<![CDATA[Cartographers' Guild - Blogs - Immolate]]> http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/ A website and forum for enthusiasts of fantasy maps mapmaking and cartography of all types. We are a thriving community of fantasy map makers that provide tutorials, references, and resources for fellow mapmakers. en Sat, 25 May 2013 06:08:02 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.cartographersguild.com/images/cartographer/misc/rss.jpg <![CDATA[Cartographers' Guild - Blogs - Immolate]]> http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/ Immolation 05-27-2010 Immo Awards for Amateur Cartography http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/9-immolation-05-27-2010-immo-awards-amateur-cartography.html Fri, 28 May 2010 04:30:57 GMT I love maps. No... I'm serious. I really, really love maps. They are beauty and order; adventure and mystery; art and information. They appeal to every aspect of my personality. I think that, for me at least, they are the one perfect medium, the perfect thing.

Now you all may not be as freaky about maps as I am, though I'm sure some of you make me look hesitant by comparison, but I do know this: you all love maps. If you didn't, you wouldn't be reading this, and you probably wouldn't spend much if any time at the Cartographer's Guild.

I've been here for a year now. This has been my favorite haunt since the day I found it. I have a frantically busy life so I don't post as much as some, but I think it's also an innate aversion to chit-chat. I can do it, but it takes effort so I don't do it much--and when I do I kind of suck at it.

Blogs are different though. In a blog you're on the soap box, talking to the world. I don't know why, but it feels different. I'm definitely an I (INTP to be exact), so doing the "look at me" thing is cringe-inducing, but this doesn't feel like that. It's out of the way, so only people who are drawn to it will read it, and only those who enjoy it will read it often.

So I like talking about maps. I have some maps of my own that I think are pretty good, though not too many. There are some here, however, that I find so breathtakingly beautiful that I find myself staring at them, sometimes for fifteen or twenty minutes, just drinking in their magnificense.

I know a lot of folks read the blog, though few of you comment... and that's okay. But I think I can do a better job drawing you out and getting you to share your opinions and insights. I'm going to make a concerted effort to do so. Writing is fun for me, but interaction and feedback are nourishment.

So with this blog, I introduce my first Immo Awards. The Immo Awards are not annual, and are not constrained to a certain subject matter or category of subjects. I will put out a new one whenever I'm inspired to, more to soak up your perspectives than to inflict you with mine, but that too.

For this blog, the Award is for Amateur Cartography, and the eligibility requirements are: Your three favorites maps from this site. Here are mine:


Vaniya by Ramah
This map was my first love at the site and will always remain one of my greatest inspiration. Sublime. Not only is Ramah a genius of balance and subtlety, he's also a very humble and kind person.



Jasmine Coast by Ascension
Ascension has always been my hero because of his slavish devotion to creating tutorials and his daring to try new things. Jasmine Coast is a gorgeous, jaw dropping map. I will always owe a debt of gratitude to Ascension for all that he has taught me.



Ceres Map by töff
I cannot imagine a map more deliciously delicious than this one. It oozes bad-ass the way BP oozes oil. I could never have conceived this map in my head, but töff did, and then flawlessly transferred his vision to a picture.

Now I took some easy ones. They were right in the featured maps forum. Most of you are probably quite familiar with them. However, as easy as they were, they are my very favorites of all the maps I've seen here. I hope some of you have superb maps to share with us, and though I won't be surprised if many of you find one of my picks to be one of yours as well, I'm hoping that a lot of other really super stuff comes out of your psyche as well.

Remember... it has to be on Cartographer's Guild to be eligible. ]]> Immolate http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/9-immolation-05-27-2010-immo-awards-amateur-cartography.html Immolation 05-24-2010 Bambi vs. Momzilla http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/8-immolation-05-24-2010-bambi-vs-momzilla.html Tue, 25 May 2010 04:49:19 GMT When I was a little kid, about six or seven, my sister and I were home after school and my mom was at work. It was a different world, so we thought... When I was a little kid, about six or seven, my sister and I were home after school and my mom was at work. It was a different world, so we thought at least, and leaving your kids home alone at base housing didn't seem like child abuse then the way it does now. Of course, neither did drinking or smoking while you were pregnant. Who knew?

