This is not a good hotel room for Video Game Writers!

I went to all the trouble of packing up my XBox and getting it through airport security, and carrying it to my hotel room.

I pull the TV around to plug it in last night, and lo and behold, the whole thing is clamped down with all sorts of boxes, screwed over everything and attached securely around everything and there's no way I'll be able to get my XBox cables into there.

In this day and age, when games and technology are becoming ever more portable, and travelers - like me - want to game on our own games, hotels really ought to allow that.

Right.

In less ranty news, Alpharetta seems like a nice town. In America, we have so many retail chains that you can travel all over the country and encounter all sorts of familiar things. There, a Starbucks. There, a Walgreens. There, a Mickey D's. I'm not really moving to a new city. I'm moving to a remix of the last city.

Even the apartments look the same.

Where is the original city? Where is the Platonic ideal of America, upon which all others are remixed?

Somewhere in America there is a city with streets both grid-like, and meandering, and with buildings as pure to the vision of Americana as possible.

Is it in America? Maybe it isn't even *in* America. Maybe it's in Canada. Architects and city managers accidentally stumble upon it in the course of normal travel. They tell each other to go there, see this city. Maybe it's in Europe. Full of American chain restaurants and shops. Full of familiar, bland retail facades. One could not imagine art that was not for a hotel, or the friendly, inoffensive walls of a Starbucks Cafe. In Okinawa, where Asian girls speak "Engrish" slang and drive big cars around to Irish pubs, Italian restaurants, and grocery stores with huge aisles.

Cities, like disco tracks, iterate across the dance floors of the world. Designers and architects twisting around upon a single, simple theme: "Inoffensive, clean, plenty of parking, mixed use retail, gated communities" repeating like an ode to joy in the subconscious brain matter of all these designing men and women.