#trap streets

[justafrogwhobuildsworlds]

Veiled spaces

-I have 2 active worldbuilding projects, Verdun, which is high fantasy, and Achetamor, which is urban fantasy. The following is part of Achetamor.

Constructed be the great wizards of past, veiled spaces are areas between touching points, a street between attached houses, a room between the wall and the wardrobe.

To access these spaces without becoming a wizard, you must locate it's entranceway, called an "archgate". Every archgate is different, you'll know it when you see it. It can be inside or outside, but typically appears as a bricked off arch or doorway.

The true sign of an archgate is the gatekeeper, every archgate has a gatekeeper. It could be a painting, a statue, a person, or anything else with a face. The most common is a face carved into the keystone of the archway. The gatekeeper cannot leave their archgate.

Speak to the gatekeeper, and if you believe with enough confidence that they are a gatekeeper, they will speak back, and may open the archgate and allow you entry.

Maintaining a veiled space is a constant effort, a wizard dedicates their life to preventing it's collapse, and is often the authority who tends to any issues it's residents may have, as well as greeting new residents where applicable.

It is a task passed down through generations. Very long generations considering wizards' lifespans.

Trap streets, named after the cartographic feature that often secretly discloses their location, are hubs for the aware to talk, hang out, trade, and often seek shelter, where they need not worry about accidentally revealing magic to the unaware. This is especially vital for those who have been visibly affected by magic.

In the event that a veiled space is unmaintained, or one of it's boundaries is broken through, there are two ways it can collapse: A Crumple, in which the boundaries moving inwards push the contents further inwards, crushing them into a single point, or: An Expulsion, where the boundaries moving inwards push the contents outward, pulling apart the touching spaces on the outside to make room for the new space between.

Both are devastating.

[anotheruserwithnoname]

I might have found a trap street

Putting aside the drama and tragedy of “Face the Raven,” a cool aspect of the episode is Sarah Dollard based it on a real concept - the “trap street”, a fake street mapmakers would put into a map to catch out copyright infringement. As someone who has always been fascinated by maps, I love the idea.

Imagine my surprise and amusement to discover an apparent trap street in a modern day city map! I was looking at a street atlas for cities and towns in Southern Alberta, and I was checking out a street map of the city of Drumheller (about 150 km northeast of Calgary) to check out an address, and something caught my eye. It was a street with a name that made me chuckle - Bowling Alley.

I’ve seen tongue in cheek street names before, so I went onto Google Street View to see if I could take a peek at “Bowling Alley”. If there’s a street sign or something I might take a picture or something next time I drive through Drumheller which I do several times a year. Before doing so, I checked the street index at the back of the atlas in case it might have been, you know, an actual bowling alley mislabled on the map. I’ve seen that too. I’ve see schools and churches plotted in the middle of rivers and lakes. But no, it was listed as a street. So go to Street View.

Bowling Alley doesn’t exist! Where the street supposedly runs, there’s a house and a yard. And the house on Street View appears to be 1960s vintage, it’s been around for a while. So this isn’t a new community we’re talking about, and Bowling Alley is a very minor street on the map - it’s not some new road extension they haven’t built yet. So I think it is a trap street!

Has anyone else come across real-life trap streets in modern maps?

[carrionlaughing]

Trap Streets Are Real, And Here Are Some Of London's

Not made up by Doctor Who.

Awesome article about London’s real trap streets! I’m pretty sure the first place I heard about trap streets was tumblr, and now I get to post an article about trap streets inspired by my Who ep back to tumblr. THANKS TUMBLR ILU

[theinsidiousdice]

Like magic

A short piece, detailing the phenomenon known as trap streets. (Lyrics are from Magic, by Mystery Skulls.)

