#people of google streetview

[googlemapsgems]

Garfield, Chicago, Illinois, US (courtesy of Google Maps via MapCrunch)

#Garfield #Chicago #Illinois #United States #USA #North America #golden hour #sunset #cityscape #people of google streetview #people of gs

[rocksalt-and-pie]

I just looked at Lebanon Kansas on google streetview and lemme tell you. It does not look like on supernatural in the slightest

#im not even sure there's people living there? there are like three abandoned houses on main street alone? #someone take the fucking google maps away from me its a problem. i have a book to write. all i ever do is look at the stupid streetview #i have an addiction #spn #supernatural #lebanon kansas #mp

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

john green quit tumblr because of the cock monologue

No, he didn’t.

This all happened a long time ago, and my memory is imperfect, but here’s my memory: The cock monologue certainly hurt my feelings! But when people are trying to force someone out of a virtual space, they sometimes resort to behavior that is similar to bullying except it’s not completely identical to bullying because the person they’re making fun of has a lot of power. (As someone who got bullied a lot in school, the feeling was similar in 2014 but it wasn’t identical--because I was aware of the fact that I was okay, that what was in danger was certain aspects of my identity/self-value that I treasured but not my entire personhood itself.)

Anyway, it hurt my feelings, and still hurts my feelings when I see it shared (it feels to me like a joke about my sexuality, although I understand other people don’t see it that way; but yeah, you don’t know much about my sexuality and I don’t really want you to but it feels like a joke about that to me, which just bums me out). 

But all of that stuff is a side effect of my job and having been successful at it, and I like my job. It is a great job. All jobs have aspects that suck. My job has fewer such aspects than other jobs I’ve had.

So yeah, I did not quit tumblr because of the cock monologue. (I also did not ask tumblr to make reblogs un-editable.) .

I quit tumblr because a few people started to make extremely specific threats. One might, for instance, send me an ask that featured a google streetview screenshot of my home alongside a plan for breaking into it.

I was super scared of these people (or possible person pretending to be a few people?) because they seemed to have a lot of knowledge about me and my family. We lived in a normal middle-class neighborhood in Indianapolis and I felt very exposed and nervous all the time in my real life, and eventually the freaked-out feeling just got too big and that’s why I quit tumblr.

(Edited to add: I am aware that prominent people sometimes use death threats against them to portray themselves as victims and protect themselves against justified criticism for their bigotry or abusive behavior or whatever. I don’t want to do that; it’s important to note that I have a lot of resources and power and so was able to, for instance, move to decrease the threat, which a lot of people can’t do. But I also feel like not talking about the experience honestly has not really helped me or anyone.)

I SHOULD’VE quit tumblr much earlier--I needed to realize that people weren’t comfortable with me in their virtual spaces and that to them I came across as cringey or even creepy, but at the time, I wasn’t nearly self-aware enough to leave for any of those reasons, and plus there was a lot of pressure from movie studios etc to stay on the social Internet so I could continue to promote my books and the stuff around them. So I didn’t quit when I should’ve, and as a result had and caused quite a few negative experiences for people. I’m sorry about the role I had in causing those negative experiences. I should’ve had a better understanding of not just how I experienced myself but also how other people might experience me. That’s something i’ve worked on over the years but still come up short on sometimes.

At any rate, I might delete this later because it makes me feel a bit like all my nerves are exposed to the air but I did just want to clarify that the, like, Tumblr Legend of this whole thing is at minimum a bit over simplified. 

[jadiealissia]

Worldbuilding Countries (Part 1)

I've lived in and visited a few countries in my life, which gave me a lot of inspiration for my fantasy novel. I'm not an expert, but I thought I'd share what I learned!

Climate

The climate will most likely come up at some point. Do you mention the cool breeze, or the orange leaves on the trees? All those nice weather descriptions will depend on the climate!

If you have a couple of different countries, it may be a little weird if they all have the same climate (especially if they are far away from each other), so there's a few things you can consider to make them a bit more specific.

Climate is of course a very complicated topic, so I will simplify it a bit.

Temperature

I like to pick a real country/city and look at its temperature graphs on Wikipedia. One important thing to note is that countries aren't simply colder/warmer than one another. I know a lot of people think that a country like Russia is cold all year round, but it is actually quite warm in summer. Some areas have a larger variation between temperature throughout the year than others (normally, the closer to the equator a country is, the less variation there is. They also tend to be warmer).

Look at Singapore:

The temperatures are basically stable all year round (the letters up top are the months). The numbers are the average minimum and maximum daily temperatures. You can see that on average the variation every day is less than 10°C.

Here is Moscow:

The temperature changes quite a lot throughout the year. Note that the maximum temperatures (summer) will occur at the opposite times of the year in the Southern Hemisphere.