So we were home and we decided to do one of those things that kids do that make you question the wisdom of letting them stay home alone at a tender age--we got out the flour and the food coloring, some mixing cups, a piece of cardboard, and a bunch of plastic critters and shrubbery from some play set or the other. We may have been in Alaska at the time. The memory is clear but the setting is vague.

From these base materials we constructed a work of art. It was a diorama--a relief map--call it what you will. It was a little slice of heaven built by a couple of small kids in various hues. It featured three small hills and a shady glen; a lush haven thick with glossy green vegetation and peopled by all of the furry denizens of the forest... all of the cute denizens anyway. Spiders and snakes need not apply.

So we slaved away at this epiphenomenal creation for what seemed like months, but was probably more like a couple of hours, breathing into it all of the hopes and dreams and aspirations of a young child yet to be tainted by the cruel ogres of reality. We imbued it with a Disney-like sense of charm and magic as only someone of true innocence could do.



Impatiently we waited, breathless for my mother to get home and break down in tears from the sheer, magestic poetry of our creation. No breathing soul could possibly witness to product of our genius and not be moved, nay, awed, by its utter perfection.

Finally, the appointed hour came. My mother, exhausted from a hard day at work, put her coat over the chair and her purse on the seat, then stood looking at our masterpiece with her hands on her hips. Silently, expectantly, we gazed up at her, beaming.

She wrinkled her nose. "You two had better throw that out before it starts to stink," she said matter-of-factly, before turning toward the counter to begin preparing dinner. Though the movie wouldn't air for another fifteen years, I felt like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" right after Santa told him that he'd shoot his eye out. How could she be so insenstitive... so blind. Could she not sense the fey magic oozing from our little fairyland?

Then I knew. Youth is magic, and every sand-speck of reality that they throw in your little red wagon reduces the gloss and the shine just a little. Every school bully, every bad grade, and yes, every tired mom who doesn't have enough energy left to appreciate the miracles her little brats occasionally poof into existence--each of them pulls the veil a tiny bit further from our eyes and exposes us to a mundane, drab place that layers a thick coat of dusty ho-hum onto everything around us.

But I have a secret. Some of us are born with a tiny spark that refuses to die. We have a private chamber; an inner sanctum of delightful things that are as shiny as they are eclectic, as marvelous as they are strange. And there in the back our hidden sanctuary is a portal that leads to worlds untold, stories unborn but bulging, bursting to escape into realization. It is a mixture of Willie Wonka and Hogwarth's, the Shire and Arrakis, the Magic Wardrobe and Sherwood Forest.

It is a secret that will never die in us, because it is us. Even when we share it, it remains our secret, because it appears different to all who see it. We intrepid cartographers... we possess this secret, every one of us. It is not so common that we all should have it, but we do, so perhaps it is no accident. Maybe we didn't bring our secret here. Maybe it brought us. ]]> Immolate http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/8-immolation-05-24-2010-bambi-vs-momzilla.html Immolation 05-23-2010 Adventures in Leadership http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/7-immolation-05-23-2010-adventures-leadership.html Mon, 24 May 2010 04:40:25 GMT Some of you who've bothered to read my blogs have probably wondered what, if anything, they have to do with cartography. I admit that oftentimes, any relationship I could come up with would seem tenuous at best. That's a shame in some ways, because cartography itself is a subject spanning all nations and all of recorded history. It is art and literature, biology, geography, geology, business, finance, science, mythology, history, lore, fantasy... I am hard-put to find a single aspect of human experience that doesn't in some direct way relate back to cartography.

