Maybe… or maybe not?
I took up driving late (I was 26 when I passed my test) and have spent my whole driving life in the world of satnav and GPS. And thank goodness because without it, having no sense of direction whatsoever, I would never arrive. My dear father likes to describe auto routes to me as if can picture one thing he is talking about. I can’t.
As a pedestrian, I am okay with a paper map. In some ways I prefer it. If I get lost, I can tear a page out and chew it to aid concentration.
alias jangdangden=firefox https://maps.google.com
#arrgh
alias jangdangden=’firefox https://maps.google.com‘
GPS was a godsend to those of us who are directionally illiterate. (Alas, I started driving before GPS, and I REALLY could have used it earlier…)
Kids today have it easy. You break down on the road, you’ve got a cell phone and a GPS on the cell phone. You haven’t lived until you’re five hours into an eight hour drive and you break down two miles outside of a tiny, dusty village you’ve never been to, just as the sun is setting, with nothing but forty bucks in your wallet and a semi-expired copy of the local Thomas’ Guide next to your glove box.
He’s guided by a signal from the heavens
He’s guided by this map app on his phone
He’s guided by the voice of Jang Dang Den
Now he’s lost in London
And he has no Bing
Or Google. Or Ask Jeeves. We don’t know which timeline this Jack is from. Granted, the scansion would be questionable.
Starting the week off with a nice bit of Cohen, I see. Well done that man
Have to show I’m interesting, you know.
Just don’t start a small fire.
I made sure the joss sticks were out before I fell asleep.
This must be the territory of The Next Day Clan.
The Next Days and the Meanwhiles have a bitter, violent, decades-old rivalry.
Ah yes, I fondly* recall book maps when you would drive off one page and nearly crash trying to find the next page you’re supposed to be on
Equally I have often cried out Jang Dang Den’s name in vain when my Sat Nav decided the road I was on did not exist and showed me driving through fields and streams
*with a certain amount of loathing
I’d be stuck in a sea of constant red lights, but the instant I broke out the map book and needed time to actually find where I was all the lights would invariably all go green and I’d have nowhere to stop.
SatNav is like Tea Bags. Two things which totally passed me by. Whatever next? I dunno.
I spy more Solver arriving soon…
HOORAY! Now Jack stuck in the past and then more Solver. Life is good!
Before gps (but after google maps was a thing) I would look it up on a computer and write down directions for myself
“Third left blah street” and etc
Also this comic got me wheezin
GPS was made available to the general public (by the famous fast food mascot, Ronald McReagan) in 1983 whereas Google Maps has only been around since 2006 (I think)
But even now with maps on my phone I’ll have memorised “2nd turn right after the scary-go-roundabout”
I also don’t imagine this is to early in the 90’s because in the late 90’s my brother worked in a camping department that sold GPS devices. So it seems the block is based on what Glenn “thinks” is future knowledge, not necessarily what is future knowledge.
I did that once, in Bristol, going to a party. I carefully listed all the rights and lefts and so on, and found the venue perfectly. And then I left, got into my car, and realised that trying to reverse all the instructions simply didn’t work. The map I had didn’t go as far as my elderly cousin’s house, where I was staying, and at once point I found myself stuck in a deserted industrial estate, where I thought I might have to spend the night, until there was someone about from whom I could ask directions.
I actually don’t remember how I got back, but I did, eventually. Elderly cousin had been a bit concerned about my lateness, but we didn’t have mobile phones back then.
I had to figure out how to get to my folks’ yesterday, having spent several days without a phone. The journey is too complex to memorise, and I didn’t even _have_ an A-Z. Thankfully I know the local area perfectly and the city well enough, so I just followed signs going “good enough”, and eventually found my way there in only double the expected time.
I think I’ve figured out how people develop a sense of direction, having spent my whole life without one. I noticed having one for the first time yesterday.
A piece of wisdom I heard from my family: there are four ways to know a route: going there, coming back, going there at night, and coming back at night.
I did Pizza Delivery prior to the general adoption of GPS-driven navigation systems (i.e. TomTom was new) and the way I did it was look at the big map in the kitchen and plan my route based on addresses.
It does help to have a good sense of direction (which I do) but the less grid-like an area is, the easier it is to get lost. Over time I did get better at noticing how many degrees I’d turned left or right while going down a road (rather than just considering the change when you turn onto another road.)
