Big Updates / What's Cooking in the World of Altera? (Patreon)

March is always the busiest month of the year for me—both personally and professionally. But this year, it's even more hectic because of a major milestone in life that I'm about to reach.

But in anticipation of this year's spring whirlwind, Matteo and I have been busy in the kitchen cooking up a lot of creative maps at the same time, so I thought I'd give you a couple of updates there and some previews.

First, Matteo and I have been developing a sort of side project called Atlas Zephyria. Can you guess by its name what it's going to be about? How about if I tell you that countries with names like Oudrapore and Salaysia or Pimente and Saint Marie & Audubon will be featured in it?

We're really excited about this one because we did it as professionally as you can get in this kind of mapmaking—using GIS to generate a lot of the layers and then setting aesthetic styles and copy content in a very streamlined fashion.

Another map we're developing is a touch up on the Wiki-style ketchup map I produced awhile back. I was re-inspired after watching the Ted-Ed video of Dan Kwartler's overview of ketchup. We've touched up the lore a bit and added a couple more ketchup types based on some more research I did, and I'm really excited about the aesthetic style Matteo devised. I know it seems like a weird subject, but ketchup just seems like the most wonderful and Altera-way of summing up interests in ethnobotany and cultural geography...

Along the lines of food, we've got another cultural geography map coming down the line. It is a bit more ambitious than ketchup: staple libations/alcoholic drinks (fermented but non-distilled alcoholic beverages). I went deep down the rabbit hole for this one, and I'm not sure how long it will take me to climb back out, but it's definitely progressing along.

Finally, we've got also got space map to boast about! This next one will show who's made it to space in Altera, and because I like to make things harder for Matteo and I, it's going to feature writing systems as well. Writing systems that are so obscure that they haven't even gotten on the radar of the Google Noto team ... they've been the main stall/slowdown for this one.

And finally, there's the much anticipated Spring update. This is also something I've been trying to find time to chip away at. I've now devised a comprehensive and methodical way of approaching map patching, but this time around, I've also got the most amount of patches to update across dozens of maps. It's safe to say that this will be a marathon for Matteo and I, and we've only just gotten started. Wish us luck...

And of course, how could I forget? The footnotes to the previous two WW2 maps are on their way to completion. I should be making a post for them very shortly!