The art of making the complex simple speaks to the very purpose of cartography. A man in a saddle or on his feet upon the deck of a ship instinctively recognize the problem that cartography attemps to solve: we can only know what we can see. Memories supplement that of course, but memories of lands and seas that we have witnessed from our earth-bound eyes are very subjective, yielding only an impression of "when I stand here, this is what I see". Trying to impart that knowledge to someone else by describing the view is difficult.

So one day, probably well before history was written down, a primitive man squatted down in the dirt and drew an "x" and explained to his hunting party that "we are here". Then he perhaps drew a circle and said "this is the big oak tree", and then with some squiggly shapes further along, "these are the elk". Suddenly, these primitive fellows could envision spacial relationships in a form simplified to such a basic level in such a dramatically clear fashion, that from that point on, whenever the hunters thought about that area, they would immediately superimpose the image of that map over their thoughts.

Think about it for youself. I have been in every state in the United States except Hawaii. I've been in every province of Canada, and Greenland, and a variety of European countries. Yet without maps, I would have only rough ideas of where things were in relation to one another. In fact, I'd probably think only in terms of where one place I'd been was in relation to another place I'd been. Maps codify spacial relationships. The shape of a country or a continent or an island becomes iconic and when we think of that place, we see in our minds a map. Try to think of the US or whatever your home country is without that distinctive and familiar map not hovering around in your mind, trying to superimpose itself.

Maps allow us to give shape to that which, to humans, is relatively shapeless... the ground around us. Sure we know what that mountain looks like or we can recognize this road or that stream that we've fished up and down countless times. But we could spend our lives doing nothing but walking up and down that stream and we still wouldn't have as accurate a spacial understanding of it as someone who simply studied it for a short time on a map. In fact, if you're anything like me, you've probably found yourself looking at a map of a place that you are intimately familiar with and seeing realities that you didn't realize were there. Down here in Florida, my most common such epiphany is: "Wow, I didn't realize there was a lake over there."

But what does any of this have to do with leadership? I'm glad you asked. I returned on Friday from a week in Cincinnati (beautiful city by the way), where I spent my time with a group of hugely-talented individuals from around my company, a diverse group from seven countries and of assorted races. The story isn't about the group, although there are many stories to tell there and I'll probably indulge myself more than once in the future. Instead, this is about the subject that we were there to learn about, which was leadership.

Now for those of you, like me, who got a lot of their leadership training in the 80's, I have to tell you that things have changed. They've changed for the better. In fact, for those of us weaned on Maslow's heirarchy of needs, it's a quantum leap. It is a vast subject with countless theories, practices and philosophies ascribed to it, but I'm not here to teach you about leadership... at least not directly. I am here to tell you how the proper role of a leader and a cartographer are nearly identical.

Managers manage. They manage inventory and finances and payroll and how their direct reports spend their time. They are like cowboys, using their horses, dogs and voices to maneuver the heard to where they want them to be. A leader is a manager as well, but a manager does not have to be a leader. Take a moment, if you will, to separate those two roles in your mind before we proceed.

Leaders inspire. They inspire loyalty, confidence, urgency, creativity, pride, determination... all of the admirable and worthwhile traits can be inspired by a leader, and the best of them can inspire the one thing, or the several things, that are most helpful for the moment. They do this by taking the complex, and often unknown elements of a situation and distilling them into a clear and unambiguous vision. A leader has a broad perspective of the environment in which their team operations, and uses that perspective to understand what is important, then boil that down to the precise combination needed to give the team a framework from which they can build with the surety of someone who confident in their knowledge of how to proceed.

A cartographer uses the techniques of a leader to accomplish the same task a leader accomplishes, only for a narrow (but hugely important) context: spatial relationships. Even the smallest piece of ground or ocean is infinitely complex. At every scale, there are countless elements comprising the space as observed. A continental map is composed of vast stretches of land and sea, each with notable characteristics, and each different from the bit adjoining it. A map of a single square foot likewise has elements of infinite variety... shapes, sizes, compositions, characteristics etc. Either has far more information than can be conveyed, much like the world of business or government or whatever it is that you do to put food on the table.