You can see this demonstrated in Copiapo (Chile):

This city is in the Southern hemisphere, so their coldest months are June and July :)

One thing you may have noticed is that the bars here are taller, which means that the variation for the daily min and max are higher too. Why is that? I'm simplifying it a bit, but generally, the dryer a place is, the more variation you will get in daily temperature. Which brings us to the next thing to consider:

Humidity/Precipitation

There are a few things to consider:

Rainfall. This can vary month-by-month, and due to some complicated factors, some countries have more rain in their colder months, some have more rain in their warmer months. Some places don't follow a neat pattern or stay consistent throughout the year. Have a look at climate pages on Wikipedia to get some ideas! Even just this page on Chile has a lot of cool examples. Each city is quite different!

Although of course the "wetness" of a country related to rainfall (e.g. you'd expect greener grass somewhere with more rainfall, brownish dry grass or a desert somewhere with less rainfall), it's not that simple. UK is a wet country, right? And if you've heard of Gold Coast (Australia) it seems pretty dry, right? Well, actually the Gold Coast gets twice as much precipitation (rain) as London!

To demonstrate, I took a screenshot (randomly selected street in each city) from Google Streetview.

Why this difference? I suspect it's because the Gold Coast is much hotter. Living in Australia, puddles are normally gone by the next day (often the rain even evaporates as it hits the ground!), but in UK, the puddles would always stay around for a while.

The UK is always mossy, often the clouds hang in the sky for ages. It can look quite grey. When it rains in the Gold Coast in summer, the raindrops evaporate as soon as they hit the pavement, which makes the air feel very humid and smell strongly of rain. You can use these sorts of sensory details in your stories :)

Also, one thing I noticed, is that in hotter weather, rain can be much more heavy than in colder weather. In Australia we often get heavy rain that causes flooding. In UK the rain usually dribbles all day but doesn't get heavy. In a place like the Gold Coast you can get rain that last 10 minutes but soaks you all the way through and floods the street.

The rainfall may also vary year-by-year. Australia goes through periods of floods and droughts that last a couple of years. The mechanism is a bit complicated so I won't go through it now, but it gives you something to google!

Humidity: Deserts have low humidity, which means that you can cool off more easily in the shade and the nights are colder. The breeze feels more refreshing at low humidity as your sweat evaporates.

High humidity (like Singapore) will feel much hotter at the same temperatures and it is normally still quite hot in the shade. High humidity feels really muggy, the air feels thick. The sweat doesn't evaporate as much, so you are left all wet and sticky. The breeze can feel much less refreshing because of this.

When the temperature is below freezing, the humidity gets very low, so your skin may need more moisturiser or your lips may crack.

Those are just some things to consider while describing your weather!

Generally, closer to the sea will be wetter, further inland is dryer. Have a look at some climate maps on Wikipedia, you will learn a lot! Climate is quite complicated since there are so many factors, so there's a lot you can do with it.

UV: This is one thing that people often forget about when they think about weather. In the UK, even on a very hot and sunny day, you are unlikely to get sunburnt (unless you are very pale). In Australia, you can get sunburnt very easily in even Tasmania, which is our coldest state, even when the temperatures are chilly.

You can't actually feel being sunburnt, which I fully understood when I visited Tasmania. I was freezing, but the whole time I was being sunburnt.

Normally, UV index is higher closer to the equator, which is why people who live closer to the equator tend to have darker skin. The melanin acts as protection against the sun. Still, this protection isn't perfect, so in the real world people in Africa used different methods to protect their skin, such as using clay as a "sunscreen".

Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. This is partially because most people in Australia have pale skin (originally from the UK), but the UV index is high.

This is something to consider in your story, since it can play a bigger role in behaviour than you'd expect if you live in a cold climate. In Australia, they recommend staying indoors between certain hours of the day to avoid sunburn, and if you do go out you should wear clothes that cover your skin, a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen. Someone with very pale skin can get sunburnt in minutes. Wide-brimmed hats are compulsory at schools in Australia - you are not allowed to play if you forget your hat.

In low-UV areas, there is the opposite issue. People with darker skin can have problems getting vitamin D. Same goes for people who cover their skin with clothing (e.g. for religious reasons). However, this is a bit simpler to fix with some vitamin D supplements.

How do I use this for worldbuilding?

If you have a map of your countries, you may want to keep their location in mind when deciding on the climate :)

I like to draw up some graphs with the temperatures throughout the year for each country and some quick notes on the humidity, rainfall and UV.

You can also add some other elements to your story. Is it a fantasy? Maybe magic affects the weather! Sci-fi? You can play with the distance of the planet from the sun, axial tilt, sun size etc. (I won't go into that since it's a whole another topic and really complicated as well)

You probably don't need to know the exact details of the climate for most stories, but having a general idea will allow you to consistently describe what sorts of clothing your characters wear, the weather etc. Those are the sorts of things that comes up in almost every story (if it's long enough).

If you read this and found this useful, please reblog so I know that it was helpful. If it seems like people enjoyed this post, I will make more (I was going to talk about so much more, but this is already too long).

