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Weren’t the big map books all Rand McNally? I remember using Mapquest print outs because my Father didn’t trust GPS since it ‘made you lazy.’ This was when GPS like Tom Tom was new and people were not paying attention and would turn into traffic or into a ditch.
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Dec 28, 2020 16:52
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RCarr posted:Hagstrom? I'm pretty sure it was Rand McNally, but I know there were some other brands like Thomas Guide for places more exciting than where we lived.
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Dec 28, 2020 16:55
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My Lovely Horse posted:I just watched Broken Flowers where Bill Murray travels all around the USA, navigating with a big stack of Mapquest printouts. It's only from 2005! To be fair it's not like at least older people leapt right onto using them. My dad still used to plan his road trips by getting his maps out on the living room floor and noting down junctions and stuff until fairly recently.
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Dec 28, 2020 17:10
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Using a physical map is really fun, but I just love road trips in general like a crazy person. It's also good to have them and know how to use them in some places. Like I've driven all around the US intermountain west and you cannot rely on having phone service there.
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Dec 28, 2020 17:58
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Outdated maps make excellent origami paper. I wouldn't do it to like, 100 year old roadmaps, but 90s ones are fair game.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:33
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I use paper maps when riding around on motorcycle road trips, it's a different feeling than following a GPS. Still keep my phone handy just in case, and I wouldn't do this if the trip itself wasn't expressly recreational, but there's a lost pleasure to counting miles and watching for the next highway sign, and watching the landscape replay itself from another perspective on the return trip.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:06
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Cracker King posted:Weren’t the big map books all Rand McNally? Your dad is right. People get in their cars and google maps their way to work, where they go every day. Ask somebody to drive to their friends house without a gps and they have no idea. It's amazing how quickly you get to know the city if you stop gpsing everything and actually pay attention to the signs and where you're going.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:52
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There are theories using GPS affects your brain in negative ways. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/7/24/20697829/gps-nueroscience-hippocampus I suck at directions so I'll take my chances, but I guess we were meant to look for landmarks and stuff.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:57
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I get super, super annoyed if I can't look at the map before starting a trip if I have to use GPS directions. Let me know where I'll end up if I make a wrong turn or I physically can't make a turn for whatever reason.  Or if you do make a wrong turn and the GPS has no idea how to get you out of that mess.... Though I'm happy to not have to rely on some weirdo at a bus stop to find out if I'm going where I want to be.
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Dec 28, 2020 20:37
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Studying a map for two minutes has saved me a lot of times from "take the next left" (meaning, take the left after the one you're currently sitting in front of), "head North on main street" (which loving direction is north? It's 1 AM, I can't even see the sun goddamnit), "In 2000 feet, turn right" (how far is 2000 feet? Is it this turn or the one I can see 200 feet past it?), and "keep left at the fork" (that's not a fork, it's a turning lane at an intersection, gently caress you). On the other hand, it also got me and my wife three miles up a closed trail (not shown on the map), swarmed with mosquitos, and pulled hamstring as we hauled rear end back down that unmaintained trail with heavy packs trying to get back to the real trail and then up to our site before dark, an injury that has plagued me for years. Some kinda garmin GPS thing would have told me that obvious trail... wasn't the trail. 
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Dec 28, 2020 21:19
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Relatedly, I asked some 20 year olds for directions while I was on my bike and I'm pretty sure they'd never had to do that before, and honestly I don't think I've done it in years. When's the last time you had to tell someone how to get somewhere other than by texting the address? Maybe that still happens a lot for people in urban areas with mass transit and walking? Not for me or my friends here in american Suburbia! Oh and before I get too  their directions were fine, they just needed a minute .
Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 21:21
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I occasionally give directions to nearby landmarks (well, before covid), because following a GPS or map in a medieval city or the unplanned city areas next to it is not all that easy. Often, the person asking will have their phone out, or sometimes a tourist map. I like helping people, so I will ask people that seem lost in their map or phone if they need help finding a thing.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:03
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Krispy Wafer posted:My father used to have those roadmap books made for specific cities that were an inch thick and mapped everything down to the neighborhood level. Those were awesome.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:08
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Krispy Wafer posted:There are theories using GPS affects your brain in negative ways. I read the article and it feels like typical science journalism, in which the worst outcome is the truest because somebody somewhere wondered if it might be true. I can't speak for others, but I use GPS for directions, and after a few times, I don't need it anymore. Like, there's a drive I make twice a year, and it's like a 60 minute ride, and I can navigate it by memory now. I don't even turn on the GPS. I used it when I first started making that drive. I can't imagine how GPS would be any different than making a map. Even before I used GPS, which would have only been before i graduated college, I personally couldn't give you directions worth a drat. I knew how to navigate my world, but God help you if you needed me to tell you how to get anywhere. I think it's just easier to blame GPS because it's new.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:50
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Cemetry Gator posted:I read the article and it feels like typical science journalism, in which the worst outcome is the truest because somebody somewhere wondered if it might be true. Yep. I use a gps for the first 2-3 times I go to a new place and then just don’t anymore. It’s literally the same as a map read by a passenger.
