Author Archives: Ian Muehlenhaus

World Chess Day (201/365)

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I spent a lot of time thinking about this one. World Chess Day. Chess is literally a game about flanking an opponent geographically, wiping out their forces, and striking down the leader. Can’t get much more geographic than this, honestly.

Alas, how can I possible make chess look and feel geographic and mappy?

Sure, I could color the board as a map. But…

So I decided to create a chess-like game, because honestly, there are so many chess apps already, and you can ask Eric Losang at the next Euro Carto or ICC meeting, but I really, really stink at Chess. Like, even with two apps teaching me how to play, I don’t get it.

I like games of luck, where low-probability and outlandish outlier moves have a chance, and in chess there is none of that. To me at least, it seems there is one “right” move on each turn and infinite “hopefully-your-opponent-doesn’t-notice-what-a-dingbat-you-are-and-wipe-you-out-within-two-turns-because-you’re-so-bad-at-chess” move. Every single turn, I somehow almost always end up picking one of the latter – well, I suppose probability says that’s likely, but I’ve never picked the right move, even once. But I still enjoy the game.

There are many stellar tile and card games in production these days. So I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of fun to create a chess-like prototype game that mixes up elements of The Cartographers (imagine me owning that game?)), Carcassonne, and I forget what other game I was thinking of at the time, but it wasn’t Chess. Oh, Castles of Burgundy and Carpe Diem by Stefan Feld… two amazing games.

So I prompted Web Mapper GPT to please come up with a schema for this new quasi-chess game. It did. Then I prompted it to please make the game but I added a twist.

The other day I mentioned in a LinkedIn post or somewhere… I don’t actually remember where or when… that you can make new design styles and create maps with prompt cartography from almost anything, “even old IKEA furniture catalogs.”

Well guess what… this map uses a design schema inspired by the graphic design style (not the sofa images) of 20-some years of Ikea and similar Scandinavian catalogs.

I think you’ll see that reflected in the sharp corners, modular build, and very IKEA colors. Kind of neat, even if it’s not particularly “chessy.” Maybe it’s neo-chessy, retro-Swedish? Whatever, it’s modular chess.

I built the first iteration to be quite simple, only a 5×5 board. However, there are plans to push it to 8×8 in the future, maybe when I’m not making maps of Chess Day some year.

The game has a simple AI you can play against. Have fun! And happy prompt mapping! 🙂


Play game here

Web Mapper Prompt 

Can you come up with some chess-like game mechanics for a digital game where a player both moves pieces but also lays terrain tiles on the board to stymie the opponent and corner important pieces? The game board should be a map of some sort, or a chart that is map-themed similar to The Cartographers, Carcassonne, or Links and Rails, but also Chess of course, as this game map thing is being made for International Chess Day.

Please brainstorm and come up with some mechanic ideas and we’ll iterate from there. Thank you!

National Retainer Day (200/365)

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I had braces when I was young. I remember my parents obsessing about me brushing my teeth well and flossing, because the braces cost a “fortune” and I had better make sure I took care of my teeth and blah, blah, blah (i.e., the sound a teenager hears when he is tuning his parents out and thinking about how to get to the next level in Sky Shark on the Commodore 64).

Finally, after several years or so, the braces were finished. And then I had a retainer. Had being the key word. It’s a hard part of personal history to forget, as it was neon green.

No one had told me that after years of pain, I would need to wear that every day at night for the rest of my life. Yeah… okay, like whatever.

I moved to Hungary as a foreign-exchange kid for a year in 1993. My retainer came with me and wasn’t used more than… well even… once. I brought it home, naturally, so my mum would see it. But by then I was pretty much grown up – a teenager set on doing unhealthy things with my life, as Generation Xers were far more wont to do than today’s generations, I feel like, but maybe that’s what my kids tell me so I don’t worry so much? Hmmm…

In the grand scheme of things, not wearing the retainer again, losing it at some point over two decades ago, I suppose, is a very minor thing. Yes, my teeth are quite crooked again. My daughter last year said: Dad, you have an overbite. I hadn’t ever noticed or thought about it. It was one of those non sequitur comments that kind of goes right through the parental armor. Ever since, I’ve been obsessed with my teeth’s newfound crookedness, which I hadn’t even noticed before my daughter nonchalantly called it out. Ironically, she just got braces three months ago. My wife is obsessed with having my daughter brush her teeth and floss. And so the cycle goes… We know how this is probably going to end. My daughter is half me, after all. (Sigh. Poor thing.)