#writeblr #writeblr community #creative writing #world building #writing tips #writing resources #writing advice #how to write #fantasy #science fiction #climate #writing #novel writing #comic writing #worldbuilding #fantasy worldbuilding #fantasy world #writing community #writer stuff

[apas-95]

i do think the geoguessr guy gets like. way overhyped, just because 1) most clips of him getting very fast or accurate guesses are cherrypicked from longer streams where he has more reasonable results on average, and 2) the harder challenges he takes on are, while cherrypicked too, also usually on set 'maps' where there's a limited number of locations, such that it's possible to memorise (i.e. 'this grass looks malaysian' is referring to the already-seen grass of the one specific malaysian location in the set).

i think his longform techniques for geolocating images are useful, such as learning identifying regional features in infrastructure and foliage, orienting based on sunlight, and performing searches of satellite maps and streetview data once the region is narrowed down. even then, though, he has a very yankee viewpoint - upon being shown a very suburban single-family, clearly usamerican home by an interviewer, his first response was to say something (incorrect) about the telephone poles; and in the same interview misidentified polish as being 'cyrillic' - which seems limiting.

people tend to get very defensive over him, because they like the idea of genius savants, and question why he isn't being hired by the CIA or laud him for 'being 4chan' or whatever - but, in reality, the flashy skills just come down to practice, and the actually-useful longform skills are standard intelligence-gathering techniques that you yourself can learn and utilise. and, i mean, you should! think of an old family home, or some other location from your childhood, and try to locate it on google maps, remembering nearby landmarks and key features. keep mental note of the cardinal directions when you're out and about, so you can remember 'that was on a north-south road, on a hillside' later. it's fun, and on occasion, useful. [spacebar clack]

[doctorbunny]

The mission to track down (most of) the locations in Ai Nan Desu Yo!

Firstly, I want to thank @archivalofsins /Gunsli-01, this whole thing started because of us DMing, wondering if we could use the background images in Mahiru's first MV to guess which university she went to, that started this whole adventure. By the end of this saga, the process truly was a collaboration too and i would've given up much sooner (sorry for taking so long to write this up!)

It started here. The caption says Mahiru is sat on the 大学のテラス (University terrace). So we figured this was the best shot to find her uni. Gunsli tried reverse image search but it just kept throwing milgram back at us. So I got an idea:

The magic of photo editing! it worked too and I got this back:

That's right! This isn't a university but a pizza place! Specifically one called 800 ディグリーズ ナポリタン ピッツェリア (800 degrees Neapolitan pizzeria) It is right next to two universities however:

Of these two, I speculate Aoyama Gakuin University is more likely to be Mahiru's as they have a large humanities department and an option to take Chinese language classes (interestingly, it is also a Very Christian university and we know from question 19 of Mahiru's trial 1 interrogation, she believes people go to Heaven when they die. There is also a lot of focus on international students and the campus nearest the pizza resturant has a 'statue of Love' in the Majima Archives building)

Inspired by this fruitful discovery I decided to try my method on other photos:

I jumped all the way over to day 13 because I felt like the sign would aid in my search. Before I bothered with any photo editing I just did some google searches "Tokyo Marun-" I got the autofill result 'Tokyo Marunouchi hotel' after investigating it wasn't the right place but we had a location name "Marunouchi" Trying again I typed "Tokyo Marunouchi Street" Autofill gave me "Marunouchi Street Park": Bingo!

This must be some kind of iconic sign because there were a ton of results for it. The bad news is that the sign was portable and only placed out for special events. So I introduce the next weapon in my arsenal: Google Streetview With a street to work with I walked up and down Morunouchi Naka-doori avenue until I got to a building with similar square pillars to the one behind Mahiru

This place is the MyPlaza, it's got a couple different shops, but importantly there is a function room you can rent out for events just like the wedding reception Mahiru attended here. This one turns out to be further away than some of the other discoveries but it makes sense because Mahiru is travelling to an event, not on a date.

Back to photo editing! This is one of two shrines I'll identify, they become important as they get special icons on google maps, becoming landmarks to search around later.

This is the Meiji Jingu Shrine

I was on a roll so quickly moved to day 14, however, my editing trick wouldn't work here so it would only be later that I uncovered the location of the park

Searching for day 11 was much more fruitful

I was really excited to track this one as Mahiru mentions it being the filming location for her favourite movie. So I thought if we could discover that, then we may unlock more clues about her as a person

I got about this far before realising I could try a different tactic. If this was a well known spot, surely in my broken Japanese I could google it right? So with a little help of my dictionary I spat out "Tokyo red hand railing movie". Somehow this barely worked

The movie? Your Name

At this point I was rolling on the floor laughing because I had been expecting some Japanese cult classic romance movie or a domestically popular but internationally obscure rom com meanwhile Your Name was a massive box office smash hit in many places. One of the few anime movies that even non-anime fans will be aware of.

