The impending winter storm is so massive that it will wreak havoc on the geographical fabric of the USA. You’re gonna have Big Great Lakes and Little Great Lakes. States within states. Vast regions will shrink and vanish. Grab a shovel! (Source: 🤷‍♂️ via some page that Facebook wanted to show me)

Doing a little river tapering. I like adding details like this when I have more time to spend on a map.

I created a quick workflow on how to find the highest value from multiple attribute columns in #QGIS. This is helpful if you have temporal or similar data in a single feature class. In my example, I had over 100 columns to compare. #gis #gischat

Life has been hectic and I've been burned out for months, just on account of work and life. Obsessively checking the news is probably not helping, so I'm trying to take a mental health break. It's definitely helping, but it's hard to break myself of my habit of reading headlines many times a day.

Lately, I've taken to posting one of my maps each Monday to a couple of Reddits (r/Maps and r/MapPorn), just going back through old things I've made. I might start doing that here, too. This week it was my map of Chiron from last May. More details: somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2025/05/20/p...

Some beautiful, understated terrain art here, also available as a free ebook!

Even w/o knowing other languages, I find knowing various writing scripts is helpful as a mapmaker. I can look at forgeign data sources and read/transcribe names. I can type in other languages on my maps and have some sense of whether I did it right.

This has been making the BlueSky rounds again, so I'll give it my own little boost.

Looking for examples of geospatial/mappy tangible art and data visualization stuff. The kind of stuff you'd want to see in the lobby of a crazy futuristic mega corp in the next Bladerunner movie... maybe. Stuff you can touch and interact with, or just hangs on the wall and blows your mind. #gischat

Georeferencing is one of my favorite parts of my job. It's just so satisfying to get an old map lined up in the right place and be able to reproject it.

I'm (slowly) working on a blog post about my experiences selling map prints online in 2025. Just want to show people behind-the-scenes in case they are curious and might benefit from the info. Are there any questions you'd like me to address, or topics to cover?

Wow! Yay! The Senate just rejected Trump’s proposed science cuts, voting 82–15 to boost funding for NOAA, NASA, and the NSF. The bill already passed the House 397–28. Strong bipartisan support for science still exists.

Each of my hand-printed cyanotypes is given a thorough quality inspection before being sent to the customer.

Latest on the federal forces in Minnesota from me and my colleague Jeff Hargarten: There are now more federal immigration agents in MN than the 10 largest Twin Cities police departments combined. 9% of ICE is in MN right now, even though MN has less than 1% of the nation's undocumented immigrants.

Some pen-plotted heart globes for you.

Did a little cyanotype printing today for the Osher Map Library. Taking advantage of a rare sunny day during Wisconsin's winter.

it’s come to my attention that my tumblr post has been crossposted to bluesky, so I’m posting it on my account here #AntiAI #GenAI

One of my fosters likes wearing my hand as a helmet/face mask. Basically for as long as I want to hold it there. When I am not doing so, she sometimes rests with her face shoved downward against a surface.

I've been playing Sid Meier's Civilization for three decades, all the while idly wondering what these two icons meant. Tonight, I finally got around to looking them up in the manual. (It's research progress and pollution status)

If Minnesota doesn't at least try to charge the murderer in the ICE uniform, they should just return the Battle Flag of the Virginia 28th. There's a fight for freedom from tyranny or there's surrender.

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

For the next few days I'll post my favorite #maps I finished in 2025. These are for "Into the Ice," by Mark Synnott. Often my monochrome work is simple due to print quality constraints. But they ran these in high detail and I could go all-out. (Simulated mockups; I don't have a copy of the book)

In my annual tradition of transparency, I've put together a wrapup of my 2025 activites for my patrons. It's open for all to read, if you want to see what I was able to accomplish with the support of the community! www.patreon.com/posts/reflec...

New Year’s has become so commercialized that we’ve forgotten the reason for the season. I’m starting a movement to restore tradition by putting Janus back into January.

Two new versions of the New Mexico hierarchical elevation grid. Green and brown pen & yellow and black pen on hot press watercolor paper.

Believe it or not, I haven't seen enough maps to do a "best of" list for 2025. Here are some mappy highlights of the year (part 1 of 2) featuring content from @mapasmilhaud.com and @pinakographos.bsky.social mapoftheweek.substack.com/p/overlooked...

