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Mapmaker’s Diary: December 2020 Part II

Jydsken-Østveg

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Mapmaker’s Diary: December 2020 Part II
Learning To Fly

Here I am continuing a new segment that I hope other mapmakers will follow up with as well in the future. I want to start this up as a place to explain the work done and other musings from the mapmaker. Additionally, it will be ok to ask questions which I will try to get to depending on time constraints. So, let’s get started.

I can’t remember the first time I flew in an airplane. Truth be told I was a baby, so that is really no surprise. Yet despite that trivia fact I don’t exactly remember my first flight as a more cognizant being either. Much of this has to do with the fact that flying for me has been frequent enough to seem a bit mundane. Can you remember the first time you rode in a car? That said there are somethings that you can remember easily. I do remember the first time I drove a car. That happened when I was much older though. I was 15 years old. Never mind the fact that later that year I would collide with a bicyclist and put the bicyclist into a neck brace for the next year. I knew because he went to my school. His parents took me to court and lost. As a cyclist by law once he is on a street, he is therefore a vehicle and subject to the “rules of the road.” He didn’t stop and yield to incoming traffic. Strike one. He didn’t wear a helmet as required in a open air vehicle. Strike two. He actually struck me. The collision point of impact on the vehicle was the passenger side hood near the mirror. Strike three. He lost his lawsuit and the costs related to the entire case forced his parents to sell their house and move out of the neighborhood. So maybe there is good reason I never forgot.

My first real flight memories are scattered. I remember fondly places like Denver International Airport when it first opened. I remember flying Trans World Airlines (TWA) on an MD-80. St. Louis Lambert International Airport is another airport I know I flew often, because that is where TWA was based for the longest time. My own family is heavily rooted in St. Louis, as the city is a known hub for German immigration as immigrants would often arrive in New Orleans and take riverboats up the Mississippi River. New Orleans is often forgotten as a large hub for immigration into the USA. Most speak of Ellis Island and seeing the Statue of Liberty as they arrived. I imagine the welcome into New Orleans was far different. A swamp full of malaria and old western style prostitutes in a dilapidated French Quarter full of bars and poker.

Air travel in the United States used to be considered glamorous. This can be reflected in cinema. Semi-recent entries like Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can displayed quite a luxurious airline industry. The short lived TV show Pan-Am with the crush of my childhood Christina Ricci show cased the image of the beautiful air stewardess. I couldn’t tell you much more about that show because I never watched it. Childhood crush be damned, I won’t watch a period drama soap opera unless it has good reviews, no, great reviews.

Neo-liberalism was a big part of the Republican driven economic platform of the 1980s, but this airline catastrophe was signed by Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress in 1978. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 increased competition but also drove down wages and service standards as low-cost carriers flooded American runways. Low-cost airlines would forever change the way we fly. Now luggage has extra fees, along with reserving a seat, or getting a meal. Air traffic would be able to balloon as the cost of flying would become less and less prohibitive to the average person. Poor service for poor people and then we have ourselves the ability to fly anywhere in the world at relatively low cost. It’s quite great for the average person, but even still there are many Americans that have never been on an airplane before. I am not doing a research paper here, but from what I understand the price of a flight has largely remained consistent, but inflation has obviously made flying significantly cheaper. Keep in mind wages also have not really gone up for the average person either, and perhaps that is also why so many Americans still have not been on an airplane.

The change in economics for air travel would have a profound impact on landscape. Higher quality carriers and semi-monopolies would come crashing. TWA was hammered with debt by the mid-1980s and would have to file for bankruptcy in 1992, and again in 1995. Much of this the result of terrorist attacks that also hurt rival Pan-Am. Then a final of accident on TWA Flight 800 in 1996 would be the coup de grâce. I remember Flight 800. It exploded in mid-air on a flight to Paris. That one, along with Seattle based Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashing in 2000 are the accidents most baked into my memory. I would refuse to fly Alaska Airlines until 2012 on a Californian trip with my Swedish crush of the time that the forum affectionately labeled “the Swedess.” Yes, sometimes the forum knows who I am dating. Speaking of which she is doing well. She’s had a baby recently that I have met. Not my baby, but that girl and I are still very close although not romantically involved anymore.