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Dec 29, 2020 02:31
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stratdax posted:Your dad is right. People get in their cars and google maps their way to work, where they go every day. Ask somebody to drive to their friends house without a gps and they have no idea.
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Dec 29, 2020 02:38
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This is a very specific thing that a lot of people today might not get: In the 1980 Billy Joel song, "Sleeping With the Televison On", there's this line: "Tonight unless you take some kind of chances, dear Tomorrow morning you'll wake up with the white noise" That "white noise" being the static you would see on an analog TV station that is off the air. Since, at the time of the song's writing, most local TV stations would go off the air after 1am or so and not come on until about 6am or so.
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Dec 29, 2020 02:40
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:It's also good to have them and know how to use them in some places. Like I've driven all around the US intermountain west and you cannot rely on having phone service there. I was heading to a job someplace remote in Alaska. Popped my destination into my phone gps got about an hour down the road and... oops.
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Dec 29, 2020 03:53
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Gps bouncing off mountains and high rises is a thing, google maps is rolling out patches to counteract the skyscrapers in New York and some other cities gradually. There are offline gps where you pre download the maps..
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Dec 29, 2020 03:57
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People in general just suck at directions and suck even more when they have to externalize them. People think I have a mutant superpower cause I know which way North is.
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Dec 29, 2020 04:20
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Mister Kingdom posted:This is a very specific thing that a lot of people today might not get: Even the beginning of the song is a reference most people won't get - it starts with the national anthem, and that's because when they signed off for the evening, that's what they aired. But I don't even know when that ended, but it had to be pretty shortly after the song came out.
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Dec 29, 2020 06:37
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Poltergeist in 1982 had the National Anthem played before the station went off the air. Fairly important to the main plot, even.
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Dec 29, 2020 06:46
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I looked it up, and I found a broadcast schedule for the Philadelphia area in 1983 for some day. It looks like NBC 4 broadcasted 24 hours. So if you were up all night, you could watch some Bob Newhart. A few of the other channels looked to be 24 hours, but it was tough to tell exactly. Also, channel 9 aired The Crawling Eye at the same time 11 showed Black Narcissist. Fun fact - MST3K got a lot of their movies by purchasing movie blocks. Back then, movies were sold to stations in packages. So you would have different tiers. You would have A tier stuff - successful films people wanted to see, and then just go down the line until you get to the garbage they fit for MST3K.
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Dec 29, 2020 07:11
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If you're going to be in an area with no cell phone reception you can plan for that and save a map of an area for offline access in Google Maps. It has saved my rear end quite a few times.
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Dec 29, 2020 07:47
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:If you're going to be in an area with no cell phone reception you can plan for that and save a map of an area for offline access in Google Maps. It has saved my rear end quite a few times. There’s a maximum area for these maps. I think at one point Google only updated them if you were in the area, so I gamed the system by having my home in the southeast/southwest/northeast/northwest of four maximum‐size maps to effectively double the dimensions. I was always “using” these maps even if just in the corner. Now it seems that that trickery isn’t necessary because Google updates maps even for places I have not been to recently.
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Dec 29, 2020 08:19
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:If you're going to be in an area with no cell phone reception you can plan for that and save a map of an area for offline access in Google Maps. It has saved my rear end quite a few times.  And this can be done with directions, too. I currently have the top half of one home screen on my phone covered with offline directions saved from Google Maps, which were put there to support summer road trips.
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Dec 29, 2020 09:24
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Mister Kingdom posted:That "white noise" being the static you would see on an analog TV station that is off the air. Since, at the time of the song's writing, most local TV stations would go off the air after 1am or so and not come on until about 6am or so. like 20 years ago you could just about have mapped the idea of the secret snuff TV show to phenomena like rotten.com, but even a 20 year old movie with rotten.com at its heart would be like 2-3 steps removed from today. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 11:33
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Xiahou Dun posted:People think I have a mutant superpower cause I know which way North is.
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Dec 29, 2020 13:06
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Not really a media thing, but today at work I needed to make an announcement to the kitchen and yelled "ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS!" and all the teenagers looked at me like I had three heads. I guess the media tie-in would be that none of these kids would get the "shop smart, shop S-mart" jokes in the Evil Dead movies. Stores don't do live announcements like that anymore. Now it's automated announcements about wearing masks and social distancing when I'm at Kroger. :/
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Dec 29, 2020 13:11
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You should deffo start your announcements with “listen up, you primitive screwheads” though. Regardless of if they get the reference.
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Dec 29, 2020 13:37
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The HERE map app, which used to be run by Nokia, lets you download whole states or regions for offline use. As a map, it's...eh. I use it as a backup when I'm going someplace a long way away with spotty internet. I don't know if it's still an issue, but I've always had problems starting Google maps from an area without coverage, even if I have downloaded content. The app tries to talk to the Google mothership first before it'll even let me use the offline map. If it can't reach the internet, it just spins.
