Google Maps
It’s a modern phenomenon that we can be scrolling through our phones and before we know it be sucked into a new creator’s world to the point that you find yourself sharing their work and telling your friends about it. That’s where I was at over the weekend after discovering ‘Shiddy Places,’ a new TikTok account whose first video appeared on August 11th where the creator uses Google Earth to randomly ‘drop’ into cities until he finds a place that’s ‘Shiddy.’
The first thing to know is that it’s entirely subjective whether or not a place is ‘shiddy.’ There have been times he dropped into a spot in a city and I thought for sure he was going to call it out as ‘shiddy’ but then said it was nice and moved onto the next spot. The other thing to know is where the ‘drop’ happens is random. He’ll circle a large swath of a part of town and Google Earth randomly drops into that spot.
To date, the most popular video from the ‘Shiddy Places’ TikTok account is the city of Baltimore, Maryland. He drops into 5 different locations and he prefaces the video by saying “Not shiddy, I’m calling it right now” before learning that Charm City isn’t so charming after all if you step off the beaten bath:
Another viral video from ‘Shiddy Places’ is where he explores the state of Washington, the ENTIRE state, until he finds a place that he deems to be ‘shiddy.’ Again, this is entirely subjective but it’s amusing to see just how many beautiful places in Washington you have to wade through before finding a place that’s moderately not nice:
As a born and raised Floridian, I fully expected ‘Shiddy Places’ to tear the Sunshine State apart. If you drop into most small towns that are 30+ miles from the coast, well, most people aren’t going to like what they find. It didn’t go that way at all though. Florida did really well on ‘Shiddy Places’.
Another popular video is where he’s randomly dropping into parts of the country of India. Americans have a lot of preconceived notions about the quality of life in India so this video is actually quite illuminating for a lot of us who have never been there:
If you liked what you saw above, consider tossing him a follow. He has zero idea I’ve written this article. I just threw it together on the fly because I’ve been laughing at this ‘Shiddy Places’ account all weekend and thought you all might enjoy it too.