As well as continuing to use the correct place-name label for the "Gulf of Mexico," MapQuest has also released a fun new tool that lets you participate in Google’s and Apple’s new era of crap maps. MapQuest's Name Your Own Gulf allows you to play at being an appeaser to a corrupt, incompetent U.S. president yourself.
With Name Your Own Gulf, you can spend your whole day renaming the Gulf of Mexico to whatever you want. Just enter a new name, and the interactive map will automatically update to display your latest crazy misnomic place-name label. Feeling lazy (or running out of ideas), then simply press the "Surprise Me" button to see the Gulf of Mexico randomly renamed.
If you want to take your deranged despot cosplay to the next level, you can even head over to X in the middle of the night and send demented tweets containing unique URL links to each of your crazy Gulf of Mexico names.
If you still have a few minutes to kill, you can also play my Where's the Gulf of Mexico? game. This game imagines a world where Google and Apple have taken their new MAGA mapping policy to its logical conclusion - renaming every location in the world "United States." However, the Gulf of Mexico has gone into hiding, still remaining somewhere among the thousands of "United States" place-name labels. You have just 60 seconds to find the Gulf of Mexico and report it to Google's ICE (Imaginary Cartographic Edits) team of enforcement agents.
2 comments:
What actually happens when the US changes a name? It's happened hundreds of times in just the last few years.
Google is not playing politics. They're simply taking the terms from the GNIS. If a POI name is changed in GNIS, then the name in Google Maps is changed as well. Generally speaking, Google defers to the local government of the user's location. Before they implemented this policy, there was quite a bit of consternation in China, India and many other places around the world. Some governments get quite worked up when a territory is "mis-named" according to their own standards ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_Names_Information_System
It was never ""mis-named."" It's called the Gulf of Mexico. It always has been and always will be the Gulf of Mexico. There is no rhyme or reason for Google to have such power over toponymy. It does not have to be a politically motivated move for it to lead to other threatening aspects of our perceived existence.
Post a Comment