Counter-colonial Creature Compendium:* the invisible rail is like something out of Edward Gorey.

Counter-colonial Creature Compendium:* the invisible rail is like something out of Edward Gorey.
German ornithologist Gerd Heinrich, who prepared for his Halmahera trip by rolling in stinging nettles, wrote of the [rail’s] sago swamp habitat in the 1930s: “I am solidly confident no European has ever seen this rail alive, for that requires such a degree of toughening and such demands on oneself as I cannot so easily attribute to others. [The rail] is shielded by the awful thorns of the sago swamps… In this thorn wilderness, I walked barefoot and half-naked for weeks.”
#countercolonialheistcrawl
#countercolonialswampcrawl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_rail

Nancy Chandler as model mapmaker

So Chris Kutalik wants Calvinoesque Invisible Cities maps, and I have a back-back-burner project to do a nice bird’s-eye view of an early modern lightly extravagantly fictionalized Amsterdam, and I’m still thinking about a bigger cities-of-canals project linked to #countercolonialheistcrawl
…and I don’t have time for any of that but I’ve made one resolution today: I am damn well buying a replacement copy of  Nancy Chandler’s Map of Bangkok because I do not want to be incapable of explaining any more when someone asks what I mean when I say “how about a Nancy Chandler type map of this?”

…once again, intersection of tourism, gaming and scopic turns of the imagination.
http://nancychandler.net/bangkok-map.html

A #countercolonialheistcrawl bestiary (European players only).

A #countercolonialheistcrawl bestiary (European players only).
…the thing that gets me about this is that it was 1671. It’s a stretch to call these lands unknown by that date – at least, Spanish and Portuguese explorers had been working on knowing them for a good long while, and the Dutch and English had already fought two wars over who should get to wrest them away from the Iberians (and natives and whatnot, obviously).

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/arnoldus-montanus-new-and-unknown-world-1671/