My wife on the other hand has no sense of direction, so it is her job to be concerned that we’re lost. I remind her that I am always lost, since I don’t know where I am, and that we’ll get there anyway. (We do! But not as fast perhaps as we might otherwise.)
“I remind her that I am always lost, since I don’t know where I am, and that we’ll get there anyway.”
I love this distinction, it’s so *right* 🙂
In my case, having absolutely no sense of direction, the more grid-like an area is, the easier for me to get lost, because all the streets look the same and I never have an idea in which direction I’m going. Just yesterday, walking home, I spent a quarter of an hour walking north when I thought I was going east. In an area of the city I walk through very often.
Sometimes I can compensate by remembering the street names… but I’m also very bad with names. Even worse, similar names -or names that my brain sees as related- can totally blend with each other. For instance, near my home are two long and wide streets, parallel, but at some distance from each other, one named after a prince and another after a count. To mt brain, since both streets are “nobility title + of + place name” both are exactly the same street, and there is no way to convince him otherwise.
I fondly recall the transitional days of looking up a route on MapQuest and printing out the result, and how I discovered that when MapQuest was given a destination address it did not know, it would just sort of average out the entire city you were heading towards and plonk you somewhere in the middle of it.
I discovered this while driving several hours across Georgia to a tech conference thingie and finding myself deposited by MapQuest in the middle of some kind of abandoned industrial park.
This was also before cell phones had long battery life and easy charging and the ability to connect to the internet to Google things like the phone number of the building you were supposed to be at.
So, yeah, even though I’m old enough to speak fluent Paper Map, the GPS era could not have come to soon for me.
Shelly seems to be enjoying the insanity immensely, almost as if she believes she has found a kindred spirit that will allow her to be as goofy as she pleases. Too bad that Jack is a very serious fellow.
Carry a compass. At least, in a strange city you should do so.
I use maps on my phone, but even then your phone doesn’t know which way north is until you’ve walked part of a city block.
A compass isn’t required, city grime accumulates on the northern face of streetlights & telegraph poles.
This would be more useful if the grime didn’t also accumulate in equal amounts on all of the other faces.
If you are confused, check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
I drove a support truck in the States for an electrical company through the summer as a sixteen year old in 1990 and let me tell you what a fucking NIGHTMARE the pre-GPS days were. Twelve hour days starting at 4am using general coordinates on a ring-bound folding atlas nearly broke me. Good luck finding 5328 N Lovejoy Ave in a 400 page atlas!
And at the end of the summer, you were baptized in electricity and IBEW bestowed upon you the name E-mon D-mon, after the submetering system
Lots of businesses don’t bother to post an address in any visible way on the building! Good job guys.
God this page is so cute.
I love paper maps. I used to drive half way across the US and back with one. At rest stops for coffee I could trace along a random highway and wonder what it was like at each town along the way.
I have a decent sense of direction, such that I tend to remember the route I’ve read on the map and if I’ve been to a location once I’ll remember exactly how to get back there.
On a recent trip to Antwerp I realised this ability was not so much a navigational ability but a coping mechanism due to my terror of looking like a tourist or being otherwise conspicuous.
And here’s me sharing my shame.
I can remember the route if it’s all main roads. If it’s random backstreets, like Google Maps tends to plan, I die screaming.
I think jang dang den definitely existed in the ancient time of the 90s (The 90s are the new 70s and I’m not ready for this to be so) but it wasn’t widely available unless you were James Bond, or an airplane.
In the 2010s I found myself traveling through France before the tyranny of the EU forced free roaming data upon the masses and I discovered jang dang den didn’t actually need data to be functional. Though google maps hadn’t figured out “saving maps offline” so I’d often find myself looking at a no doubt very precisely calibrated dot marking my position on the blank screen of an expired map. I had to relearn the skills of our ancestors, such as looking at road signs.
Bracing!
That was me yesterday! It was fun! I had a sense of accomplishment having reached my destination and it almost restored my mood.
Master of improvisation, me.
I say almost, because when I had to get back to my house via public transport, still without a functional phone, and ended up late, and had to call in, and sprinted to a Wetherspoons and then couldn’t connect to the wifi, I definitely did nearly have a moment. Thankfully the bar manager let me use his.
Right, Jang Dang Den is passive. However, getting the map when you have no internet connection can be challenging
Yes we had the old JangDangDen back in the mid ’90s, though the mobile phones we had back then were actual phones, not pocket computers, and could often only make phone calls if you stood on the back of the sofa and held them up in the air. (Actually that still happens around here.)