Alas… why this long story about retainers, teeth brushing, and … I really do lose myself in these posts. It must be WordPress or something. Apologies.

Today is National Retainer Day. At first, I figured only a lawyer/barrister lobby group could come up with such a patently absurd name. But no… t was instituted by orthodontists and dentists, I read. Must have been one hell of a slow day (or year?) at the American Dental Association lobby group when they came up with this. Perhaps they were huffing too much laughing gas? (I’m not saying they did, but “other people are suggesting” as a notoriously slippery US President is fond of saying to avoid litigation.)

Anyway, National Retainer Day is a real thing. And I really am mad to my teenage and 20-year old self for not wearing the darn thing. Though, to be fair to my younger self, I don’t have cavities yet, so apparently I did brush well. Silver linings.

All of these things were on my mind when I came up with the idea for today’s map. As well as, metaphorically it occurred to me, the US could use a social and political retainer to jar us back to a place of normalcy. But I quickly squashed the ides – orthodontics are incredibly expensive and the US is already bankrupt.

Alas, my mind wandered to the new Map Styler GPT tool I’ve been playing with. It’s soooo fun!

Before making this map in Web Mapper, I asked Mapy Styler to create a map design schema based on dental x-rays, ultrasounds, and mammograms – essentially, medical imaging theme. I think you’ll have to admit the results are… well, let’s just say they are pretty satisfactory.

Then, I wrote a simple prompt with a quirky request, uploaded the medical imaging style with the prompt, and waited…

3 minutes and 26 seconds later – Gangbusters! (A word I’m not sure I’ve ever used in my life. I’m starting to confabulate more than my own LLM agents. Where did that word come from? Downright creepy.)

Happy National Retainer Day, World! 🙂

Bonus: this one used a gnomonic projection, which is really fun bur rarely used, because it’s not very practical unless your launching missiles or making a retainer map. A shout-out to the University of Kansas cartography family, as it’s centered somewhere near Lawrence. 🙂 

View Map Here

Web Mapper Prompt

Hi. Sunday is National Retainer Day, celebrating tooth hygiene and orthodontics or something weird like that.

Speaking of weird, I have an insane vision. I’m imagining a very minimalist map of the contiguous US states. But they are projected in an unconventional manner (for example they are oblong or stretched and distorted (perhaps a gnomonic projection centered on the middle of the contiguous US (i.e., Kansas/Nebraska area?)

I would like this “slippy” map to do something special. As the user zooms in or out, or pans, it systematically should shift, transpose, rotate, angle, shear, and every other design geometry parameter there the states into different projections, distortions, etc. I leave it up to you to create it, but the joke is that there is no retainer, so they are malleable. Their geometry stays the same, but the underlying projection and positions of them are moveable, etc.

Please find an appropriate free API or coding method to make this playful, fun, and not at all serious but interesting enough to look at for 10 seconds, laugh, and share with others.

Here is another fun part. I would like this to be styled like a medical image/dental x-ray. Fortunately, I had another agent create a map style schema for you on this. It’s attached.

If possible, please set this up to be entirely gray scale and medical image-esque. The neatline should be the edge of a laptop or desktop monitor. (On mobile devices, just give a small black bevel for the same effect. Like the person is looking at it and playing with it on a computer in the dentist’s office.

Sources button should just be a simple “i” in the lower right, which should show attribution to Creator: Ian Muehlenhaus (link to muehlenhaus.com)
Prompting tools:
– Web Mapper (link to your own self, but not this conversation)
– Map Styler (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6a57dc08e31481918450b1d81c92518f-map-styler)

Map Style:
– Medical Imaging (www.promptcartography.com)

Attribution:
– other APIs, etc.

