Teh second blogzorz, or: Angsty Google Earth screenshots and where to find them (Aug 31, 2022)

MY FIRST REAL BLOG POST! I have no idea how many people actually care about this topic. Hopefully some of you do. Keep supplying me with that sweet Adsense revenue or whatever. Anyway -- enough prelude!

I'm in my final year of high school, which means constantly drowning in mountains of homework and college apps and thingst that NEED TO GET DONE BY MONDAY OR BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. So, naturally, instead of doing any of that, I spend my time clicking through the streets of Google Earth for hours at a time. I've learned that -- this is me struggling to justify my awful time-management habits here -- Google Earth is a MASSIVE untapped source of angsty screenshots. You heard it here first.

When I describe an image as "angsty", I refer to the types of images that depict a sort of nostalgic, lonely picture of North American suburbia, the kind of photos that you'd see in the thumbnails of lazily-made midwest emo compilations on Youtube with titles like "i miss her and i am so depressed and i live in ohio and i hate ohio". I don't live in America, but I am fascinated with that sort of thing. I look for places that give the same vibe on Google Earth, and I think I've gotten kind of good at it. As an example, here's one I took in Basalt, Colorado:

Look at it!!! So angsty!!! The overturned wagon, the homemade ghost-things hanging from the tree, remnants of a halloween long past; the absence of people, the gray sky. A childhood abandoned. That's your crappy 2011 midwest emo bandcamp side project band name right there. Here's another:

Glorious low image quality!!! I took this one somewhere in west Texas. I like it because it looks like the backgrounds of so many vintage late-aughts Youtube home videos. Again, there's nobody in the picture, not even any cars. Just imagine yourself as a self-absorbed teenager here. You would ride your bike and scream Cap'n Jazz lyrics at the top of your lungs and be so cool like a movie character.

Now, to find the things! The best specimens are, in my expert opinion, ones that are a) of low camera quality and b) close to dawn or dusk. I'm reasonably sure that (this is conjecture, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt) in recent years Google has restricted street-view shooting to just a few hours around noon, or at least they've cut down dawn-and-dusk shooting by a signifcant amount. They've also upgraded their cameras to ones of much higher quality. Therefore, in general, the newer the street-view data, the higher the camera quality and the closer to noon it will be. This is great for usability, of course, but bad news for our Epic Quest for Angsty Screenshots. Finding old street-view data is a challenge, though I've found it's generally easier if you restrict yourself to relatively small, but not TINY, towns in more remote areas. This pattern emerges possibly because (beware: more conjecture!) larger population centers have their data pretty frequently updated, while really tiny population centers have not been reached by Google to be mapped until relatively recently, leaving remote medium-sized settlements in the position of being significant enough to have been mapped at some point in the past, but NOT significant enough to have been updated recently. Thus -- angsty screenshot heaven!

Let's test out this theory. We open Google Earth and head to the United States (I restrict myself to the US, at least for now). You can use either the web version or Google Earth Pro, the free application. Pro is faster and has a better-looking UI, but the web version lets you change the FOV till you start feeling carsick and is therefore better suited for screenshotting. So we have our Google Earth open. Good. Now pick a state; more or less arbitrarily, I choose Nebraska.

Now we just zoom in and start looking for medium-sized settlements. After some hunting, I find a suitable-looking one: a small village called Newport. If you're one of the 97 people (2010 census data) who live in Newport, Nebraska reading this, send me an email! I'll send you something cool in return.

Great! Look at it, it's small but not too small. Perfect for our purposes. Now we drag the little guy down and take a look at street view.

Hot diggity! Look at dem shadows! The lonely stop sign! The house on the CROSSROADS!!! METAPHOR!!!! Mission accomplished. You did good, kid. You did good.

Okay, it's not that easy. It never is. Such is life. I probably visited about five other small Nebraskan towns before I found something I could use here. It'll take some time. What's even more frustrating is that sometimes there will be angsty segments right next to non-angsty segments! Here's an example of what I'm talking about, from Mesick, Michigan:

Those two were ONE CLICK of the forward button away from each other! It's insane! Actually, you knoww what, I'll even link it here so you can see it for yourself because I don't think that image captures the difference well enough. Just go down the path behind you, and then turn around and get on the main road. It's mind boggling. These angsty segments of road are everywhere, they're just scattered in places where you'd never ever think to look. That's a big part of the reason why I like them so much; they're little blink-and-you'll-miss-it flashes of awesomeness spread sporadically across a huge, huge world. They're really hard to find, and yet every time I go looking for them I find something. I'm only searching a few small towns at a time, which means there must be hundreds of thousands of these just waiting to be uncovered. The world is just so big. Somewhere out there is the perfect Angsty Google Earth Screenshot. And I will never find it. But I will find plenty of really-darn-close-to-perfect ones. Awesomeness is everywhere, if you just look for it.

At the bottom of this post I'll probably put some more screenshots that I've taken. I'll come back after I've posted this to add to it if I find any more. Which I will. I really do spend an ungodly amount of time on Google Earth. I have no life, if you can't tell.

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So! this is the part I tell you about the contest. A CONTEST! In which YOU, dear reader, have the opportunity to win TONS OF GREAT STUFF. FOR FREE. Your ears do not deceive you! All you have to do is submit an Angsty Google Earth Screenshot of your own -- email me at sfarrell105 at gmail dot com with the subject line CONTEST -- for a chance to WIN, WIN, WIN!!! The top 3 winners will get crappy certificates from me that you can put on your own websites or set as your desktop background! If you're someone I know in real life, I'll buy you a drink! You have NOTHING TO LOSE! Don't delay, submit today!! Winners will be announced when I feel like it, which'll probably be like a month or two from now? Yeah! Tell your friends!!!

And THAT concludes my first real blog post. If you stuck with me till the end, thank you. Tell me if you like this stuff. Don't tell me if you don't like it. I will cry. Just kidding. Maybe.

Trying to think of a good sign-off,
strelka