Our job, like the leaders, is to sift through that infinite complexity and to extract those few things that are most important and that we (and those we serve) can wrap our minds around and use as a clear roadmap (business term... coincidence?) to reach our goals. I know you've heard before that the map that conveys information simplest and clearest is the best map. That is a principle more often observed in the breach here, I'm afraid, owing to our collective love for art.

Creating a map is an exercise in leading your audience to a clear understanding of the spacial relationships existing between two or more points. If the users of your map will have little or no use for the areas covered by forest, you leave that information off. Political demographics aren't interesting to most people looking at a railroad map, so that stays off as well. Unnecessary elements may be a distraction, just as business information unrelated to the task at hand can cause your team to take their eyes off of their purpose.

Understand that for maps as art, all of these restrictions are meaningless. Most of what we create here is for entertainment purposes and qualifies as art. The same is can be true of "real" maps as well of course. Many of the maps created by the ancients were more fantasy than anything else, and even in extremely accurate and utilitarian maps, artistic flourishes were rife throughout the map. I suspect that many of our cartographical forefathers (and mothers) were frustrated artists.

I'd love to share more insight into what I've learned about human nature, relationships and how these things relate to cartography, but it's late and tomorrow is another day. Thanks for your time and attention! ]]> Immolate http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/7-immolation-05-23-2010-adventures-leadership.html Immolation 05-13-2010 Finding Time http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/6-immolation-05-13-2010-finding-time.html Fri, 14 May 2010 03:56:51 GMT Finding time. It sounds like a pursuit requiring a geeky-looking metal detector and a blue plastic bucket, wandering up and down the beach in... Finding time. It sounds like a pursuit requiring a geeky-looking metal detector and a blue plastic bucket, wandering up and down the beach in flip-flops and a straw hat. I actually have the hat, but my metal detector is in the shop... meaning I haven't bought it yet.

I wish it were that easy, because I could use more of it. Between kids and softball and wives (present and ex) and the job and college and the weekly Pathfinder game and reading, it's a wonder I find time without a metal detector to make a map, much less write a blog, but somehow there's always enough left to squeeze a little more out.

I think about time a lot. How much do I have left? What should I do with it? Remember all the old people you knew when you were a kid? Chances are, they're gone now. How long before we wake up as old people and we're gone the next day? It could be depressing if you had the wrong perspective on it, so I try to not have the wrong perspective.

Some years ago, I stood back and looked at my life and decided that, if I were to die tomorrow, I would not have grounds for complaint. Not that there is anything all that special about what I've done with my life, but I've crowded some really good stuff into it. There was that time that my son and I completely fell out watching the World of Warcraft ROFLMAO video. We still crack up whenever we hear the tune. I also remember when, in his first year playing Little League, he made an unassisted triple play... from the pitcher's mound!

I remember my first car, a '69 Mustang Mach One. Seeing the Stones in the Festhalle in Frankfurt. Meeting my dad in the airport when he came home after two years in Vietnam. Reading Dune the first time in middle school. Playing Tactics II and Tobruk with my best friend. Exploring abandoned missile silos with my mates, five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The many weekends shearing sheep with my stepfather and his brothers up in Minnesota are now fond memories. Busting up concrete slabs out behind the house where we lived in Alabama. Picking corn for our dinner in the field next to our place in Wisconsin. Cutting oak and ash for firewood with my friend Steve and his son in Omaha. Spending a Saturday building houses for Habitat with my two oldest.

I remember the first time I went down the intermediate slope at the Broadmoore in Colorado Springs. The first time I went down any slope for that matter. It wasn't pretty. The years I spent with my first wife and my buds playing paint ball every Sunday. The six-sided doghouse I made from plans in my head.

I just realized that I could keep going until even the most stalwart readers got bored and wandered off. Just an ordinary life, but at forty-seven I can honestly say I'm past the break-even point. It is staggering, the shear breadth of the memories I've accumulated in a few decades, without really having done anything special.

