All my favorite books have maps
All the best books have a map at the front, right? At least, all of my favorites. I love two genres: fantasy/scifi in an invented world (Narnia, Earthsea, etc) or a travelogue in an exotic place. Either way, I’m always flipping back to the front of the book to peek at the map.
But! I also often want to annotate those maps - or in some cases, I want to supply my own. So: I made plotted.io. It’s a simple little web app that lets you add maps from books and annotate them.
You can upload an image of a map - like the drawing on those first pages - of the fantasy world. Or if the story you’re interested in happens in the ‘real world’ (even in fiction), you can choose a ‘real world’ map to annotate.
I have a personal reading journal site, but that’s only for me. I’m the only one who can post there. But Plotted is for everyone! Anybody can grab an account and add a map.
A great example of this is Dracula. The core of the story happens in two places: Transylvania and England. it’s fun to explore a map of where those places really ARE. And there are a couple of plot-relevant journeys in the book (the voyage of the Demeter, and the final race back to Transylvania) where actually knowing the geography really adds to the story. When Dracula causes a storm and fog, the ship Demeter wanders right through the English channel, without a chance to stop for help. Stoker’s original audience would understand this intuitively, but I sure didn’t as an American. Seeing this on a map really drives the story home!
But I think it’s also just as fun when you annotate a fictional place. Like: when you read The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, didn’t you want to visualize all the crossing paths of Aiden Bishop? I know I did. So I made a map!
This is a little half-baked for now, but it absolutely scratches my itch. I can:
- upload a map
- associate it with a book
- draw lines on the map
- add pins on the map
- and label things
- and share that map with others
Is this going to satisfy the real obsessives? Probably not. For fiction worlds where there is a deep bench of expertise - Middle-Earth, Westeros, etc - there’s already going to be some other mapping project. But for the rest of us, we can use this.
Sprout Sign
Here’s a silly project that came out of an actual client conversation!
Sprout Sign is a baby horoscope tool. Enter in your child’s birthdate, and the STARS will tell you about your child’s future!
We’re working on a state-funded project now at Brand New Box about getting early childhood resources to people, and one of my left-field ideas was: what about the kind of folks who trust woo-woo Instagram more than like, their pediatricians? Is there a way we can speak that language?
I jokingly suggested: what if there’s an online Tarot reading, but the cards just tell you to get your kids vaccinated?
I loved this idea, goofy as it is. And we spitballed into other new-age spiritual models: astrology! I couldn’t resist just making it, even though (of course?) it’s not something that we’ll really publish with actual tax dollars, but it’s something that I can absolutely make for fun!
So: here’s a astrology tool for the crystal crowd, where every horoscope result just tells you what childhood vaccinations to get next, from the official CDC vaccination schedule*.
( * I used the CDC immunization schedule from June 2025. Will we have recommended vaccinations in the future? Or maybe we’ll all just get measles, who knows)
Beaver Cosplay
I’ve never really identified with people that do cosplay stuff. Like yes, the craft and artistry of those costumes are amazing! But I’m just too GenX to really accept the idea of me, personally, dressing up as something from a movie. Right?
Anyways, lately I’ve been on a low-key mission the last few months to make people watch HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. This includes: family, friends, and everybody who works at Brand New Box. Haven’t seen it? Imagine a 90-minute Looney Tunes but that looks like this:
That hat is incredible Halloween costume material, right?
SO: The movie has been video-on-demand for a while now, but THIS week it was playing for one night only at my local arthouse theater. I couldn’t resist doing a 1-hr craft project to make my own hat.
Add a crumpled paper bag for a raccoon tail and a lick of paint - and we’re off to the theater.
Crit Alignment
Everybody is bad at design critique. At least, until you get better. What if we pretended we were better?
This spring I’m teaching a small Interaction Design studio course. I really enjoy this, but one challenge is that students are very, very nice.
Which means they’re not great at critique! And critique is a big part of design school, and how you can get better as a designer. A big part of making your work better is hearing from others about how to make your work better. We need everybody to participate, and use their whole brain to figure out how to make things better.
So: this spring I’ve been assigning roles for the students to play. We started with the roles Paolo Pedercini used in a game design course (See here!), like ‘The mean professor”, “The BFF”, etc.
But my favorite so far, sparked by a suggestion from Nate Clark, is a D&D alignment grid. What does a ‘chaotic neutral’ critique look like? How about a ‘lawful evil’?
I had students roll dice to land on a role. Now the student gets plausible deniability to really critique. (“I’m not saying this - don’t take it personally - but the Chaotic Neutral is saying this!”)
Was it perfect? No. Was it fun? Absolutely.
You need a Groundhog Day codeword
Here’s an important idea: you should have a Groundhog Day codeword.
A what, you ask? Let me explain.
How could you be convinced that a loved one was stuck in a time loop? You know - a Groundhog Day / Edge of Tomorrow / Palm Springs situation, where they are doomed to repeat the same day over and over. The chrono-afflicted protagonist always needs to get help, and they do this by finding someone they trust, and telling them about their experience being stuck in time.
In the movies this is solved when the victim repeats the day over and over again, learning the rhythms of the day. When they go to finally convince their friend/partner/television producer about their situation, they amaze them by knowing everything that will happen in advance. They can predict: look, that person will trip over their shoelaces! A blue car will drive past! It’s going to start raining, and that man will realize that he’s forgotten his umbrella!
But that takes so long. Your poor friend must have lived this day out dozens of times. We can do better.
You need a secret codeword. Choose one now, and keep it secret. Only you can know this, but you have to decide it today. Settle it in your mind. Zanzibar. Don’t tell a soul. Zanzibar.
THEN: when your partner/colleague/meteorologist tries to convince you that they’re stuck in a Groundhog Day situation, you can tell THEM your codeword. When the loop resets (for them), THEY will remember but YOU will have forgotten all about it.
They can then tell YOU your codeword, you won’t remember telling them, and voila! - there’s all the evidence you need.
“Matt, I am stuck in a time loop, and I need your help. Your codeword is Zanzibar.”
It’s foolproof!
Of course, if someone is somehow trying to trick you into giving up your codeword, if they are not actually chrono-displaced - that’s OK. Just tell them! Then simply pick a new codeword, and commit that new one to memory. Because of course: when your time-looped wife tells you your codeword - you won’t remember telling them anyway. If you do remember, that person isn’t actually time-looped.
Really, we should make this a global public service awareness campaign. Just like FEMA advises us what to put in our emergency kits, and families should have pass phrases to make sure they’re not getting scammed over the phone with AI-powered voice clones. You should have a time loop codeword!
The important things are:
- Choose your codeword.
- Preregister it with yourself. Remember, you can’t do this in the middle of someone’s time loop (because you’ll forget it when the loop resets). You’ve got to settle this now.
- Don’t tell anybody else! Keep it secret, keep it safe.
Of course, this isn’t any help if YOU are the one stuck in the Groundhog Day situation. That’s why we all need to have this - so we can help each other.
Groundhog Day Codewords. Get yours today!