I feel like I gotta set the stage here so everyone knows where I'm coming from. If you follow my private twitter and mostly know how I feel about this stuff, feel free to skip down to the pictures.

I hate all this AI shit. It opens up so many pandoras boxes, so many legal issues, so many ethical issues, all so we can do less of the things that make us human. On the other hand, this stuff isn't going away. Maybe the Chat-GPT model isn't sustainable as we crash into the exponential curve of pro...

Part 2: Controlled Erosion, and the Manifesting of Desire

The geologic aspects of mapmaking are a motherfucker. You'll post a map online and 18 different people will slide out of the woodwork to tell you how your mountains are wrong, how your rivers are wrong and how your biomes are wrong. Homie, didn't you work out the prevailing winds?? Where are your PLATE TECTONICS. Excuse me, rivers don't do that, except when they do.

It's pretty much functionally impossible to hand craft an accurat...

Part 1: QGIS and how I learned to love The Devil

A part of fantasy cartography for me isn't just the map itself but the technical process of mapmaking. What the technical process of enables. How much fidelity can it give me? How flexible is it?

I made this way too many years ago. Even made a little leaflet applet with it. A series of several PSD and Illustrator files, cobbled together with blend layers to try and give me a flexible, performant map making solution.

... It came up short....

I've been a nerd for a long time. And like any nerd, I've been world building for some time. Some people come up with tons of settings with tons of new ideas, moving on when things get to cringy. Not me. I keep on trucking. But not inflexibly. Instead, for me, since my teenage years, this has been the... Ship of Theseus. Or the forest burning down to bring new life. Instead of starting over, I mercilessly cut and burn things down so I can focus on new ideas that better represent me as I get ol...

It felt like a lot of closure to me and the perfect time to make an appearance after years of misgivings between me and the fangame community.

Those misgivings were over nothing. Early in the life of fangames I took issue with the design choices of a few new fangames, which had no sense for humor or how and when to use traps. Eventually, a few years in, they clearly became their own thing. Like at a certain point a game isn't "Doing IWBTG wrong", it's just a heckin' needle game.

Some people...