Some said, life is what happens when you're making other plans. I'm not really suggesting that the plans aren't important. I planned to get a degree and after twenty-five years, I actually pulled it off, but yeah, that wasn't really how I'd planned it. I planned to have a big family, having grown up in a small one, and that happened as well, in spite of changing priorities and relationships.

I'd love to stay and chat some more, but I've got to work tomorrow and oh... look at the time! ]]> Immolate http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/6-immolation-05-13-2010-finding-time.html Immolation 05-10-2010 The Importance of Being Reliable http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/3-immolation-05-10-2010-importance-being-reliable.html Tue, 11 May 2010 03:37:15 GMT When I was a teenager, I could have listed any number of desirable qualities in a person. In fact, I'm sure I did. Exhaustively. To anyone who would listen. One of those qualities was probably not "reliable" however. There were plenty of adjectives like "imaginative", "original" and "you've got to haggle", but "reliable" would have been reliably missing.

Now that I have surprisingly survived to the ancient age of seven-and-forty, I see things a bit differently. Part of wisdom is learning that some of the things you believed when you were young were pretty much completely, depressingly, even reliably... wrong. Like the idea that this relationship you had with this other person that consumed your life and you were convinced that there had never been another love such as this one and that the passion and intensity would last forever... wrong. Oh the relationship might last your entire life, and every day might seem a little better than the day before, but passion an intensity doth not survive the thirtieth poopy diaper. Or that idea that the "right" person for you would be too "sophisticated" to be bothered by you frequenting strip clubs... wrong. Or how about the concept of being a much better parent than your parents were with one hand tied behind your back... wrong. You might pull it off, but unless your dad's last name is "Manson", it will probably be hard.

Now, in my dotage, "reliable" has become the new hotness, having switched places with "unpredictable", which occupies the old and busted spot. But the truth is, reliable has always been important to me. I just failed to realize it. It was important to me that my mother could be relied upon to set high standards for me and reliably hound me to meet them. I could rely on my DI giving me "twenty" if my bed wasn't made perfectly. I could rely on the money in my account every payday. I could rely on my kids to groan and act embarrassed every time I try to be funny in public.

I think we human like to build institutions that we can rely on. When we find these reliable things in our lives, we want to support them and encourage them through our support. Church, family, country and friends... we go out of our way to strengthen the institutions that we love. Because they do what we expect them to do, to the extent that they do so, we use them as foundations in our lives to build upon.

Now all of that is probably a too-long-winded and overly-dramatic build up to my point, but my point is this... and yes it relates to cartography. There are institutions within this community. Some are mere processes, some are traditions and some are even individuals. But these institutions are important to us. Many of us probably focus on one or two of them, though we are cognizant of the others, but those one or two are quite important, and a big part of what attracts us. Fellowship is one that I'm pretty sure most of us place great value in, and happily it is the most reliable of institutions here. You can also count on someone to offer advice or encouragement when you need it, because that's the kind of people we are.

Civility is another important institution at the Cartographer's Guild. In my many years online, I have never found a single place with so many people that remain so unrelentingly kind to each other.

One of my personal favorite institutions here are the challenges and the featured map forum. Now these have been imperfect in their reliability, alas, but they are important institutions to more people than just me, and through our encouragement and appreciation, we can ensure they not only survive, but prosper.

What institutions "do it" for you here at the guild? ]]> Immolate http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/3-immolation-05-10-2010-importance-being-reliable.html Immolation 05-09-2010 What is in a name? http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/2-immolation-05-09-2010-what-name.html Sun, 09 May 2010 17:39:28 GMT Although the concept of blogging was born as early as 1995 and the name itself introduced in 1999, it was at best a vague shadow in the corner of my... Although the concept of blogging was born as early as 1995 and the name itself introduced in 1999, it was at best a vague shadow in the corner of my awareness until 2004 when blogs became mainstream. Since then, I've been a loyal reader of a number of different blogs.