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Dec 29, 2020 14:41
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Jack B Nimble posted:I use paper maps when riding around on motorcycle road trips, it's a different feeling than following a GPS. Still keep my phone handy just in case, and I wouldn't do this if the trip itself wasn't expressly recreational, but there's a lost pleasure to counting miles and watching for the next highway sign, and watching the landscape replay itself from another perspective on the return trip. Yeah, there's still something unique about using a physical map instead of GPS for trips like this. My wife and I tried to do the same thing driving around country roads in Ireland. Though I still felt myself slipping into that mindset that maybe we're not taking the fastest route, oh no! Apparently when my dad was younger, him and a friend used to go driving out into the middle of nowhere at night and get themselves intentionally lost just to see if they could figure out how to get back. He said he always learned a lot about the areas and how different roads connected. To my spoiled rear end using a GPS, I must admit that sounds strangely fun.
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Dec 29, 2020 16:09
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Yeah here, that's the one for the boonies
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Dec 29, 2020 16:11
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They call a street directory a 'Refidex' here after the brand name. My parents are small regional town folk and had never heard of them, I'm pretty sure if they never visited me they would have never known about them before they were made redundant by GPS. I moved to a city with 2 million people and they drove down to visit and I had to explain to them the concept of a street directory when they started asking me how to get to these different addresses for shops/people they wanted to visit. My mother actually said, 'well we don't need one of those, we've got a map' and showed me a big foldout roadmap of 500,000 square kilometres which only showed the state routes in and out of the city. Their plan was to just drive around in circles starting in the middle of the city and ask random council workers/petrol station attendants if they knew how to get to some particular street in one of the city's 200 odd suburbs.
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Dec 29, 2020 16:39
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waffy posted:Apparently when my dad was younger, him and a friend used to go driving out into the middle of nowhere at night and get themselves intentionally lost just to see if they could figure out how to get back. He said he always learned a lot about the areas and how different roads connected. To my spoiled rear end using a GPS, I must admit that sounds strangely fun. for a while this spring i was the only person in my entire office actually going in to the office. the commute situation was spectacular, no traffic ever. to take advantage of this i would freestyle a route home, just head generally in the direction of home but variant to see how many different ways i could do it and i learned a lot about the area between my home and my job i dont knock anyone who has a bad sense of direction for using GPS because it is helpful, but leaning on GPS if you don't need it will prevent someone from developing a real sense of place around an area. and just exploring for the sake of it can be a lot of fun!
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Dec 29, 2020 17:40
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I used to travel to a variety of different work sites back before GPS was a thing. One site required 3 different interstates to get to. Each time going to the right. I later discovered I could have just driven to the left and been there in 15 minutes on surface streets. I'm literally too stupid with directions to not use GPS.
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Dec 29, 2020 18:23
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waffy posted:Yeah, there's still something unique about using a physical map instead of GPS for trips like this. My wife and I tried to do the same thing driving around country roads in Ireland. Though I still felt myself slipping into that mindset that maybe we're not taking the fastest route, oh no! Having pretty much lived all my life in Ireland, i can safely say that you'll get where you want faster if you stick to larger roads, even if they are a bit indirect. Our small country roads are tiny, like so small two small cars cannot pass each other without very careful manouvering. Like, driving from Dublin to Galway City takes 2 hours max. Driving past Galway to Clifden on the Galway coast takes about as long again, even though it's about half the distance. Worth it though, Clifden is awesome. Tl/dr dont drive on irish roads that are called like, the r1233 - the bigger the number the smaller the road.
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Dec 29, 2020 18:34
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I suspect that some ppl just have a very strong innate sense of direction and are more likely to enjoy using maps rather than GPS as a result. That’s how I feel at least, I can come up with all sorts of benefits as to why I like maps but when it gets down to it, it’s really just that it tickles my brain in a nice way. waffy posted:Apparently when my dad was younger, him and a friend used to go driving out into the middle of nowhere at night and get themselves intentionally lost just to see if they could figure out how to get back. He said he always learned a lot about the areas and how different roads connected. To my spoiled rear end using a GPS, I must admit that sounds strangely fun. I used to do this with friends in high school in the early 00s. Often entailed smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd too. Good times.
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Dec 30, 2020 08:23
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Pookah posted:Having pretty much lived all my life in Ireland, i can safely say that you'll get where you want faster if you stick to larger roads, even if they are a bit indirect. Our small country roads are tiny, like so small two small cars cannot pass each other without very careful manouvering. Like, driving from Dublin to Galway City takes 2 hours max. Driving past Galway to Clifden on the Galway coast takes about as long again, even though it's about half the distance. It's got to be a thing people do, too, we picked up a guidebook specifically listing scenic country routes. e: at one point we needed gas and realized at the station we didn't know if the pumps would work different or if you had to pay in advance or what and had to approach a very friendly traveller with an "excuse me we are tourists" routine 
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Dec 30, 2020 08:53
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Getting lost on purpose is fun and cool. You just pick a direction and wander until you see something fun. Half of my fun stories are [got lost in place X and had to make it work]. But a cellphone gps as a back up is a lifesaver when I hosed up being an explorer and just want to go to bed. I’m just old enough to appreciate warm bed over cool late night hang outs.
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Dec 30, 2020 09:12
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