I randomly zoomed out on Google Maps and dropped the pin with my eyes closed. I ended up at 19 Pochtamtskaya Ulitsa in Kapinsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast. Which is in Russia.

19 Pochtamskaya resembles a Soviet Gulag of some sort. I can’t read Cyrillic, which is what all of the signs are in. There is a barbed-wire fence and a couple of smokestacks in the building, but they come out of the underground, not the building itself. Perhaps a secret government manufacturing center? Probably not, because the exterior of the building looks absolutely terrible. In actuality, likely a brake factory or something. If it was an apartment building in DC, the rent would easily be $2,000 a month because of the “urban design.” I wonder how many Google Street View drivers have been abducted by townspeople?

This is the original assignment link. I chose to make this assignment connect with the 80s theme. I chose this image from google maps the street view to create a story with Madonna going to record her next song. The car reminds me of an 80s car perspective, and the image makes you think about where the car is going. Madonna is driving to record her next song, while she is playing her recent songs on the radio. She has a show coming up and she is heading to the recording studio.

In the year 3033 things were very rough for simple astrobark farmers. Below is a picture of an abandoned astrobark storage shed. On it you can see the gang tag of the local gang found in Kai’s town, the “Blue”. The Blue are an extremely violent gang that has slowly grown due to a lack of effective ruling and an ineffective criminal justice system in the area. You can see in the background that there are more old buildings in the back that probably date back more than one thousand years. This picture illustrates the similarities to old Earth environmentally. Many of the trees, plants, and wildlife are almost identical despite having very different genotypes. It is a phenomenon that is still being researched in the most prestigious Universities throughout the solar system.

It is rumored that this specific astrobark storage shed used to belong to a semi-prosperous family. This family was very committed to harvesting the ground born plastic precursor that was so necessary to the area’s economy. Unfortunately this family was unlucky enough to be the next stop on the Blue’s warpath. The Blue’s needed more money to resist the local law enforcement’s push back against them, thus they were extorting and applying pressure to farms in the area. This extortion attempt was met with resistance by the owner of the farm, which resulted in the slaughter of the family to teach other farms in the area the consequences of resisting. When Kai first heard this story he was horrified, terrified, and also very angry. He immediately made up his mind to fight such a horrible force in the world, and put a stop to their violence.

This picture is actually from Yuendumu, in Australia. I picked this area because I wanted a rural picture with limited greenery, due to the fact that it needed to be an astrobark farm. It was funny as I was digging through Google maps I didn’t really know what I wanted until I saw this picture. It even had a little drawing or, “tag” which I could use to add in a antagonist into Malachi’s story. After I found the street view that I wanted, I simply took a screenshot and then added that screen shot to my blog. This assignment was interesting, made more interesting because I needed it to have some sort of relation to my character. Hope you enjoyed!

Just Zaying…