Despite this, I hadn't actually seen it myself and wasn't really in the mood to watch it (I had more locations to track down, dammit) but fortunately Gunsli came in clutch, having previously seen the movie and also in the mood to rewatch it for clues about Mahiru.

These stairs are actually at a place called Suga Shrine, making this our second landmark. (Fun fact: if you look it up you'll find pictures of movie fans recreating photos of the place)

We were starting to build up an idea of Where Mahiru's world was, the border between Shibuya and Shinjuku ward. There were several parks in the area, so I figured I'd set out to find the day 14 park location by searching through each one. I was worried this would take a while but when I started with the biggest park, Yoyogi, I basically hit jackpot right away. Immediately upon seaching it, google recommended me results for images of the park at night. It turns out that Yoyogi had a large area used for concerts (that also may have been used for movie nights). By chance, I found this image from the park at night

which looks awfully similar to the lamp/benches seen in the background of day 14... According to Gunsli, the nearby yoyogi station is featured in an important scene in Your Name, so that's another thing pointing towards them being in this park. It's not solid evidence but we'll come back to this later.

At this point I'm both hyped up and bored, so to amuse myself and just to see if I can, I decide to search for the place Mahiru's boyfriend is working at in day 8

At first I had written it off as pointless to even try searching, but Gunsli noticed that in the top left corner you can see a hint of the store's sign. It is the same colours as a Seven Eleven (a chain that exists both in the US and Japan) This greatly narrowed down my search, as it ruled out the many Family Marts and Lawsons in the area (I cannot stress how many convenience stores there are in Tokyo) Unfortunately, there were still many 7/11s to search through and thus leads to the several hours I spent on google maps, individually going to each 7/11 in Shibuya and trying to look for those bike racks, floor tiles and old security camera. It was demoralising. But when hope was nearly lost and I almost gave up (there was a heat wave outside so my brain was melting during this). Gunsli reminded me of something very important. On day 8 we get two images, the above of Mahiru waiting outside the 7/11, and one of her sat on a park bench. If we were right about the day 14 park being Yoyogi, then surely our 7/11 would be in walking distance? The search began again. The third 7/11 I found near the park was it.

In one fell swoop I had confirmed both day 8 and 14. In celebration I made a tumblr post

Now, at this point I'm running out of images to search for because a lot of the locations in Ainan are indoors, meaning they could be taken from a studio or even one of the milgram crew's homes (which isn't actually uncommon) and thus, not a relavent location. I did half heartedly attempt to look for the day 9 bar, but as you can imagine, without any external landmarks it was even more of a goose chase than the 7/11...

The last location I decided to look for was all the way back in day 5

This edit was pretty tough to make so i was very annoyed when it didn't work. By this time it was late at night, but Gunsli had a hunch that this would be a well known running route, so started looking for those. By the time I'd woken up, she got it down to a route called the Imperial Palace Running Route, which is very popular (especially with tourists, it is recommended to give it a go if you're in the area)

I found it on streetview by following road signs seen in a video of someone running the route Gunsli found (the part in Mahiru's video appears at about 1:35)

It's an area called Takebashi and here is a screenshot both of what we saw in ainan, as well as what Mahiru would've seen in the direction she ran (the route loops back on itself)

Ok I'm tired it's 1 am, finally here's a really rough map of everywhere in relation to each other

An interesting thread throughout is that many of these places are sort of tourist-y, suggesting Mahiru's boyfriend may not be from Tokyo either. The university (assuming I'm guessing the right place) taking in lots of international students and Mahiru's boyfriend working at a 7/11 (which Japanese people can do but is also Stereotypically the part time job of choice for people from outside Japan while studying) could perhaps even hint to him not being Japanese, but it's all speculation right now

I hope you enjoyed this long rambly mess, I'm so sorry it took me so long to write it all up....

#mahiru shiina #milgram #ミルグラム #milgram theory #long post

[ms-demeanor]

100% sure this is going to sound like an absolute dipshit question to someone who hasn't been relying on their phone for everything since adolescence but how do you deal with an emergency if you leave your phone at home? Like if you get stranded or injured how do you let someone know or navigate out of the situation without contacts + gps

It's not a dipshit question, and people HAVE become extremely reliant on phones but that isn't always a bad thing and it's not really a preventable thing. It may be a requirement that you have your phone at work or school for 2FA verification, etc.

In terms of navigation, here's some good advice regardless of whether you have your phone on you: Get a map of the area and know it before you go there. Don't protest in areas that you're unfamiliar with, and if it's at all possible, learn the area ahead of time. If you're the kind of person who goes to protests, it's worthwhile to scope out the kinds of areas that protests in your region happen at. You can take a weekend and drive around city hall or follow past protest routes, etc. If you can't physically go to where you'll be protesting ahead of time, spend some time on google streetview and get a feeling for what the area looks like and plan routes out.

