Comment by asciimov
3 years ago
As a kid that grew up on the south plains (Texas panhandle). I have a love hate relationship with those windmills. On the one hand it's neat seeing all that green power generation. On the other, it does ruin the landscape to some extent, it can be visually jarring to be driving some back road, go over a rise that, and be smack in the middle of a wind farm. It also can be a little distracting at night, where the darkness is awashed in blinking red lights.
I think the red lights make them more mysterious at night.
Especially when you drive over a hill and it's all foggy, and there's this big field of red dots flashing. It's like the robots are coming :) I like it.
I love the red dots. My partner and I drive out to Big Bend every couple years to spend a week or so there, and on the drive back there's a stretch of road where at night there's a huge number of the dots juuuust barely visible over the horizon, and then you start to crest a certain hill and suddenly BOOM there's even more! It's always glorious and I wake her up everytime so at least one of us can fully appreciate the majesty. Unfortunately my partner doesn't drive these days, her epilepsy has gotten bad enough that they (honestly thankfully) yoinked her license, so I don't really get to take it all in since I'm also driving the car at the same time and trying not to die while staring at the pretty lights :(
Everybody likes to tell their "...and that's what inspired me to go into a technical field" story.
We had several radio masts in an opening near our home growing up. I'm going to start incorporating those into my story. "It was then, gazing at those red lights as a two year old, that I knew I was destined to spend my life writing YavaScript."
Probably some truth to it, tbh. That and locomotive engineers honking when we'd drive by making the universal "honk the horn" sign.