This is one of those things that very few can be nostalgic about. Hurray for the GPS! It has freed us from going crazy searching on a paper map.
My strategy for navigating in my car before GPS was available was generally to get horribly lost and swear a lot. It helped to know some good curse words.
When the first standalone car GPS nav devices appeared on the market, I bought one and never looked back.
Jang Dang Den: the Great comPass in the Sky (the one that still works even when it’s overcast).
Tangentially related to the last panel, I met North about 10 years ago. He was taller than I expected.
I am only one year older than you if memory serves, and I got my license at 25. But I feel like I spent many years with paper maps and Expedia printouts before the wonder of borrowing a stand-alone GPS unit with terrible sensitivity that was supposed to (but rarely could) connect to a slow PDA for navigation. I feel Jack’s pain here
I still have a twenty year old street directory in my car from the Before Time. I should probably throw it away, lest Jang Dang Den be angered.
Perhaps keeping your ancient, invalid street directory in the car for future generations to discover archaeologically is what truly shows your reverence for Jang Dang Den.
I’ve got several old paper maps I’ve been transferring to the side pockets of every new car from the old one for decades, even though I never use them.
I think that when we totaled our previous car last August, our unbroken heritage of vestigal paper maps came to an end; pretty sure they’re in the box with the other things the new car does not need, like dash-mounts for a phone holder and our emergency jump-start battery
Silly Shelley. A true sage would immediately recognize Jang Dang Den as the Justice League’s orbital satellite and its worldwide teleporters.
Careful; John just recently had to abide a cease-and-desist from a comics company… 😉
Iirc it was just some sort of literary estate squatting on HP Lovecraft’s mate’s books, not an actual comic book or movie company, more like 3 lawyers in a trenchcoat occasionally impersonating one when they sniffed money.
There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather.
Not to be confused with Fin Fang Foom, one of the old Marvel monsters.
I also learned to drive in my mid 20s and thus never knew a time without GPS. But one time not too long ago, maybe 2017, my partner and I were driving from her aunt’s in Stroud to her friend’s in Sussex – we live in Scotland and my English geography is not great – when my phone died unexpectedly, thus wiping out any sense of knowing where we were going. In those days she still didn’t have a smartphone, we didn’t have a road atlas, and neither of us had a battery pack… so our only hope was to keep going for a while until we found ourselves at an identifiable landmark (a Sainsburys near Oxford I believe), ring the friend we were heading towards, get her to look up the directions, write them down step by step on the back of an envelope and then anxiously try to follow them for several hours through Reading’s grey roundabout plains, hoping we were where we thought we were/following the right signs.
People gripe about reliance on google maps these days, but that day gave us a real taste of the before times and I don’t think it was better!
Semi-mandatory geekery: GPS was available in the late ’90s, but not much at the individual civilian level. So Jack’s curse/post-hypnotic suggestion/paradox filter isn’t just preventing him from mentioning things that are unknown in this timeframe; it’s preventing him from hinting at things that would raise questions.
But it’s not perfect. If Shelly was a geek, “so you know how to get to places … from the sky” might cause her to say “You mean GPS?” – which would presumably cause that element of the block to crumble. The longer Jack keeps trying, the more likely he is to find ways round this thing.
Yes, the GPS program was actually launched in the late 1960s by Nixon, with the very first satellite put in orbit in 1978, and the system was deemed operational in 1995; but it’s only under Clinton that it became available to the public.
Another fun fact: GPS satellites have to constantly correct for the relativistic time dilation caused by their orbital velocity.
Anothernother fun fact: GPS satellites also have to constantly correct for the relativistic effects caused by the difference in gravity between their orbit and Earth’s surface!
These two relativistic effects cancel each other out somewhat, tugging time in opposite directions, but their respective magnitudes are different.
The understanding that gets me through the night is that time itself does not tug – more that spacetime is not the steady, linear stream it is imagined to be, and instead itself a never-ending and lush terrain full of gravitic features to explore. The satellite is at the exact position in spacetime it is supposed to be. But when, exactly, by a human standard, is that, so that we all may wind our watches appropriately? Well, as we can see from this story, that’s always a bit negotiable.
So GPS satellites are like wizards, then?
You need to be a wizard to understand general relativity.