But really, really, really, try to take a month off of relying on your phone for navigation just to practice this. Look up directions ahead of when you have to go someplace, write them down, then drive there based on those directions. Is there an unexpected blockage? Figure out how to get around it without a phone rerouting you. This isn't something that a ton of young people know how to do anymore because they have literally never done it and getting from point a to point b is something that often involves troubleshooting steps that people don't often think about.

I actually highly recommend getting a paper map of the closest large city (AAA offices will have these maps available at low prices, and if the city has a tourism board they will likely have them also, but you want a DETAILED map) and taking an afternoon to drive to that city, get yourself lost, and find your way home. This is something that you should practice. This is something that requires practice. Everyone should practice navigating strange places without their phones. Everyone should practice reading maps. Everyone should practice orienting themselves in a location without technology.

If you're going to the kind of protest that you don't want to have a record of, you should not go alone. You should coordinate with friends or activists you know and have a plan to meet up after at a specific location that is, ideally, within relatively easy walking distance. You may want to designate someone who will stay at that location with their phone or a burner phone in case people need help. You could also designate a meet-up location that has a payphone - but make sure it's actually got payphones and they actually work ahead of time.

I hang out at a Denny's in Downtown LA that's pretty close to where the jail releases people; a lot of them don't have phones or any cash when they're released, so they often approach people on the patio asking to borrow cellphones. The script that works most frequently seems to be "Hey, I just got let out and I don't have anything on me, can I use your phone to call my brother to pick me up?" That can be modified to something like "Hey, I just fell down and lost my phone, can I use your phone to call my friend to pick me up?" A lot of people will be suspicious about this, but at least some will be cool about it.

If you are worried about needing to contact people, write down a few phone numbers ahead of time. If you're injured there will be *someone* around who has a phone you can borrow to call a friend. If you are injured badly enough that you need an ambulance you can usually just *say* that and then when you get to the hospital they'll have phones that you can call out on.

You should make a point to memorize at least three phone numbers so that if you get caught somewhere and you *don't* have a piece of paper with a friend's number on it, you can still call *someone.* If you're in a car accident and you're not hurt but your car won't drive and you lose your phone, how do you call someone for help? Do you know your sibling or parent's phone numbers? Do you know a friend's phone number?

What you DO NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES do is bring 2-way radios, ham radios, CB radios, or any other kind of radio equipment to a protest. Bringing radios to a protest can increase any charges levied against you because they are evidence that you pre-planned coordinated communication and that shit will get escalated real quick.

Oh also I don't know if you kids know this, but if you know someone's first and last name and street if they have a publicly listed landline you can call 411 in the US and an operator will give you their phone number. So if you know where your grandma lives and your grandma has a landline you can call 411 to get her number when you don't have your phone handy. You can also call and use this service to get phone numbers and addresses of businesses so long as you know the business name and the city the business is in. (Usually. I once had 411 hang up on me because I was looking for the address of Pricks Piercings in Pasadena and I could see why they thought that was a prank call)

[goldmanguyperson]

if you have the time i always recommend looking around at recently wartorn places on google maps. often the images are pretty out of date, so you get to see what life was really like for people. it can really help dispel a lot of racist fearmongering and other propaganda. and i find it instills a sense of togetherness, of despair and of hope, of sadness and joy

I saw a cafe in Gaza with an image in the image carousel that showed a cool table that spouted mist, I wish I could have seen what that was about in person; as it is i have no real clue what it was for. there is a theme park in Gaza and i saw an image of a lady in a hijab with her kid having fun. some of the reviews complained about uncleanliness, crowdedness, and rickety untrustworthy structures in the park; no doubt really the fault of the treatment of Palestine. There is a small section of streetview of a street market. There is another small section of streetview, taken with a phone vertically, along a normal road. each picture i looked at had a different building.

“Temporarily closed”, most of the establishments said.

One day the map will update and much of what’s on it now will be gone

#free palestine #palestine #google maps

[priestess-of-the-north-west]

Burial site Lindholm Høje at Nørresundby, Denmark. Dated between 400-1000 CE. (Picture by Bavi, source.) More information about this site at the Vikingemuseet Lindholm Høje. And here you can look around at the site the Google Streetview-way.

Interestingly, it's not only ship shapes but also circles. Picture made by the Archaeology in Europe Educational Resources Website.

Some stone ships at Lindholm are relatively young, early Viking Age, but most can be dated further back in time, to the Northern Iron Age. Stone ships, however, go back as early as the Northern Bronze Age:

Southern Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region with important areas of ship-decorated artefacts, rock art and stone ships from the Nothern Bronze Age, illustration by Joakim Wehlin in 2022.

Besides remains and typical items for burial, archaeologists found tools, fireplaces, needles, charcoals, and other artefacts with the stone ships.

A study by Dr. Joakim Wehlin showed that some of the stone ships didn't have graves. This suggests a social use.

Wehlin also proposes that these stone ships should be related to a specific group of people in the Baltic region:

The communities around the Baltic Sea differed from the Nordic Bronze Age sphere. In the wake of these maritime groups, what could be called a Baltic Sea culture ca. 1000‑200 BCE emerged. Through establishing and sharing mutual interests, the communities around the Baltic Sea have reached a certain degree of consensus. Such a manifestation would not have been possible without an infrastructure or network, in this case, a maritime one: a “Baltic maritory”.

A tentative map of the Northern Bronze Age "Baltic maritory" by Joakim Wehlin in 2022.

#stone ship #northern bronze age #northern iron age #viking age #ritual #ceremony #map #denmark #sweden #finland #norway #germany #circle #grave

[scary-ivy]

Great news, Disneywolrd apparently has so much money in their budget they've made these unnecessarily complex "virtual tours" for their hotels that are probably supposed to invoke Google streetview but instead feel like you're navigating a DOOM level. You can look "around" a space using artificial image effects and then move forward with a much much higher "frame rate" than Google maps, meaning the image stutters around you like this.

As you can see there are people in this and some of them are blurred out but some aren't? No matter what the instant you move towards them they fade out like ghosts. In the outdoor portions the sky changes drastically every time you move. Also it's possible to move "thought" solid objects and sometimes even walls into another room. I feel like I'm going to throw up after using this for 2 minutes.

#Disney world #the swan and dolphin

[inqorporeal]

Two guys claiming to represent Google Streetview just dropped by the shop to promote a new store walkthrough thing they're pushing.

Maybe they were legit, maybe not. But if this is something Google is promoting it's such a bad idea. People are so lax with security and post passwords and shit everywhere. Some stores that allow virtual walkthroughs are either gonna get hacked or knocked over.

Whose fucking cockamamie brainfart was that.

#technology #this is such a bad idea

[googlemapsgems]

A lady and her dog in Kharkiv, Ukraine (courtesy of Google Maps via MapCrunch)

#Kharkiv #Ukraine #people of google streetview #people of gs #dogs of google streetview #dogs of gs #Europe

[hclib]

New Streamlined Church and a Street Renamed

In 1938, Minneapolis’s northside welcomed a new streamlined church, St. Austin’s Catholic Church, at the northeast corner of Washburn Ave. N and 38th Ave. N. Designed by Minneapolis architects Bard and Vanderbilt, but heavily influenced by the church’s pastor, Rev. James Troy, and his worldly travels (to Brno, Czechoslovakia in particular), the church was an unusually modern, white stucco building with steep arches and curved corners. It was unlike any other building in the city and unlike anything Bard and Vanderbilt would design again.

The Church of St. Austin was a newly-organized Catholic church, made up of about 1500 people who formerly attended St. Bridget’s, St. Ann’s, Ascension, St. Phillips, Holy Cross, St. Joseph’s, and Sacred Heart churches. The new church was named in honor of the late Archbishop Austin Dowling, who was the second archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul (succeeding John Ireland) from 1919 until his death in 1930.

It was the church that led to the renaming of 38th Ave. N to Dowling Ave. N, which was officially changed by the city council on November 12, 1937. (Note, Dowling Ave. was not named after the other famous Minnesota Dowling, Michael J. Dowling, the Minnesota politician, newspaper publisher, businessman, and spokesman for the physically handicapped, who as a boy lost three of his limbs to frostbite, and for whom Dowling Elementary School in South Minneapolis is named.)

Unfortunately, the streamlined St. Austin parish didn’t survive for long, cheaply built with stucco and wood trusses, rather than poured concrete, it wasn’t built to last. The church and parsonage were demolished in 1963, just 25 years after it was built, and five basic single-story homes were built in its place from 1964 to 1965 (pictured in Google streetview above).

St. Austin parish moved to a new brick building nearby, at the corner of Upton Ave. N and 41st Ave. N and eventually merged with St. Bridget parish. Their second building is now home to the New Oil Christian Center.

Photos, 1940 map, and building permit index card from the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. See more photos of St. Austin Catholic Church.

#Minneapolis #Minnesota #North Minneapolis #churches #Catholic churches #Austin Dowling #St. Austin Catholic Church #Minneapolis history #architecture #lost buildings #1930s #Streamline Moderne

[severeweatheralert]

Things I learned while writing two novel-length fics in the space of nine months

Or, advice I hope might be of someone use to someone out there, but all brains are different so YMMV. Ironically, this is probably the longest tumblr post I've ever written. Do let me know if you got something out of it!

Planning

You don't need to know every single plot detail at the start. It DOES really help to know roughly where you're going, plotwise and thematically, so it feels less like you're running straight into the great unknown and more like you're headed to some destination. Even if you don't quite know how you're going to get there, yet.

You don't need to know every single character detail, either. Favourite song? Favourite food? I couldn't name my own, let alone my characters'. What is important is a general idea of what makes them tick. What do they want? Why are they here? How do they think? (and if you do introduce details, save them in a notes file someplace, so you can easily find them later).

Outlines are great. Outlines are not the law. If you come up with something that works better than the thing you'd originally planned? Change it.

Scene setting

Remember that you're writing fic, not a movie script. That means you don't have an effects team to pay and you can make the entire environment do whatever you want. Forest fire on the horizon to match your characters' mood? Do it.

Trust that your readers' imagination works. You don't need to describe every single detail to set a scene effectively. Just pick out a few that give off the mood you want, and leave it at that. (Setting dependent, of course- a scifi setting will need more description than a classroom or a hospital room, where most people will have been in their life at least once). This goes for character descriptions too.

Sprinkle scene descriptors through the dialogue/action instead of starting with a whole paragraph of exposition. You'll pull people in quicker.

Research: if you're setting your fic in an existing place, it helps to do (some) research and incorporate that in the work. Simple things like incorporating the name of an existing retail chain or a highway makes your setting feel a lot more real. Google Maps is great if you're writing in a country you've never been to. Just hop on streetview.

Drafting

If you're trying and failing (multiple times) to write a scene, ask yourself if there might be a pacing reason for that. Is the scene necessary at all? Are you trying to start too early in the scene? What are you trying to establish with it, and could that maybe happen elsewhere in the story?

If you get stuck on a phrase/name you haven't picked/word you can't think of/detail you haven't yet researched: put something like [NAME] in brackets. Then keep going. You can come back to it later and you don't need to disrupt your writing flow.

Turn grammar and spell check off. Run a spell check when editing but don't get haunted by the little red line while drafting. A lot of the time its suggestions are bad anyway.

When writing dialogue-heavy scenes, it's sometimes nice to get the actual dialogue out of the way first, then come back later and add actions or descriptions in between to pace the dialogue.

Sometimes you'll have to draft a scene multiple times before it feels right. This is painful, but ultimately okay.

Feel like you should write but don't really want to? I like to set a timer for like 20-30 minutes, give it a go, and if I'm not into it by the time it goes off I'll go do something else.

Editing

Let a section sit for at least a day before going back in to edit. Give your brain some time to forget some of it. You can still draft the next bit in this time!

Sometimes it helps to set the text to a different font or to paste it into a different text editor. Trick your brain into thinking you haven't seen it before, basically. If you're brave, you can even use the editor of whatever website you're posting to.

This is when you run the spell check. But remember: you're allowed to mess with grammar and use words that the spell check says don't exist. "He deadpanned" is a perfectly understandable dialogue tag, for example.

Use a thesaurus! I like powerthesaurus.org because it has a dark mode. The main thing to remember is that you're using it to find synonyms that may fit your meaning/the mood better, not to find more complex words. Especially useful if you find yourself using the same word over and over in a section.

Practical things

Brainstorming on paper works WAY better for my brain than brainstorming digitally, for reasons unknown. Plus you get the fullfillment of using up a notebook.

Have a scraps folder for deleted scenes. Don't actually delete them! You can scrap them for good lines later.

Especially for longform work, keep notes. Things like repeated lines, relevant plot details, things you want to incorporate in future chapters: keep them somewhere where you can find them.

For writer's block: sometimes you need to let a story simmer for a bit. I like going for hikes or chewing on my plot in the shower.

I like having two WIPs with vastly different moods at the same time. One in posting stages, one in drafting stages. That way if I don't want to work on a very moody WIP, I can switch to the other and still get something done.

If you're writing longform work: you'll improve over time. Try to resist the urge to go back and edit the first chapters once they start grating at your perfectionism. Especially if you've already posted them.

Don't write the whole thing in one document if it's longer than ~10k. I like SmartEdit Writer to organize my fics. It's free.

Uploading

I'd recommend having a few chapters' backlog before you start posting. This way you a) know you like the fic enough to keep working on it for more than one chapter; b) have some backlog in case writer's block strikes or life gets in the way of writing; c) can go back and edit in foreshadowing or edit out plotholes as you discover them.

If you have (and want to give) a lot of content warnings, keep a list while you're writing the chapter, so you don't have to figure it out last minute before uploading.

Your works' stats (kudos/hits/subs/comments) say nothing about the quality of your work. This one is hard to internalize.

#writing #fanfic #fanfiction #ao3 #writing advice #writing tips #mine #writeblr #creative writing #writing advice with lang #this is very personal obviously #long post

[osakafromazumangadaioh]

Important note: basically all of the works I talk about here have some element of flashing or strobing images so if you are photosensitive please take care if you watch any of the shorts I talk about here.

One of the things I've done on my stream that I'm most proud of is marigovision where we take a little break to watch something together. I've taken this as an opportunity to show off things that people might not have seen. We've watched a lot of experimental stuff from the 40s like Norm McLaren and Len Lye, former Soviet Block animation, early computer explainers from the 70s, videos of people cooking that kind of thing. (recently I've been getting big into 8mm experimental shorts so look forward to that when i come back from my streaming break)

One of the first things we watched was an experimental short film called Shift by Toshio Matsumoto.

