Welcome to Reno

City of Cards C5.11: HERE!

Back from my road trip! I got a chance to visit friends up in San Francisco and meet my baby nephew for the first time. I'm exhausted, but it was a good vacation.

I also went to see the Madoka Rebellion movie and, well, it was pretty darn great. If you're a fan of the series, I think you'll find it a pretty satisfying ending.

As for things in City of Cards? Working on these pages has been an interesting experience. I'm going to write a bit about my thoughts and the significance of the map object so if you want to keep your brain clear of my ramblings feel free to ignore from this point on.
I've spent a lot of time traveling through the southwest over my lifetime. Road trips were a big part of my childhood and in the last several years I've driven back and forth across the States more times than I ever thought I would.

Disposable objects are a big part of the culture that I grew up in. Every road stop, every motel, every town with a tiny historical museum has these tourist maps that you pick up and stick in your bags and maybe look at, maybe don't, especially now that more and more we print our maps out off the internet if we have a piece of paper in the first place.

But when I started working on this section, writing the discovery of an object with little to no value in our current society as having history and presence to people that have no sense of their own history, it made me feel a great sense of nostalgia and fondness for these little road marks.

Discovering your own history is something that takes a lot of work. You've got to keep your eyes open for the road signs that tell you who you are now, where you came from, and where you're going. When someone dumps you out in the desert with no information, the only way to find out where you are is to start walking and see what you run into.

So when Ace hands Plato this tourist map, there is a real desire on Plato's part to know more. This object is significant to him. Its existence, in his mind, is adding to his own sense of who he is. His life is being given historical context on top of the knowledge of the past history of Reno.