Everyone knows the "blog" is a contraction of the words "web log". It helps to have a catchy-sounding name to catch on to the public's awareness, but I think the idea of the media meritocracy was one who's time had come with the advent of the internet and its present omnipresence in our lives. Think of the blogs that you read regularly. Are they popular within their genre. How would you judge the bloggers' talent compared to the others in their area of expertise?

Not every blog is popular because of the writing genius of its proprietor. Some of the biggest and busiest have a number of solid writers, but have achieve broad popularity by giving everyone a voice, no matter how obscure and unknown they are in "real life", whatever that means these days. I don't think the blog feature in Cartographer's guild will supplant the wonderful personality of the site as it is today, not do I want it to. But I do hope that it will be a tool for expressing thoughts and telling stories that feel awkward in the forum context.

What is in the name "Immolate"? I originally chose the name for a character in an MMORPG called Asheron's Call, way back in the day. He was a mage, and in my mind, his specialty was fire, although the game didn't work that way. This was my first MMORPG. I had friends who played Ultima, but what they told me didn't tempt me to join them. Asheron's Call came out at the same time as EverQuest. I played in the beta and was hooked.

Names are the bane of many MMORPG players, not to mention role players in general. By comparison however, names are a constant source of challenge for the cartographers here. Nobody has to make up more names than a fantasy cartographer who is producing maps with regularity.

There are so many name generators on the web that it is trying to just visit them all. They all have limitations, and it isn't difficult to see the methodology in the best of them through repeated attempts. They are useful for idea inspiration and can even occasionally come up with a good name.

Looking at detailed maps of the real world can be a better tool for cartographers. Many of us attempt to borrow specific cultural elements from real world cultures for our make believe ones, names being one of the most useful. Even if we don't use actual names we find on a map, a studied perusal of the map can get us into the "groove" of what names from that culture sound like, and also inspire us with the general variability and frequency of one-off names.

When I sit in my chair and stare off into the distance, creating names from whole cloth in my head, I generally find myself resorting to the "real world" method subconsciously. For a name to sound "right", it has to strike a chord in our minds, and that chord is defined by our experiences. Even when I am just taking an existing name or word, and then altering it slightly to create a new name, my judgement is based on what I already know. Is this a good name? Does it sound right? Few of those decisions are based on a conscious, logical thought process. I know immediately that it does not sound right, and save much time by trusting my instincts and not trying to understand why it doesn't sound right. I suppose that points to a profitable line of research, part psychology and part linguistics, that might lead to a name generation algorithm that produces a much higher percentage of hits than the ones we currently have.

How did someone like Tolkein come up with so many really excellent names? Rivendell. Elrond. Legolas. Gimli. Frodo. Sauroman. Helm's Deep. Mines of Moria. Khazad-dûm. Aragorn. Tolkein was educated in a manner that is rare today, true, and he knew things about linguistics that most of us will never known exists. But in the end, I think he did just what we do. He was just more aware of the rules for specific languages and therefore able to conjure names within those systems with far less fumbling than we do. You can see it in the consistency of names among various members and places within a single group of humans or demi-humans.

When I was a young man, perhaps in 1977 or 1978, I first read the Lord of the Rings books. They changed my life, but even then I was intimidated and somewhat put off by sheer volume of strange and awkward names in the books. I reread them again a few years ago, and after thirty years of reading, RPGs, MMORPGs, TV shows and movies that were heavily influenced by his work, I honestly couldn't see what the problem was during my initial reading. Everything fit this time around, which of course indicates a change in me.

I wish that i could recommend an easy way to consistently come up with good names, but I can't. It's still a creative birthing process for me, as it probably is for you.

In the name of contributing something to the subject, here are two of the online resources that I've gotten good use of in the past. Please contribute any of your own hard-won tricks if you care to.

http://www.seventhsanctum.com/index-name.php
http://www.fantasynames.net/ ]]> Immolate http://www.cartographersguild.com/blogs/immolate/2-immolation-05-09-2010-what-name.html