—
The map title should be relatively small font, the same as all other font on the image, upper left. No pre-title above it. No subtitle.

National retainer day. Sun 07/19/2026.

The US map must fill as much of the viewport as possible. Nothing else. Let the user click and drag or zoom a tiny bit and see the distortion.

Please make zoom do something that distorts, etc. No need to zoom in on the map. Any interaction with the map should have a precalculated impact on the distortion and movement of it.

Thank you!

IMPORTANT: please make sure the states have the great lakes cut out of them. Otherwise they look kind of silly… and the map is silly enough. 🙂

National Caviar Day (199/365)

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I’ve only had caviar a few times. I’m pretty sure the stuff that cost ~$3 in Hungary in 1994 wasn’t legit, but I’m counting it. It was delicious – though bright orange. It was some sort of egg. Maybe just eggs from the nyekladhaza tok where I frequently swam.

I had it at some party too. I forget where. But then someone mentioned whatever it was that they were serving was caviar, and like the time I couldn’t pass up eating free lobster at Larry’s 50th birthday party in Madison, I ran over there just to try it. And then consumed probably more than my share… It was good. It’s basically salt with a gelatinous texture and a hint of fish flavor, but… as you can already tell, there is a reason I’ll never be a food critic. (Speaking of which, perhaps, and just perhaps, food critic and taste-testing is one of the most stable professions to be in right now? It will take a while for a Tesla bot to outdo a human on that, I imagine. Then again, people like me think fish eggs are delicious – maybe we humans are the crazy ones?!)

I spent my teen years living on Lake Superior – literally, as in it was 20 meters across the street. My city decided to subsidize and build a giant freshwater aquarium celebrating Lake Superior and local fish – The Great Lakes Aquarium.

I don’t bring this up to imply that city planners and politicians trying to get reelected should never be allowed to make long-term public business decisions on behalf of the community – though I do mean that. Rather, even though everyone an aquarium showing trout and walleye that are in almost all 15,000+ lakes in Minnesota would not draw a crowd just because they added a large sturgeon to the tank, the mascot they created for the aquarium became one of my all-time favorites! If they had t-shirts with this mascot, I would buy five. (I tend to hoard clothing items I really like and worry I’ll never get replicas of. It’s weird!)

Alas, like a scene from a Robert Zemeckis movie, if he created Back to the Future, as I can’t be bothered to check my memory on this, the Surgeon General has been erased… from history! (In other words, I can’t be bothered to go look up the director of a movie, but I can spend an hour searching Google and Wikimedia for images from before the digital camera era of a person in a giant sturgeon costume dressed as a general. He has now become merely a mythical and legendary mascot even though I recall shaking the General’s hand one day at a community event. (Perhaps this is how UAP/UFO observers feel when no one believes them?)

Without further ado, a map for National Caviar Day – which I will note, seems somewhat strange, because I don’t think the market for caviar is huge in the US, and you might as well go all out with an international day, but whatever, maybe the former-Duluth mayor that thought it was a good idea to build a freshwater aquarium is now in charge of the US Caviar Lobby Group?

Happy National Caviar Day everyone! Long live the Sturgeon General!

P.S. I found a drawing of the Sturgeon General in an archived Lake Superior Magazine article, where the journalist actually sat down and interviewed the Sturgeon General himself. A fascinating read and look at 1990s, pre-internet marketing in many ways.

Article is linked here, but this is not the Sturgeon General I remember! This is a mere caricature of his greatness!

View map here

 

Web Mapper Prompt

Create an interactive web map titled **“Black Pearls: A Global Atlas of Caviar and Sturgeon.”**

The map should celebrate National Caviar Day while presenting caviar through four connected themes: geography, sturgeon biology, aquaculture, and conservation. The experience should feel luxurious and refined, but it must remain educational, scientifically responsible, and transparent about data quality.

### Core concept

Begin with a dark global perspective of the northern hemisphere showing major sturgeon rivers, inland seas, coastal habitats, aquaculture regions, and documented caviar-producing locations. Avoid making political boundaries the dominant visual element. Instead, emphasize river systems, watersheds, species ranges, and production geographies.