"One of Matsumoto’s last shorts, Shift is also among his most impressive works. Through the use of what was at the time state-of-the-art video technology, Matsumoto decomposes a residential building in horizontal stripes, thus tearing down its balance and symmetry."

If you haven't watched it, it is here. It's weird and crunchy and digital and eerie and above all else, playful. It's funhaver media, it's one of my favourite things I came across as part of screening for marigovision. I did notice something fun about it, something that I don't think I've noticed anyone has spotted. At the very least, no one in the English speaking web.

So a little while ago, I've gotten into the films of Takashi Ito. Takashi Ito is another experimental Japanese film maker from this cohort. The first short of his I saw was Spacy which knocked my damn socks off (if you look up this one, please do take care if you are photosensitive, there is a lot of strobing). Ito uses a lot of my favourite filmic techniques like stop motion and light trails to create this really otherwordly space where it feels like a haunting is taking place. The next one I saw is called Box (again if you are photosensitive, please take care with this).

The film shows a rotating box with frame-by-frame landscape photographs on each face of the cube. The box looks as if it's revolving 360 degrees, but it only revolves 90 degrees. Ito explains that he was "aiming at disturbing our awareness of space in the movement from the three-dimensional to a plane and back again."

Here's a frame from it.

Here's another.

As I was watching it for the first time I almost jumped out of my seat. That's the same damn building from Shift! Has no one else noticed this? At least on the English speaking web at least, I haven't seen anyone notice this. It's possible there's an interview with either Matsumoto or Ito where they discuss this.

So a quick biographic detail, Ito studied at the same university that Toshio Matsumoto taught at. In fact his film making style is directly influenced by Matsumoto.

He attended an exhibition showcasing works by filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto; upon viewing Matsumoto's 1975 experimental short Ātman at the exhibition, Ito thought, "I want to make a movie like this."[7] When he learned that Matsumoto was coming to work at the university, Ito abandoned plans to get an immediate job and decided to stay enrolled in the school.[7]

So a little while ago before I watched Box I was kind of curious what building this was, where and when it was shot. Because it's so strange and interesting looking, someone probably knew but I wasn't able to find anything anywhere, no one even talking about it (again, i can't speak japanese which limits me to discussion on the english speaking web, I'm sure someone has talked about this on a japanese film blog or something like that).

But the fact that the same area is also featured in Takashi Ito's Box kind of gave me a big clue as to where this was shot. I found the college that Toshio Matsumoto taught and where Takashi Ito studied and popped it into google maps, had a lil click around on streetview and, sure enough.

There it is! It's the Kyushu University Ohashi Campus. Specifically the most famous image of shift with those two circular windows above the doorway seems to be the "Acoustic Research Center Building" according to Google Maps. You can click around in here to give an eerie approximation of Shifts camera movements. It's very surreal.

Here's another wide view, it's a really quite striking campus with these very geometric shapes. I can totally see why two separate experimental film makers were both able to make something so radically different using the same space as inspiration.

Both of these were released in 1982, I'm so curious to know of the genesis of this project. Was it the younger Ito that suggested this or was it the elder Matsumoto. If anyone speaks Japanese and is familiar with experimental film during this time period I would be so curious to know.

Thanks so much for reading and watch things that make you excited to make things!

#toshio matsumoto #takashi ito #shift #box #experimental film #experimental short

[dehalogenase]

i think google earth is one thing that i would like to not take for granted. i remember pre-google earth times when my dad would tell me about the civil engineering projects he worked on in a different state as a young engineer. i also remember hearing stories from my mom about running errands in CDMX for her grandmother as a kid or swimming in the water in Acapulco. after I learned how to use google earth i asked my dad to show me where the dam he designed was and he was so skeptical at first!!! i dont blame him!

i also remember when my family used skype for the first time. it was a video call like any other but it had that uneasy sense of technological trepidation i imagine in the early telegraph and telephone offices.

the level of connection we have now is incredible, the access we have to others around the globe is astounding. what a cure for provinciality and small-mindedness!

turn on street view in Kerala or Papua New Guinea or Paris or better yet, turn on street view on back country roads in Italy or at the edge of a cliff in Chongqing. see the world and taste the similarities, imagine the smell of foreign grasses, hear the familiar sound of children laughing around a street corner. watch the road signs, wonder if people in this locale always drive a fair bit above the speed limits like you do.

think about waste, notice the neon coca cola sign above the local beer-hall. think about hegemony, spot the plastic chairs, you know the ones. think about poverty and all the dirt roads and towns-of-shanty that support your big tower PC and family computer in the office where your mother will job search after getting laid off in 2009.

zoom back out. spin that tiny blue marble around. find your home, but don’t zoom in too quickly. try to look through the windows, imagine the streetview car just outside. do you want to greet it or close your blinds?

#art #text #woolgathering