> I consider asking the boys if they appreciate music beyond the norm, maybe bebop or grime or chiptune, but luckily realize the ridiculousness of that line of questioning. So instead I ask about their favorite rappers. They amass a respectable list: Kendrick, Wiz, Jeezy, Kanye, Juicy J.

There are many more lines just like it scattered throughout the article, and I hope I do not have to explain why they leave a negative impression of the author. I am sorry Mr. Sorgatz but your culturally-savvy, hard-edged commentary makes me feel like you are a phony.

We both read the same thing, but I like the author and you dislike him. Which is really interesting, because this is a totally uncontroversial article. It's funny that subtle choice of words have hugely different effect on different people.

Maybe I should start reading posted content more often, rather than reading only the comments?

> Every spring, around 20 new kids don graduation caps, celebrate their nascent adulthood with a class party in a rye field, and return to the farm the next day to plant corn or milk holsteins.

It's like milking holsteins and planting corn is inferior to complaining about it. As if the author is the only one smart enough to complain.

Also, the photography was amazing (and I'm glad that Photog2 was a character!). It's worth skimming for the photos alone.

I didn't interpret their tone as trying to be hard-edged or snarky; I felt it was just them honestly showing the process of someone returning home to a place that was incredibly isolated 25 years ago, and then trying to rectify what it's like for these kids in that same town who now have access to so much more information and avenues of communication.

I liked the different asides where they mentioned what was popular in the town 25 years ago versus what the kids like now, and how the kids interests today compare to bigger city tastes. I grew up in a town that's 5x larger than Napoleon but still pretty small, and I see many parallels with this story that match my experiences.

Funny as it is, that's the author's confession of his own feelings as the last sentence.

I grew up in a rural town just outside the suburbs of a US rust-belt city. I had a similar experience, but not nearly so severe. Luckily for me, the suburbs were a 40 minute drive, and we had access to 2 metro areas worth of radio stations (thanks to being across lake Ontario from Toronto). So I not only heard the talking heads thanks to CFNY, I saw Depeche Mode, New Order, etc in concert with my high school friends.

The point I was going to make is that I just returned to the town for the first time in 20 years (my parents moved away in the mid 90s) due to a family vacation to Niagara Falls. I was AMAZED at how little the town had changed. If I squinted, I could be back in high school in the mid 80s. The only real differences were some of the shops had changed hands and the cars were newer. This is in stark contrast to the places where I've lived in my adult life (Raleigh-Durham, the Bay Area, Virginia) where things change at a rapid clip.

The piece was a little too rambling for me, but the mix with the good pictures made it all work.

Genuinely curious, I don't know enough about photography to tell what shots would be hard to capture.

There's not a lot of information in the scene. It's way easy to burn out big hunks of the image and try to grab some contrast in the boards of the building or in the roof.

What I'm guessing he did -- and this is only a guess -- is take a multiple-exposure shot and then do some magic post-production. But instead of trying to pull more information out? He left it mostly a wash, with only the roof having detail. (I'm thinking he pumped that up a bit)

This makes your eye struggle to find information and meaning in the walls of the church, or the surrounding land. You see the roof, it is interesting, so you assume there are other items of interest there. But there isn't any -- which nicely tells the story of a remote community that's timeless, the gist of the writing.

He formed the shot in an original way to have the viewer's mind play into the theme of the text, while still making a nice image. Very cool.

ED: Actually the more I look at it, the more I like it. It's almost like he used a gauze of soft focus on one of his shots, with the church in focus and everything else just a little blurry.

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/XlF3k_kKSMqjacY8minUhQ

In answer to your question: HN has stories like this every day, maybe you haven't scrolled through the 2nd/3rd/4th pages enough?

I grew up in Spokane, and graduated from high school there in the late 80s. At the time, the place seemed just as boring and backwater as Napoleon...though it retrospect it was far from it. I was eager to get out and go to "real" places, so I joined the military. I saw new states, countries, continents.

I still went back to Spokane, though. Up until this year, I had family there. My mental map, however, was frozen in the early 90s; 1993-94, specifically...the year I lived in town after getting out of the Army. Subsequent visits to Spokane over the next 20 years became increasingly jarring, as that city moved on but the image in my head did not.

In that respect, I envy the author because sometimes a lack of change can be comforting. The fast-food place where I worked my first job for two years? Demolished. The same for movie theaters where I took dates, pizza parlors and bowling alleys where I hung out with friends. That's progress, of course, and if Spokane hadn't changed at all that would probably be even more disquieting.

After reading the article, I think the residents of Napoleon may have the advantage over the rest of us "big city" dwellers. While modern technology has made it into their world, they still have developed interpersonal skills that a close-knit community fosters. In my neighborhood, in contrast, I barely know my neighbors. We all have Netflix. I've worked on sexy, shiny things in my career but as the cutting edge has moved on, they've faded away; folks in places like Napoleon are more likely to focus on hardy things that last.

Small, remote towns have obvious disadvantages but I think sometimes their benefits are overlooked.

I'm probably blindered by my asocial nature, but I strongly agree. "Internet culture" is often considered synonymous with urbanization, but improvements in communication and delivery make rural living (at least in the developed world) much more appealing.

For me at least, technology removes the need for proximity. If I were incubating a technology company and working with a small team, a small town in the Dakotas would be an ideal location. Yet so far as I know all of the incubators are encouraging companies to base themselves in expensive (and distracting) urban areas.

Assuming you have an idea, and a small team, and need a place to implement it, what are the actual disadvantages to a rural location? Sure, maybe bustling cities are great for generating new ideas, but what startup has ever been long on time but at a lack for ideas?

Veering off in analogy, my guess is that there is probably a correspondence between those who like "open office layouts" and those who want to live in dense cities. Many productive engineers prefer offices with doors, and fewer distractions. Am I wrong to associate "rural life" to a "an office with a door"?

The 1970s Plymouth Sapporo in the foreground (a rebranded Mitsubishi Galant). Haven't seen one of those in decades, and this one is rustless. Behind it a 1990s Chevy Caprice, a 20000s Chevy Impala, and then the grain elevators. It is the land that time has forgotten.

  Not venturing out-of-doors, one may know the world

The area was mostly settled by "German-Russians". These were Germans who moved to Russia under Catherine the Great, and then re-immigrated to America in the late 1800's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans. German was the primary spoken language in the area until World War Two (1940's) when it became too politically unpopular to continue. Which is to say, they made it through World War One before making this change.

Pheasant hunting is probably the primary activity that brings visitors in to this part of the country. Pheasants were introduced from Asia about the time the German-Russians came, although they nativized faster. There is lots of public land available for hunting, much of it enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep land out of production and often opens it up to public access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_Reserve_Program#E....

The town's approach too "development" was different than other parts of the US. Primarily, they were concerned with tearing down houses before they became dilapidated, or worse, "bought up by some California trucker passing through who'll move in with his Go-Go girlfriend" (close to exact quote). You could (and still can) buy a very nice house in town for less than $50,000, or a livable fixer-upper for much less. There's probably better potential for being a remote technology worker now than when I was there trying to do it by dialup.

I was back a couple falls ago, visiting from California for pheasant hunting. The town I was in looks exactly like the photos in the story, enough so that I wondered at first whether Napoleon was a pseudonym. Visually, it was almost identical to how it had been when I was last there a decade before. I had been wondering how much impact the internet has had on the culture, and this article gives nice insight. Thanks Rex!

Strange. That was the only daytime form of entertainment for a large portion of the teenage population of towns like this: driving up and down Main Street and in front of the school, either showing off your car (your status) for the girls or showing off that you have a girl in the passenger seat.