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World Emoji Day (198/365)

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About 10 years ago, I believed that emojis were a scourge. I felt they were making people stupid and would atrophy our brains. I despised emojis.

Now… I use them all the time. I don’t believe in brains atrophying from such things anymore – just straight-up adapting to our new technological environments. And I’ve adapted to the use of emojis now, and I actually enjoy them.

No, I haven’t gone so far as to view The Emoji Movie – it looked liked  “human slop” to me. (I assume that is the phrase many people would be comfortable with, since so many are accusing LLM agents of producing “AI slop.”) And I still haven’t taken the time to memorize any emoji codes outside of GitHub, where they are easy to remember (“:poop:”). But I kind of dig them now. One emoji is often worth at least four or five words. I wouldn’t necessarily write prompts with them, though. (Not yet, anyway. Something to try, perhaps? {would-insert-thinking-emoji-if-I-knew-how}).

I also like Dorling cartograms – there should be an emoji made for those, actually. So I thought… let’s go for it. Let’s ask Web Mapper to create a Dorling cartogram of emojis. The risky part? Which emoji for each country? Dangerous.

I wrote the prompt specifically to avoid any representation of skin color and to focus on agriculture, nature, and economic aspects. I uploaded one of the 40 map styles. And then… Web Mapper produced this.

Well done, Web Mapper. Well done. Thank you. {wish-I-could-insert-a-heart-emoji-here}

View Map Here

Web Mapper Prompt 

Hi there,

Could you please do me a favor. I would like to create a World Emoji Day map in the style of a Dorling Cartogram. Each country should be represented by a unique emoji that is not particularly offensive. Determine which emoji to use based on current or historical political, economic, social, or ecological/agricultural stereotypes and norms for that country. (e.g., Guatemala may work represented as a Banana due to its high banana production, or a t-shirt because of its clothing manufacturers). Size the emojis based on the most comprehensive recent year of country population data found on Wikipedia.

You may use duplicate emoji styles as long as they are real and have different colors. NOTE however: no emoji representing human skin tone may be used more than once. All human skin tones should be default emoji yellow.

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World Snake Day (197/365)

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I don’t like snakes. I have a (seemingly) primordial bias against them.

My dislike for them only increased when, as a child I stepped on a Gardner snake barefoot while playing tag in my yard. Not poisonous, but unexpected and creepy. (I imagine the snake enjoyed the run-in even less.) I still shriek whenever I see a Garner snake on my property, which is quite frequently, as I moved into a pine forest full of them.

I’ve always been fascinated by poisonous snakes, though, ever since seeing the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and because where I grew up, we didn’t have anything “venomous” to speak of. Not even spiders.

I think that’s why snakes feel “more dangerous” than they probably really are. Bears, moose, and sometimes a random wolf or two were frequently in my yard growing up… (albeit a spruce forest then). Our crab apple tree tended to attract momma bears with young cubs every year. Made waiting for the school bus intriguing. But they were no problem. They were mammals. Our species’ cousins, if you will.

But poisonous snakes?! I felt so lucky I never had to deal with those.

Today, I decided to create a map of poisonous snake species around the world to celebrate a day that (inwardly) freaks me out – World Snake Day. Perhaps it will help me overcome my fear. (And yes, I know snakes are crucial for ecosystems. I still don’t like them.)

Animal range datasets are frequently murky. Also, the datasets aren’t generally easily or readily available or accurate for 60 different species around the world at once.

So today’s map was a two-part challenge for me.

The first: use Spatial Data Doctor GPT to find, collect, and trace different toxic snake species ranges anywhere it could find them. Naturally, I asked it to also return reliability scores based on how each feature was retrieved, its source, and the level of generalization the source had to begin with.

Simple. This was a much bigger ask than many other data retrievals I’ve done, because in some cases I believe it had to analyze print maps from open-access journal articles, etc., and then logically determine and trace those ranges.