I know someone who had to help write Boltzman’s Constant into a commercial contract. Theoretical Physics is all fun and games until someone had to dot an i.
I wonder if Jang Dang Den wears nothing but underwear, like Cousin Fin Fang Foom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_Fang_Foom
There is something absolutely delightful about Young Shelly that I can’t quite define, nor can I define the exact way in which her personality differs from that of her older self. In any event, it’s some excellent writing and art.
I think I’ve figured out the answer to both: It’s Young Shelly’s sense of humor. At this age, she hasn’t yet learned that every sign of weirdness *may* be cause for concern in that town, and so she’s simply amused. It’s charming.
Back in the 90s, there used to be a homeless guy in downtown Atlanta who made his living guiding tourists and other lost-looking souls. He gave good directions, and you’d give him a buck or five. I always thought it was an excellent business model.
“Go right on Peachtree for two blocks and turn left on Peachtree and keep going until you come to Peachtree”
“I was 26 when I passed my test”
Still ten years ahead of me. After getting a dressing down from a midwife, I finally passed a month before my eldest was born.
It’s kind of odd that Jack has this perspective given that the mystery kids didn’t even use phones to communicate, much less navigate. At least for a while.
Context: in The Case of the Unwelcome Visitor, Jack shows Erin that they use the bean sign to communicate.
Ha! I was about to ask if we’re sure he’s talking about GPS and not the Percy’s Peas + Beans sign!
But Lottie and Claire use their phones all the time in Solver and Wicked Things.
There was a lot of change on that front in a very short period, with the kids getting older and cell phone saturation increasing, and it got compressed even further for the kids, because they were maintaining a “present” that was moving faster than their own ages. In “Unwelcome Visitor”, the only time the ‘fart signal’ is even mentioned, the kids were 13, and it was 2012–13. Some, but not all, of them had phones. By the time they were 15 in “Severed Alliance”, it was 2016–17. Jack’s present now is presumably 2024, and he never knew a world without Zambians.
Lottie had a phone as far back as “Team Spirit”, but it wasn’t even a smartphone, and she didn’t carry it because it was “for emergencies” (so of course when there was an emergency, she didn’t have it), and she got a new one, also not a smartphone, in “Fire Inside”. In “Forked Road”, Mildred had a new terrible smartphone that came with Neil’s phone plan, and at the end of the story, Sonny was listening to The Whom on his smartphone. By “Severed Alliance”, Shauna was using her smartphone to covertly Facetime Lottie when she was kidnapped.
And Mildred’s smartphone got thrown into the river by Amy, but once the timeline was altered again it never happened so her phone reappeared.
I learned to fly a small aeroplane in the 70’s. Driving was always filled with the terror of being suddenly lost, but from 10 thousand feet you can see everything and know which way you’re going with the compass. 2 dimensional travel is the problem that requires all of those lefts and rights and making the wrong turns to get lost.
…except when there are too many clouds.
Yes, that’s when you should land. But conceptually the difference between the bird’s eye view and the “flatland” view.
Counterpoint, per random walks in 2 dimensional space vs 3 dimensional space: “A drunk person will eventually stumble home, but a drunk bird can flap forever and never find their way.”
We went up in a helicopter once at some event or other. A fiver for 10 minutes in the air! It was near home, an area I knew very well on ground level, but once we were in the air, whooshing around over this familiar countryside, everything looked different and I very quickly, completely lost my bearings. I’m still ashamed of this! I’m good at maps; I can usually tell where north is without a compass; I knew the area well. And yet …
With a paper map I’m better as a pedestrian too. Difficult to not wreck while driving and reading a map.
Back when I started, learning to balance the Geographers Master Atlas of Greater London on the middle of the steering wheel whilst negotiating a tight corner was a vital skill and I had at least one very interesting encounter knocking on the front door of a farmhouse to ask if I could use their phone when I’d broken down in the middle of nowhere, Essex.
If you ever sell originals, this is the page I want.
Sadly, it was drawn on a computer.
I was hoping for the same thing, James, and then saw the credit line at the bottom: “Created in Foob Dimby Roop on a 14-core Biggle Bammle Boomle”
if you ever sell computers, this is the hard drive I want.
My Aunt once posted on Facebook to not give her directions like “East” or “West” because she has no idea which way those are, so I replied “Ok, from now on I’ll use “Sunwise” and “Widdershins”.”