@toasthaste / toasthaste.tumblr.com
The Mississippi-Arkansas border was set to the Mississippi River as it existed in 1836, but since the Mississippi River changes course constantly, there are now little blobs of Arkansas on the Mississippi side of the river and vice versa.
Oxbow lakes!
Banjo-Kazooie - Gruntilda’s Lair map!
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS - World Map of the Forbidden Lands, with some tiny colossi for good measure.
I've started quilting my quilt and I thought it would be fun to approximately quilt in the shape of major roads (thanks yarrow for suggesting this in april) but now I want to quilt it more densely and feel locked into the road thing as 1) it is a sin to lie 2) as i am learning, Boston has an infinite number of roads
I will actually probably do leafs or vines or so on but wanted to share my road conundrum
Additional planning materials:
This is an absolutely gorgeous project!! I love your quilting style and especially the way you represent buildings. I got excited when this post showed up on my dash, because I have a degree in geography, and in your quandry over "lying about roads," you are encountering a situation that mapmakers train for! The term you're looking for is cartographic generalization. Please forgive a nerd infodumping on the internet. I hope you find this fun to read!
Basically: if you wanted a map to convey a territory in utterly perfect accuracy without losing a single detail, it would have to be 1:1 scale -- exactly the same size as the territory! However, that would not be a very useful map. Imagine trying to unroll that on your kitchen table.
So absolutely all maps lie. Or for a more generous way to put it, they employ cartographic generalization techniques. This just means that cartographers decide what level of detail to include that makes their map most useful, legible, and ideally also aesthetically pleasing. Here are some example techniques!
Cartographic generalization always involves some discernment. For example, because I'm a fucking nerd, I like to amuse myself by looking at maps of places like Indonesia and checking what islands are included or not included.
I don't think it's a grave crime to remove tiny islands from the Indonesian archipelago on a global map. There are SO many islands, and can be genuinely hard to visually parse at certain scales, so generalization makes a map more useful. However, people live on those islands! Those are real places that matter! The decision to remove them does carry some weight. It's interesting to think about.
All this is to say -- with your lovely quilt project, you are both an artist and a cartographer! You are gonna have to leave out some roads, but you don't have to feel bad about lying; it's just a part of every map's process.
🥺 I love this addition so much! Thank you! I don't have anything smart to say so I will just share one of the quilted maps of Linda Gass as a little snack to go with your interesting words
Urban Power vs. San Lorenzo Creek – What’s Next? (2019)
The map of the world according to Anaximander (610-546 BC). He is considered one of the founders of geography.
I’m happy to see that “the place I was raised has an ideal climate and every other climate sucks” is such a universal human tendency
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
Reading a book on sea monsters on ancient maps and I thought this was such a funny way to put it. They couldn’t even afford sea monsters :///
map i made.
I live in a yaoi state 😔
Hey All,
I've been away for some time, as we've been working really hard on something quite exciting:
let me present to you the world's first ever global ocean drainage basin map that shows all permanent and temporary water flows on the planet.
This is quite big news, as far as I know this has never been done before. There are hundreds of hours of work in it (with the data + manual work as well) and it's quite a relief that they are all finished now.
But what is an ocean drainage basin map, I hear most of you asking? A couple of years ago I tried to find a map that shows which ocean does each of the world's rivers end up in. I was a bit surprised to see there is no map like that, so I just decided I'll make it myself - as usual :) Well, after realizing all the technical difficulties, I wasn't so surprised any more that it didn't exist. So yeah, it was quite a challenge but I am very happy with the result.
In addition to the global map I've created a set of 43 maps for different countries, states and continents, four versions for each: maps with white and black background, and a version for both with coloured oceans (aka polygons). Here's the global map with polygons:
I know from experience that maps can be great conversation starters, and I aim to make maps that are visually striking and can effectively deliver a message. With these ocean drainage basin maps the most important part was to make them easily understandable, so after you have seen one, the others all become effortless to interpret as well. Let me know how I did, I really appreciate any and all kinds of feedback.
Here are a few more from the set, I hope you too learn something new from them. I certainly did, and I am a geographer.
The greatest surprise with Europe is that its biggest river is all grey, as the Volga flows into the Caspian sea, therefore its basin counts as endorheic.
An endorheic basin is one which never reaches the ocean, mostly because it dries out in desert areas or ends up in lakes with no outflow. The biggest endorheic basin is the Caspian’s, but the area of the Great Basin in the US is also a good example of endorheic basins.
I love how the green of the Atlantic Ocean tangles together in the middle.
No, the dividing line is not at Cape Town, unfortunately.
I know these two colours weren’t the best choice for colourblind people and I sincerely apologize for that. I’ve been planning to make colourblind-friendly versions of my maps for ages now – still not sure when I get there, but I want you to know that it’s just moved up on my todo-list. A lot further up.
