Last summer my ten year old godtwins were baking a lot of snacking cakes (the best cakes) and we needed to borrow demerara sugar from a nearish neighbour. I strapped my Apple Watch on one of them so I could find them, and I drew them a map. It occurred to me it had been a really, really long time since I last said to anyone “let me make you a map”.
I was thinking about this when I came across mapto.app — a new way to create custom maps. It’s billed as being useful for events:
But I immediately went to work making adorable neighbourhood maps — where to get the good coffee, the best view of the Harbour Bridge lights show, the pocket park with the seesaws that make music.
One of the first Kickstarters I ever backed was for a hand drawn foldable tyvek map of San Francisco. My pledge tier came with a handwritten personal itinerary for the city, which was delivered to my hotel room on my first trip.
We’ve lost touch with personal maps because we live our lives with precision GPS in our pockets, which is sad because handmade maps are one of my favourite things. There are three map projects I’ve been thinking about for years now — two of which are possible and one is more of Black Mirror episode.
The first is that I’ve always wanted to take a world map, and some pins and thread, and draw the line of travel for my whole life. Something like this:
On a world map scale, the thread would quickly become impossibly thick for frequently travelled routes (I don’t actually know how many times I’ve flown between Auckland and Wellington), but it would stretch thin across oceans and wrap the whole globe in a web.
The second thing I’ve always wanted to do is create a city map that’s actually a collision of the places I know best in my favourite cities. I know Hells Kitchen like the back of my hand, but somewhere above 55th, the map would become Upper Street in Islington. Too far along the Holloway Road, and the map is the laneways of Melbourne. You get the drift. It would be a contiguous city map comprised of the most familiar neighbourhoods from your life. Anyway, I saw how easy it would be to do this watching custom map tutorials on tiktok, so I just need to get on with it.
The third thing came from listening to my friend Lara talk about ghost cars. Ghost cars come from car racing video games. They represent your previous best time, or perhaps the best time on the track, and race against you as a translucent competitor egging you on to improve your record. Lara was using the concept to track her progress against her prior year’s work:
Ben had, in turn, been thinking about ghost cars because of this project. Back when we were all using Foursquare to check in places, Tom Armitage built a bot called Tom Armitage in the Past, that checked in as him one year earlier:
I don’t check up on Mr Armitage In The Past very much. The idea, rather, is that I might bump into him some time. How strange: to be in one of my usual haunts, and know that a ghost of me, a year in the past, is also there, watching a movie, having a drink. Sometimes, those memories are less cheery than others. Sometimes, they’re brilliant. It gives me a visceral memory: reminds my bones, my heart, what they felt. (That, for reference, is my defence against nostalgia. This isn’t just about nostalgia, because you might not like what it makes you feel. It’s just about remembering feelings; stopping to pause and remember the passage of time).
My dream (nightmare?) version of this is that I would like to run into my ghost car on the street. I’d love my future AR glasses to show me a line on the footpath that says “you’ve walked here before”. To stand on a street corner that feels familiar and realise that even if I don’t remember the exact circumstances, a past version of me was here too.
These three projects are all about maps as nostalgia — as a record of our lives. I envy people who keep meticulous journals, I’ve never been able to stick with it, but visually I’d like to see where I’ve been.
"Maps and memories are bound together; a little as songs and love affairs are," writes Adam Gopnik in the preface to newly-released picture book Mapping Manhattan. "The map is a stronger version of the trip than a video might be; it is almost a stronger version of the trip than the trip is. I look at the subway map of New York, see the dull line of numbers – 33, 42, 51, 59 – and they fill you at once with memory. Maps, especially schematic ones, are places where memories go not to die, or be pinned, but to live forever."
For some fabulous personal maps, check out the Hand Drawn Map Association.
Conclave hive, assemble. You can now play as Dean Thomas Cardinal Lawrence as he prepares for All Saints' Day in Delectatio Morosa: A Conclave Visual Novel, which is a dating sim fan project.
I’ve become obsessed with watching miniature and diorama makers on YouTube (yes, this might have started with the iconic Bobby Fingers). I really want to be a miniatures person, and I feel satisfied when I complete a kit, but I hate the process. Anyway — I dream of becoming a miniatures person now specifically to make one of these Live Boxes.
Another keynote from ATmosphere. In this, Ms Boba talks about fans (yay), but more importantly gives a great, easy to understand introduction to ATproto, PDS, labellers and so on. If your eyes have glazed over when people have tried to explain these things to you before, this will definitely help. (Also there’s a shout out to Maciej’s timeless talk Fan is a Tool-Using Animal)
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