Chessex battlemat?

 

[Maxperson]

O rly?

Looking it up, it seems California's Central Valley has a population density of 155 people per square mile. It may be empty as compared to LA. But, there are 28 entire states in the US with lower population density than that! Basically, more than half the states are more empty than the Central Valley. There are five states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska) with less than ONE TENTH the population density of the Central Valley.

And, besides that, CA, as a whole, is a cultural and economic powerhouse. The Central Valley is the middle of somewhere, because CA is somewhere, in a way that, say, the middle of North Dakota just isn't.

The population is that high only because of the farm workers needed to work the fields, not because there are places to go and things to do. If you want to reach places that are somewhere, you have to travel for a long time to get to them.

The existence of other places that are even more nowhere than Central California, doesn't turn nowhere into somewhere.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The population is that high only because of the farm workers needed to work the fields, not because there are places to go and things to do. If you want to reach places that are somewhere, you have to travel for a long time to get to them.

Every time I've been to Trona, I am sure I have made a wrong turn hours back and have just been driving through the desert aimlessly before I finally start seeing signs for it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Having lived in and driven around California, there are definitely parts that feel in the middle of nowhere.

I lived in Visalia, a city in the Central Valley, for a bit and once I was driving someone about an hour to Kettleman City, a small town that's mostly a big truck stop. When we got onto a small highway crossing farmland I realized we were low on gas. I figured we'd fill up at the next station. We kept driving and driving and driving... No gas. Finally I saw a little town off the highway. I turned off and I was driving around. There was literally nothing open, nobody walking around, just closed stores and a little cul-de-sac. I saw a guy hosing leaves off the sidewalk. I parked and I asked him if there was a gas station in town.

He looked at me and shook his head and said, very slowly, "No... no... not here..."

If that doesn't give you the feeling of the middle of nowhere, I don't know what does!

Another time I went on a road trip driving randomly around California. I turned east from the coast and drove through the mountains. I was passing oil derricks... I stopped at a little diner. When I sat down at the counter, the waitress asked, "Who are you?"

The diner was basically only patronized by guys from the oil derricks.

The rest of the trip was like that as I drove out to Barstow and other tiny towns surrounded by dry mountains or desert.

Yeah, I had a fair amount of this when I was younger. There are some very odd cases toward the east side of the state where you can drive up what are essentially country roads (even though they connect at least town-sized settlements) and drive through areas you realize sometime in the last 40 years have essentially dried up and blown away (probably from mining concerns closing and the areas no longer being viable). You know ghost towns exist but you usually don't think in terms of them having gas stations in them...

 

[DrunkonDuty]

A friend and I once got lost somewhere in central California. Felt pretty isolated, but not so isloated we couldn't find a motel by the side of the highway. No idea what, if anything, this contributes to the debate.

I will say 155 people per sq mile seems high for an area that isn't a city.

 

[Autumnal]

People don’t realize how some parts of David Lynch’s movies aren’t made up or exaggerated at all

 

[overgeeked]

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

Barstow is "the big city" people in Trona travel hours to get to, hilariously.

(To be fair, they have a famously good Del Taco ...)

 

[trappedslider]

After I'm done binging my current show I plan to watch B5