5. He cynically took advantage of good social movements with a product he didn't invent so he could make money off of people trying to do the right thing while distracting us from material social change.

1. Peters ripped off Gall and took credit. Probably. 2. Peters pretended his was the first equal area map (It wasn't. At all) 3. Peters massively distorts shapes which are also important in geography! 4. His claims reduced geography to a false premise- that size is the only thing that matters.

Sorry to the man who came into my store looking for a Peters Projection world map. I stand by my words but you didn't deserve the tone of voice I used to say "absolutely not because I'm not a hack."

Gen-X and older Minnesota folks, here's a bit of nostalgia for your Christmas gift.

toMake Press & Editions Bearing Witness :: the World Beautiful #toMake #Missoula #aRealPlace #printmaking #PinholePhotography #Film #Lithography #ReliefPrints #Letterpress #Luddite #BlueSKyArt #LimitedEditions #MonoPrints #Making #ByHand . . . www.tomake.com

Anecdotally, it seems like many cartographers (myself included) have a bad sense of direction and get lost easily. I'm not sure if this is just confirmation bias — a mapper getting lost sticks out as amusing. But it could make sense: those who must look at maps often end up falling in love w/ them.

(Whether they want me to or not). Also I wrote a blog post about this years ago: somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2020/10/13/t...

Evening #map doodle: showing cities in the 13 original states that have populations comparable to the whole colony's estimated pop during the Revolution. I had to mix & match both city-limit pop and metro pop to get numbers that sorta lined up. 1780 Data: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Evening #map doodle: showing cities in the 13 original states that have populations comparable to the whole colony's estimated pop during the Revolution. I had to mix & match both city-limit pop and metro pop to get numbers that sorta lined up. 1780 Data: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

The 14th Mountain Cartography Workshop will be held April 22–26, in Harrachov, Czechia. I've been twice and it's a great gathering. Hoping to be able to attend & present my auto-hachures to terrain-minded colleagues. Perhaps I'll see you there? mountaincartography.icaci.org/activities/w...

My holiday baking tip: add a small pinch of cayenne pepper to your cookie dough. Not enough for the cookies to seem spicy; just enough to leave a pleasant lingering warmth behind after eating.

Right MAP Making :: Five Ways to Make Maps for a Future to be Possible. The most obvious characteristic of our age is its destructiveness. Available as a signed two colour letterpress 22x15 in broadside from www.tomake.com/manifesto.html #RightMapMaking #letterpress #printmaking #toMake #mapmaking

If you enjoy both #RhodeIsland and #rivers, stop by The Map Center (@mapcenter.com) to check out (and maybe buy?) this poster I designed for them, showing the state's streams in the style of a transit network map.

I have no specific endorsements, but many independent map artists' shops are here! mapartists.org

I make stuff, &&& it is available for purchase @ toMake.com toMake Press editions original lithographs, relief, mono-prints, letterpress maps and prints. & YA) ANYTHING THAT ALLOWS THE VIEWER TO ACCESS HOW YOU SEE THE WORLD IS ACCURATE #toMakePress #aRealPlace #Missoula #printmaking #making

#silentSunday #madison #dreamkeepers

North and South America terrain as a hierarchical grid.

This week on The Map Room (1/2): National Rail’s All Stations Interactive Route Map www.maproomblog.com/2025/12/nati... Alabama’s New Election Map Was Drawn by a Teenager www.maproomblog.com/2025/12/alab... GIS and Enshittification www.maproomblog.com/2025/12/gis-...

Curious about using Python to make #maps but don’t know where to start? I wrote a tutorial that’s ostensibly about GDAL but is really a beginner’s guide to programming: medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

Another atlas headed for recycling (yes, I've saved many but there are dozens just like this and I just cannot save them all). I had to translate what this glorious map was showing -- it's wind! And the location is Azerbaijan.

It's Cyber Monday – the last day to get 15% off all prints in the Transit Maps store before Christmas (no more sales this year)! My original maps: transitmap.net/store/produc... Vintage reproductions: transitmap.net/store/produc...

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

Buuuuuut — there's also an exclusive Rhode Island rivers piece available only at The Map Center.

While I've lately been promoting the Independent Map Artists group I organize (mapartists.org), I haven't actually indulged in shamelessly promoting my own #map store for a long while. Weird world maps, mountain sketch mugs, river transit maps, and more. somethingaboutmaps.com/Storefront