Happy National Coloring Book Day!

Remember the adult coloring-book fad? Regardless, coloring-book publishers don’t want us to forget it.

I have nothing against coloring books, aside from the fact that millions of trees were slaughtered for a fad about 10 years ago. I was never particularly proficient at them, though. I have a tendency to not enjoy staying inside the lines – or lanes or silos or… – but I do have fond memories of a Return of the Jedi coloring book from 1983.

But the adult-coloring craze has started dying off, I believe. I think there may be some coloring special issues of German-language Flow Magazines lying around our house. But that’s about it. And when I go to thrift stores looking for CDs, I see bookshelves filled with coloring books that have one or two images filled.

So what to map for coloring book day? I suppose I could try to find data of color book sales by state (since the day is officially national), but let’s be honest… that’s boring.

I could easily have Web Mapper GPT spit out a coloring book of maps. But honestly, I would be surprised if there aren’t 200 or so LLM-produced map coloring books on Amazon already? I was listening to BBC Radio about six months ago and they had a program in which they interviewed an American romance-novel author who was producing 25 novels a year using GPT 4.0 and selling 50-100,000 copies total. Now that’s a living, I told my better half and kids. I asked them if they thought I might try it. It was unanimous: stick with my day job.

And so here I am, on a Saturday evening, writing a blog for no money to provide a free map coloring book to the masses… when I could be directing ChatGPT 5.6 to author my 17th romance novel since January, including a new addition to The 50 Shades of ColorBrewer or Cartographic Projections series.

Alas, Gordon Lightfoot summed up my situation well when he crooned… “Sometimes I think it’s a shame, when I feel like I’m winning and I’m losing again…”

But alas… at least I get to make coloring books for free while watching Detroit Tigers’ top prospect Max Clark make his first-ever major league start in scenic Sacramento while my daughter tests today’s m-app.

But not just another coloring book! Oh no… I couldn’t stomach that. Let’s gamify our coloring book!

I recalled that you can fill in a world map with four colors. So I decided to allow people to pick areas of the Earth, or the entire world, and try to color it in with a preselected amount of colors.

Adjacent countries and/or provinces may not have the same color. It’s a challenge, and as my daughter was finding out, it’s not always as easy as it looks.

If you get stuck, you can click a button and have the coloring book fill itself in. Take a sneak peak, and try again.

Since this game is about coloring and not language, I also decided to try and make this more universal than most maps and apps I create. I think one of the greatest benefits of LLMs is that they speak many natural languages – not just English. So this app can be viewed in 12 or more languages – including Esperanto, because why not?

I have no idea if the translations make sense, but my daughter vouched for the German and French… passively. Most importantly, I added a British English version, so I don’t catch too much flack for “coloring book” versus “colouring book”. (You’re welcome, Ken. 😉

I also experimented with adding WeChat and Telegram sharing options, because why let US tech company’s dominate the echo chamber.

And that’s a wrap… Enjoy National Coloring Book Day in whatever language you prefer. Good luck and happy coloring.

View ChromaCarto App Here

Web Mapper GPT

Hi. Sunday is National Coloring Book Day.

I would like to make a digital coloring book game to celebrate.

The game will have a start up menu where the use chooses which part of the world they would like to map. Options will include (based on World Bank Region or SubRegion classifications, as suitable):

– The world: without small island countries
– North America: as belonging to North America, as well as US states, Canadian provinces, and Mexican states/districts and Latin America
– South America
– Europe: which will have all the countries of Europe including Russia but only up to the Urals. No states or provinces.
– Africa: just countries. No states or provinces.
– Asia: just countries
– Oceania / Australia