Minnesota is quite crazy with all that blue, right? Some other US states that are equally mind-blowing: North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. You can check them all out here.
Yes, most of the Peruvian waters drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the maps of Peru, if you want to take a closer look.
Asia is amazingly colourful with lots of endorheic basins in the middle areas: deserts, the Himalayas and the Caspian sea are to blame. Also note how the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra are divided.
I mentioned earlier that I also made white versions of all maps. Here’s Australia with its vast deserts. If you're wondering about the weird lines in the middle: that’s the Simpson desert with its famous parallel sand dunes.
North America with white background and colourful oceans looks pretty neat, I think.
Finally, I made the drainage basin maps of the individual oceans: The Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian and the Pacific. The Arctic is my favourite one.
I really hope you like my new maps, and that they will become as popular as my river basin maps. Those have already helped dozens of environmental NGOs to illustrate their important messages all around the world. It would be nice if these maps too could find their purpose.
Traffic Light Sequences in Europe
Data was gathered from Youtube videos and personal observations, visualized using Javascript.
by dbond09
The world has variables you’ve never considered
the population distribution on this planet is so wild. over a third of all humans alive today live in either China or India
when i read about geography i'm consumed by two questions - one is about the range of human experience, and so i poke around at the edges of small towns and rural expanses and island micronations. but the other question is about the modal human experience and that seems like it sits squarely in Asia
Yesssssssssssss yesss I've been doing demographics lately its so interesting yes yes yes
heres some maps I made of the world divided in two, three, four, and five regions of roughly equal population, respectively
6 regions -- the Americas were just a bit too small to make their own region, but I liked keeping them together. So I added the general area of Africa that I think has the most cultural similarity to the Americas. Cause ykno. Atlantic slave trade. An astute observer may notice I just made 4 and 6 by splitting 2 into 2, and then 3, respectively, and may question whether that's really at all the best method of doing this. It super is not. But its immensely satisfying and I will not stop
River basins in North America.
Each river on the map is colored according to the basin it belongs to and scaled based on its size.
(Pictured: the eight Fluvial Nations of North America. Not pictured: the International Zones; the Ocean; the Other Ocean.)
Cyclones, also known as hurricanes or typhoons, are large low-pressure systems that suck air in forcefully, resulting in circulating winds of 119 to over 249 kilometers (74 to over 155 miles) an hour.
They usually form over warm ocean water in the tropics and subtropics. Lightning flashes are more likely to occur over land than water, and most often in the tropics, where more heat provides more energy to produce thunderstorms. The hotspot in Venezuela occurs where warm, moist air from the Caribbean Sea encounters cold air from the Andes mountains.
by natgeomaps
Map of broad U.S regions
This is the best one actually I love the overlap it makes so much sense now
@amtrak-official I think you were asking about these
I love getting midwest maps
Give me a map of the midwest how you imagine it, and don't just use state lines, show me how you think the cultural area of the midwest actually exists in the US
Blue dots: cities that come to mind if I'm trying to name a Midwestern city to explain the Midwest to someone
Green dots: other cities among the 120 most populous cities in the US which feel probably Midwestern to me
Orange shaded region: Midwest core
Purple shaded region: yeah sure probably Midwestern but it kind of depends on context (Food? Demographics? Religion? Politics? Music? Natural environment/climate?)
Black dotted line: approximate "upper Midwest" versus "lower Midwest" boundary
Red line: approximate "the South" boundary- yes I guess I believe the South and the Midwest aren't mutually exclusive
Pink circled region: the Great Plains- a unified region which should be included or excluded from the Midwest as a package deal. I typically include it but I don't feel strongly about whether it would be better to consider it a separate but related region. However, if someone thinks the only thing west of the Midwest is The West, then the Great Plains should be in the Midwest, because they are definitely NOT the West.
I thought about some of the qualities people might think about the Midwest and looked up maps for them. Here they are, with the Midwest indicated by that quality circled. Note I am not making claims about whether any of these qualities are good or bad, they're just things that get associated with midwesternness.
"the Midwest is flat"
"the Midwest is not diverse"
"the Midwest was a hub for the Great Migration"
"the Midwest is union states that were not the original colonies or the far west"
"the Midwest has a significant mainline protestant population" (pink ABCUSA, orange ELCA, and green UMC on this map)
"the Midwest is farmland"
"the Midwest has wet summers and dry winters"
"people in the Midwest are of primarily German, Scandinavian, and Native American ancestry"
There are lots of these kinds of things that aren't occurring to me at the moment. But just for fun let's combine these ones into a map! There's a transparent purple layer for each of the previous maps, and a black outline for places that fall into at least 5 of the 8 regions.
Maybe this is the Midwest? Probably better than my first reblog on instinct alone.
I am sad that op never gave me feedback like they did for some others :( I want a good grade in making pictures and interacting with my current favorite theme blog :(
