Bipolar disorder is a real thing and nothing to mock. It impacts millions around the world, including several distant relatives and in-laws of mine. So I’m not mocking this disease.
However, I do get a little tired of mapping global- or state-based epidemiological datasets. And the fact that bipolar can be turned into a cartographic pun was just too tempting to resist.
So I present to you the Cartographic Bipolar Day Map!
This one was a bit of a mess. Originally I wanted an Equal Earth projection that would rotate with the labels representing themselves right-side up, so to speak, even with south at the top.
This proved difficult from a technical standpoint. With very weird rendering errors using Equal Earth and D3. After several attempts back and forth with the LLM, I asked it if it would be much easier to just do it with Web Mercator, to which my assistant responded: “Oh, hell yes!” (I’ve asked my assistant to swear a lot so it better resembles working with someone I’d enjoy working with, as I only trust people who swear… a lot… but I digress.)
I gave it permission to use Web Mercator and some obnoxious raster base map just for fun, and alas… about a minute later we had a map.
Yes, I could spend my weekend perfecting this gimmicky map for a handful of “likes” on LinkedIn, I suppose, but the weather is abnormally warm in Minnesota right now, so I’d rather go outside and cut down some dying pine trees. Tornado season is coming… I figure I won’t be able to make maps, prompted or otherwise, if there is a 20 meter-long tree trunk dissecting my office.
Original Prompt