The Golden Age of air travel is something quite interesting to me, and I write about this because I thought it interesting. I could actually write in far more detail, but as I arrive to nearly 900 words and just over one page of text, I think I ought focus a bit on the map itself.

Truth be told, this map update is quite simple. It is a mid-month update and so I did not want to change much from the previous entry. You’ll note that this map is still named as Beth. So Beth will get her month in the sun. Although since it is December and as I understand planetary orbits and tilt the sun will be in the sky for a shorter period of time for the majority of us. The biggest change is the fact that more nations and more colonies exist. On that note I will remark that many colonies I placed had some vague placement language, and I highly encourage anyone that is unhappy with their borders to request changes or edits in the map thread.

One of the biggest changes I made was actually on everyone’s borders though. I reduced the border shading from 6 pixels to 4 pixels. This will give everyone a bit more space on the interior of their nations. I felt it to be a good minimalistic change that is hardly noticeable. In fact, would you have even noticed if I didn’t tell you?

I came very close to mapping airline routes based on our new CSEAC group, but decided we should wait until more is known about it. I also wanted to map out some sea routes, but again felt that a bit much for a mid-month edit. In fact, sea routes might never appear. Islands were added all over the place by request and that meant having to redo the coastal lines for every location. This is why I don’t like the idea of adding or changing coast lines that much. The process isn’t terribly long as most of it is automated, but it is a process.

Josepania is now a mandate. I hope everyone will be able to utilize the European Forum soon and figure out how we govern such places. Mandates can start to get more specific over time, but they need to be RP’d rather than OOC arbitrated. That said, how they function in RP is perfectly fine for OOC arbitration. Just note that map changes will require some IC RP before anything is changed. With how easy it is to obtain colonies for the time being, I think that is understandable as anyone can really just make an OOC idea a reality in a different way.

I hope to have inactivity logs begin sometime in early-2021, but for now I will not be trying to remove nations due to inactivity. The scenario is fresh and I hope to allow everyone to find their way at first. Additionally I hope you found this entry in the new diary series interesting. The entire purpose of these is to give you some random information on myself, a topic, and the map. I hope this style of updates is more captivating than just a list of changes. Feel free to respond on the topics I write about as well, both on the map topics and the more random musings. I’ll make an effort to respond to everything in my own way.
 
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Imimoya

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I love how this whole topic reminds me of a third year exam in architecture. In Project Management and Technology, we had this professor obsessed with Airports and the world that revolves around them, so much so that we almost memorized all the national and European laws on sea and air navigation, especially the air one. It was a strange examination, especially because I talked about the various national, international and local bodies responsible for the operation of an airport, from the arrival of a customer at the terminal, to his departure and landing in the city of arrival.
 

Jydsken-Østveg

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I love how this whole topic reminds me of a third year exam in architecture. In Project Management and Technology, we had this professor obsessed with Airports and the world that revolves around them, so much so that we almost memorized all the national and European laws on sea and air navigation, especially the air one. It was a strange examination, especially because I talked about the various national, international and local bodies responsible for the operation of an airport, from the arrival of a customer at the terminal, to his departure and landing in the city of arrival.
An architecture part is something I left out of this write up as I try to keep the non-mapping parts to a page or less. I was also going to write a little bit on TWA’s hub at JFK Int’l Airport which was designed by Finnish great Eero Saarinen.

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It’s now a national landmark and become a hotel, which is both tragic in that it is no longer used for what it was originally intended for, but amazing that it can still stand and be put to good use.
 

Touzen

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With the current situation making large scale international travel by flight impossible, I would estimate there will eventually be a higher than normal interest in RPing things related to the topic. More airline manufacturers, more airline RP - as a sort of compensation. Should such a situation arise, adding airline routes would be a nice nod. In that way, the map would also be a time capsule of the RL times it was created in, and other aspects of the map might be emphasized in the future as RL circumstances shift, again being a snapshot of the collective consciousness at that particular time.
 
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