fantastiquecollective:

Most fantasy maps are really, really horrible. Here’s some of the worst offenders:

Eragon-world: The At Least One of Everything Fantasy Map.

Goodkind-land: The All the Borders Perfectly Follow Geographic Features Fantasy Map.

Kushiel-world: The Not Trying Hard Just Like Earth Fantasy Map.

Middle-Earth: The God Made It Fantasy Map.

Narnia: The Inconsistent Travel Distance Fantasy Map.

Valdemar: The Place Names Sound Really Made Up Fantasy Map.

Westeros: The Conveniently Paper-Shaped Continent Fantasy Map.

Randland: The Copying Stupid Things Tolkien Did Fantasy Map.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: The Fantasy Maps Are Mainstream Fantasy Map.

relevanttomyinterests:

Get on me.

uh me first

katkatmadkat:

Respect to all Australian Indigenous peoples on this Invasion Day.

Terra Nullius was bullshit.

Check this awesome interactive map of Indigenous languages

siterlas:

“It came as a surprise to me after over 20 years of seeing “normal” world maps to come across an upside down one. The most surprising thing was that I found it surprising. It is completely artificial that we have North at the top of a map.

The convention came a few centuries ago when Northern hemisphere, European navigators started using the North star and the magnetic compass. Before that, the top of the map was to the East which is where the word orientation comes from.”

- the upside-down map page

theamericankid:

The Reverse Map of the World - If land masses dominated instead of water

zuky:

torayot:

jaded16india:

hidingincanada:

spatiotemporalcookies:

Colonizability of Africa. (1899)

A map by cartographer John George Bartholomew (1860-1920)

I’m going to take the time to type this out, because, you know, holy shit.

The pink: Healthy colonizable Africa, where European races may be expected to become in time the prevailing type, where essentially European states may be formed.

The yellow: Fairly healthy Africa: but where unfavourable conditions of soil or water supply, or the prior establishment of warlike or enlightened native races or other causes, may effectually prevent European colonization.

The gray: Unhealthy but exploitable Africa: impossible for European colonizaiton but for the most part of the great commercial value and inhabited by fairly docile, governable races; the Africa of the trader and planter and of despotic European control

The brown: Extremely unhealthy Africa

I have no words to describe any of this, except to note that this was a genocide that these bastards planned, and carried out, in many many parts.

Next time someone tells you to “just get over it”, it being the European colonization of the world…. show them this. Some things…. you just don’t ever get over. 

It makes me SICK to think we’re supposed to pick up pieces of ourselves and somehow be not-broken, just because there isn’t *visible* presence of the colonisers anymore.

Yes, I knew someone who insisted on being proud of the British empire. I suppose he never saw anything like this, only knew the vague idea that a big empire meant a powerful country. He was proud of this legacy. He did not understand genocide and subordination are concomitant to empire.

He was very much for the “burqa ban” in France. When I objected, he asked if it was right if he should barge into a country and demand everyone to bend to his needs. I said that, as he was a white English man, people like him had already been doing that for centuries and that they are still at it, because it’s colonialism.

To some degree, this old “Colonizability” map still roughly reflects European presence in Africa today. Because of climate and terrain, the equatorial region was always considered the least desirable environment, so Europeans started their genocidal invasion at the northern and southern tips of the continent, gaining their strongest foothold in South Africa, but also along the Mediterranean coast — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt — and across the Red Sea to Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria. If you were to make a new map based on neoliberal economic and military penetration, it would probably look surprisingly similar to this seemingly antiquated artifact.

baruchandroll:

[description: collage of a huge wave made from old maps. the names of oceans and some place names are visible]

mattressesunderwater:

Matthew Cusick

offyougoapparently:

visualized || imleavingyoumylegacy