I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

New tutorial post on the blog: "Urban Relativity," discussing my method for comparing city populations with their surroundings, which I sometimes use to help decide which cities to show on a map, and which to leave off. somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2026/03/23/u...

Reading @tylermw.com's new post on the latest rayverse update. Best lines so far: "...a cartel of cartographers formed an illumination illuminati to plot an influence campaign so you would understand their plots." "...in effect, all terrain maps are pretending to be Norwegian." 😂

1/5‼️Gigantic new #rayverse update + blog post! Introducing {skymodelr}: render 3D scenes in #RStats with realistically-lit skies 🌇 at a given location, using just a latitude, longitude, and a time. Blog: www.tylermw.com/posts/rayver... Github: github.com/tylermorganw... Site: www.skymodelr.com

Introducing population tiles of France. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Did this a while back but forgot to share: the Danube basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The Paraná basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Average monthly precipitation of the world, 1970–2000 #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Today's basin is the Yangtze. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Average monthly precipitation of Japan, 1970–2000. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Another day, another basin: the Mekong basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The Mississippi basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

#30DayMapChallenge · Day Thirteen · A new tool. Visualisations of segments of the Duchesne (left) and Sevier (right) rivers, inspired and made possible by @geo_coe (who wrote a wonderful set of tutorials in QGIS) and @OpenTopography.

The Nile basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines (OSM and derived) of Australia. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The Colorado basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The Congo basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The Ganges–Brahmaputra basin. Have another version that includes even more rivers but that's taking forever. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

The Amazon basin. Been wanting to do this for a while and finally managed to fix the errors I was getting. I rather like how it turned out. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines (OSM and derived) of Vietnam. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines (OSM and derived) of Thailand. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines (OSM and derived) of Portugal (minus Madeira and the Azores). #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Freshwater ecoregions of Australia. #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Freshwater ecoregions of Africa. #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines (OSM and derived) of Romania. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Did this last week but never shared: a profile of Hunter Mountain's ski pistes. Should I do more? This was just a test of an idea. Might choose a mountain in Europe or Japan next time. #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Freshwater ecoregions of South America. But why didn't you do this in #rayshader?! Of course I did, but am still sorting out a few issues because rivers don't fall neatly into categories... #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Top 10 peaks of the United States, by which I mean Alaska, because all of them are in Alaska. #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Nine volcanoes of Japan. Mt. Fuji is instantly recognisable. The others too, I hope. This took a while to get right. Looks like fancy chocolates, no? Or little LED buttons. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Back to ski runs. I liked @infowetrust.com's suggestion and got to work but was frustrated by label size and placement. So I made it interactive, two ways. Which do you prefer? tterence.shinyapps.io/hunter_mount... tterence.shinyapps.io/hunter_mount... #shiny adventures, an #rstats tale

Not sure what happened here but I like it! #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Visualising Atlantic divergence versus Pacific subduction. #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Visualising ski run elevation profiles of Hunter Mountain. Thoughts? I tried facetting them by difficulty but they'd look either too wide or tall. Is it useful, interesting? Might be worth combining with an isometric view (in rayshader). #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Peaks of Japan. #ggplot2 adventures, an #rstats tale

Lighthouses of Delaware Bay. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Trying something different with Mount Snow in neon. Am of two minds about the light reflections...maybe microfacet is better. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

This was supposed to be a draft render. Just a quick `render_highquality()` with no additional arguments. Is it me or does it already look pretty good? #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

That's it. I have had enough of `rgl::rglwidget()`. Time to revert to Sequoia.

Power lines of the United Kingdom. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Found the code to do this strange attractor while looking for something else. Thought I'd see how fast I can render 360 frames of this with denoising. What used to take hours now takes slightly more than 60 minutes. #rayrender adventures, an #rstats tale

poisonfrogs: Color Palettes Inspired by Neotropical Poison Frogs laurenoconnelllab.github.io/poisonfrogs/ #Rstats

Power lines of Germany revisited, this time showing both OSM and derived power lines. Should have done this from the start but was afraid it'd take too long to render this many lines. Guess not! :) #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines of Germany. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines of France. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Power lines of Italy. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Ships of the Gulf of México. Thought I'd try to overlay all of them on one viz this time. Probably clearer if I split them up, no? #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

I can now paint with #rayshader. This is with a mere ten samples. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Ships of the Mediterranean. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

R: the language that sets the gold standard for dataviz! Anonymous user K. Midas says: "I love it!" (from a cheeky #rayshader figure in an upcoming blog post about rendering 3D plots with "golden hour" lighting by generating synthetic sunsets, entirely in #RStats with #rayrender)

This lo-res, firefly-ridden render of Brasil's power transmission lines (osm and derived) took hours. Turns out even with Tyler's amazing optimizations, I can still bring the rendering process to a crawl. To be fair, it's over 150k lines. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale