Roadside Attraction

theoffingmag.com

42 points·aways··8 comments

I adore roadside attractions. I have two key sources for finding them:

https://www.atlasobscura.com has a very high bar for inclusion. I fire it up anywhere I visit and see if there's something obscure and interesting to check out.

https://www.roadsideamerica.com has a very low bar - like a rock that someone painted pink and added googly eyes to and now it looks a bit like a pig. Any time I'm on a road trip I keep an eye on this (I use their inexpensive iPhone app) to see if there's anything worth a quick diversion.

I love both of these platforms. The Wikipedia "map" tab on the iOS app is also a great source of neat local oddities.

I like that you take time out from the AI wars for stuff like this.

For those of you like me who tried to highlight then right click on Marfa Lights and ran into their annoying right click hijack, here's the Wikipedia link...

Well now it works. I swear it didn't work before. Oh well anyway here's the link...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights

For a sec there I thought it said "Roadside Picnic"

You could do worse than spend some time with this fantastic 1972 novel (forward by Ursula K. Le Guin):

https://content.cosmos.art/media/pages/library/roadside-picn...

Bonus: this version has an afterward by author Boris Strugatsky which is quite entertaining.

The description of the (aftermath of the) picnic in the novel was absolutely beautifully haunting and that verse alone to me made the movie feel like superfluous variations of the theme.

The article is missing images. I used this dataset some time: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/headsortails/us-roadside-att...

highly recommend going through it a bit, lots of fun pictures in there.

Very nice writing.

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