A 350Z Appeared in the Same Tokyo Spot on Street View for 17 Years. Then It Vanished.
My Weird New Hobby: Wandering Around Tokyo on Google Maps
Ahmed Hossam's hobby is wandering Google Street View, and in Tokyo he found a white 350Z parked on the same narrow street in every capture since 2009. He muses on the calm of places that stay put while the internet races on. Then a Tokyo local visited the spot: the car and the house are gone, replaced by new construction.
So the 350Z showed up in that same spot for 17 years, and now it only exists in old Street View captures. The time capsule outlived the street itself.
- dkurth
In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"
When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.
Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!
- rambambram
I had to click this title!
For some months now I do basically the same, but without the clicking in Streetview. There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo, I found I really enjoy these. The streets are so clean and the houses so beautiful. Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.
I also enjoy the walk-throughs of neighborhoods in New York (edit: now that I think about it, this started with following ari@home, a streamer who makes electronic music on the fly while walking and having an open mic). I tried Dallas once, I guess, but it was all way too big and bulky (but it was down town I guess, so that's to be expected of a lot of cities on this planet).
Does anybody have ideas for other nice spots on this beautiful planet!? I think I know Tokyo by now. ;)
- dwd
Found myself recently down a rabbit hole watching a lot of climbing videos (free, trad, bouldering, etc).
I was looking at Google maps to locate some of the more obscure climbs outside the Yosemite valley proper. Little did I realise that Tommy Caldwell, Alex Honnold, Lynn Hill and others had done a project with Google to take a Street View camera up El Capitan (The Nose route but also parts of the Dawn Wall). Seriously the best in-person view to get an idea of what it's like pitch by pitch up the wall.
- hfosidkc77
I lived in Tokyo for a year and my favorite hobby was taking the train somewhere about 10 miles from home then just wandering around, vaguely towards home. It's such a beautiful walkable city, and the safety means you don't need to worry about much at all. I usually walked at night and I would come across drunk people stumbling home, pets (and rodents!) roaming the streets, construction in the middle of the night, strange open late restaurants / bars, and all kinds of other things. Living in Japan has its downsides but that activity was a nice reminder of what a cool place it is. I continue going back every year just to explore new little places I've never gone. I recommend anyone who visits to find some time to just wander around. Pick a destination and walk there and see what you find.
- N7lo4nl34akaoSN
If you've talked to ChatGPT enough this is instantly recognizable as AI writing. It's this kind of romantic hacker poetic ad copy thing. The short little punchy sentences. The sentence fragments. The repetition. This new age Instagram drama: flash talk for goddesses and sunsets.
I guess it works! But it's gross. lol.
- EvanAnderson
I appreciate this hobby.
I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.
At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.
A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).
- ehnto
I like trying to find spots I once visited, like little cafes or things like that. Harder than you would think given how sprawling Japanese cities are.
I also enjoy trying to find where photos are taken from. Especially fun are photos from a tall building, and trying to get the exact building and recreating the angle of the shot. That often takes lining up railways, roads and other buildings in order to first find the right tall building.
- sbarre
I've done this in Google Earth VR, and it's very fun. You can get down to basically street view, but everything is very blocky and blurry..
Or you can stay at "Godzilla scale" and walk around the city with buildings the (relative) size of appliances or furniture.. NYC is kind of fun that way.
If you are somewhere that you've been in real life, it's uncanny how familiar it still seems even at low res..
For somewhere you haven't been, or are planning on going, it can give you a sense of scale/scope/direction that is quite nice.