The spell you got on me, it's like magic His eyes crossed with the effort. He could have sworn that the crossroads he stood at looked different just a moment ago. A step back, then a step to the side-- There! For just a moment, the street to the east flickered. Well, 'flickered' might not have been the best word, he considered, but there wasn't really a word for what he had seen. For one brief instant, two streets had occupied the same place in space, and he could see both of them as clearly as if each of them were supposed to be there. Fog began rolling out of one of the streets, but not the other. Though it took me by surprise, oh no She sat down at her desk and unfurled a square of browned parchment. It wasn't the best in the world, but it was what she could afford. One shiny gold piece was all the money she had to her name, and she'd traded it for some parchment and some ink. She was no stranger to living this way, though; she'd bartered similar deals many times with shopkeeps across the world. She pulled a battered journal from her knapsack and began painstakingly recreating and fleshing out the rough maps she'd drawn in her travels. She turned away from the map for a moment, missing the way it glimmered and sparkled in the torchlight for just a second, then turned back, holding a second notebook. This one held sketches from years and years ago. She liked to make changes in her old maps when new roads got built, just for consistency's sake. Never give up on you He followed the fog. It was normally a basic tenet of his that he never went down unfamiliar streets at night, especially ones that he couldn't see down, but in the fog he couldn't have controlled his feet any more than he could have stopped his heart. The two streets rapidly resolved into one - just one street, fog thick enough he could barely see to the ground. He could see the faint shapes of buildings lining the road, a dim light indicating a torch here and there, vague silhouettes watching him from corners. His feet kept beating out the same pattern on the ground. A spike of fear pierced his mind, but it was all but drowned out by a deep feeling of belonging. I want to give it back They were a rare phenomenon, but by no means unheard of. Trap streets - odd, ethereal, barely-there streets that you first see only out of the corner of your eye, that bewitch and confound anyone unlucky enough to stumble into one. It's said that some trap streets have been there for ages, ensnaring passersby and making their own small worlds. They were the product of ill-advised spells and a well-meaning desire to prevent plagiarism. Not much was known about them otherwise, for perhaps obvious reasons. Got me feeling like I'll never give up She squinted at the parchment. The map on it was several days of grueling work. She remembered what happened last time, and she didn't intend to have anyone steal her work again. The tip of her quill trailed down the mountains and plains she'd lovingly rendered, coming to a stop on top of a crossroads in a forgotten corner of a forgotten town. She retraced one road, giving it curves and bends that it never had. Anyone who lived there would know the difference, but if someone copied it, she'd know for sure. She stood up from her chair and stretched, closing her eyes. The map shimmered, and the still-wet ink around the crossroads pooled slightly. If you crossed your eyes, it could even look like fog.

[givethatbooknerd]

Does anyone know if there's a list/collection/registry of paper towns, fictitious places, trap streets, phantom islands and the like? Much like Algoe and Argleton and Beatosu? I'm looking for a list of worldwide or Dutch ones, but I can't find anything. It's for a school project. Or you could help me out through reblogging! Any help would be very much appreciated!

[mapnostic]

Trap streets give way to automata errata

In the olden days, i.e. the 1990s, there was a practice among mapmakers to intentionally include trap streets on reference maps to protect the copyrighted material. The idea to fabricate a street, or the name, or a feature, implant a pattern... ideally something small enough that it won't mislead a map user or be noticed at all until the point where it is necessary to prove that someone else copied your proprietary data into your map. They are tricky to use in US court cases ever since a federal court ruled that, "the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact."

Although they show up as artifacts in online maps, the practice seems archaic in the current era, where lines drawn on paper maps have been converted to digital file formats, usually though a painstaking manual process of georeferencing, tracing, and/or orthorectifying. Once geographic information becomes "data", the manual process of cleaning and maintaining it becomes an incidental rather than central part of map-making, a tedious and unrewarding process left to "data monkeys", "interns" and "quality assurance" teams. Trap streets seem romantic in the era of plain old errata which, once they have been integrated into a geographic data set, and copied, distributed, and reproduced, are near-impossible to completely eradicate.  Here is something I like to think of as a trap street, even though it is really an erratum: Sunset Reservoir!

Sunset Reservoir: Google Maps

Looks like an awesome natural space suitable for dog walking and sunbathing. Actually, it is an underground and completely enclosed... reservoir.

Sunset Reservoir: Google Maps & Google Street View

I think I know exactly where this error comes from, because when I used to work for the City/County of San Francisco, I used to warn colleagues about the "water bodies" shapefile that was passed around interdepartmentally -- in addition to Lake Merced and the lakes in Golden Gate Park, it contained this reservoir, most likely because it was originally created by the Department of Public Works to track the water resources of the city, not the locations of urban lakes. Should I press the "Report a Problem" button and let Google know?

They are in good company, I upgraded to Mavericks this weekend, so I can say definitively. It's also not fixed yet in Apple Maps:

And incidentally, here's an argument for manual data creation/curation. Open Street Map:

(originally published at mizmay.com on 2/9/2014)

[chrisgayomali]

[truesthetruth]

T-Rock - Chief Chief Chief T-Rock is one of Atlanta's best kept secrets and probably the only rapper on earth with a discography that can rival Pastor Troy in terms of sheer volume. The man literally has like 30 albums. Anyway one thing he does well, besides his lyrical prowess, is the weed song. This was featured on his most recent mixtape Still On My Hoodie Hustle Trap Streets but was probably on another project as well. Mary got ya paranoid...