So, I’ve been tinkering with things and making some memory palaces. You know, the usual stuff like childhood home, garden, grandpa’s house and so on. And while thinking about what else is usable with unique loci I happened to think about maps. Not landmarks, not local shops, none of that. Just maps and the areas I am familiar with or not and I’ve been pondering how to make use of them without having to deal with things like shops that might move or close.
So, one of my ideas would be to take some random area of a hometown, with a bunch of streets and cross streets. For example I could follow a street, derive a unique theme from the street name and every cross street would then be the loci. The cross street name would then also contribute something to the scene to make it unique. If for example the area had 5 streets in parallel with 5 cross streets, I could mentally travel them in two different directions and that’s 50 loci right there. I don’t have to know what’s there or what the area even looks like. If the area is familiar, it’s not even that much of a work to remember them. And if it’s not, it’s just 10 streets to learn by heart.
Of course this method assumes that you don’t live in a country where half the streets are named like “10th street” or something equally boring.
I thought about using street numbers too, but not really sure how to go about. Thought about making every number a character or a prop for the setting provided by the street name, but I’m not really sure if they can be unique enough to not mix things up. Easy to learn though if you have 10 of them and always assign them to some street, but I’m not really sure about this.
The other thing I was thinking were road trips. Towns usually don’t go anywhere. A straightest route from city A to city B and see what loci all the smaller town, villages and settlements along the way can provide, what unique setting could derived from their names. But then I’m not sure how to tell all the highways apart. If the road itself is not memorable enough, maybe start and finish town might provide a memorable theme for the palace and loci towns act as unique props?
Anyone do something like this? Good way to learn geography on the side or just a tried and failed idea?