Well done, Spatial Data Doctor GPT. Well done. This is my favorite GPT in the whole WebMapGPT suite. I don’t think many GIS companies have realized this yet, but there is absolutely little reason for a human cartographer in 2026 to ever visit a slow-loading, archaic GIS data portal again. That’s what LLM agents are for! Try it if you haven’t yet. It may just change your dataset creation life. Don’t forget to ask for a source and reliability score for each feature returned too and/or a provenance file. Particularly because the anti-LLM trolls are out there, and they are looking for prompt cartographers to strike. Beware of the trolls. They’re like… like… what we’re mapping today!

So where was I… yes, poisonous snakes!

I now had an epic dataset. So it was time to create a map. Alas… you may have heard, but over the past two weeks I’ve been creating a lot of stuff for other prompt cartographers. What drives me recently is helping more people develop prompt cartography workflows and become more proficient at the process. That’s my entire modus operandi right now. That’s why I started creating map design styles and schemas a couple of weeks ago.

On that front, I’ve also created a Map Design Lab at www.promptcartography.com that allows you to mix and mash up to four of these design schemas to create your own Franken-Design schema (or style genome) using what I am currently calling a Map DNA composite score. (I labeled the tool “beta” on purpose to reserve the right to change the subpar naming conventions I tend to come up with at one in the morning on a Monday).

So now we all have over 40 researched styles we can use, as well as a site where you can mix and match different styles together, add new colors, remove some palette colors, edit and tweak which fonts are used, etc. So the second goal of today’s map…

I wanted to use some new schemas and a Map Design Lab mash-up to make this map. I will show you three mash-up schemas below. All of them are based off of board game systems I own and love, because I haven’t had time to play many games recently.

In the end, I kept the the World War II Undaunted Normandy-inspired card game theme mixed with the classic Cassini French Cartography style. I just preferred the legend styling and map organization with on this one compared to the other outputs. It’s a map style mash-up! Cool!

You’ll noticed that the board game schemas aren’t posted anywhere online yet. There’s a reason for that. They were made with a new WebMapGPT agent I’ve built called Map Styler. These were the first design schemas I created with the actual GPT. They are prototype and QA outputs. The original design schemas were designed in a different place, not using a specialized GPT. I took what I learned from making those to create a GPT tool I can share with the world.

I will release Map Styler shortly – maybe tomorrow depending on how fried I am after work. It will allow you to write a simple prompt and create detailed design schemas (essentially what are used in the Map Design Lab) of your own.

For example, in the examples shown below, I asked the GPT to create schemes based off board games I was looking at on a cart in my garage. You can make design schema from almost anything – the backs of DVD covers work, Ravesnburger puzzle box layouts, Ikea furniture catalog designs… Yup, I’ve been playing around a lot. You can make some seriously cool designs by mixing them together!

And rest assured, the tool never copies any trademarked or copyrighted icons, logos, etc. It creates a map style scheme inspired by what you ask it to do research on – not copying directly. It’s amazing. It’s fun. And it just sped up the cartographic process significantly! Anyone who has played Bohnanza knows that the overly saturated yellow map with eye-burning red font is spot on. Design inspiration and mixing is merely a prompt away now. No coding required. No GUIs required. Just a half-decent prompt.

Map Styler will be announced on the WebMapGPT Blog soon. So if you’re interested, stay tuned.

But anyway… snakes! Blasted snakes! Yikes!

Today’s map shows where 60 of the world’s most toxic snakes live (roughly).

It’s interactive and designed for kids, parents, and people who randomly might Google or LLM “show me a map of the world’s most poisonous snakes please.” I’m sure this will land on the 47th page  of Google search, but it will be out there, in the wild.

Another prompt cartography artifact. Ta-da!

I hope you enjoy today’s map. It was fun to make. And I can’t wait to get to the next day, because snakes… yuck!

Bohnanza / Family Card-Inspired Game Mash Up Styled Map

Forest Shuffle Game / Cassini Map Mash Up
(Also inspired by Guillaume Touya and the very nice cheese-shop guy in Nantes 🙂

 

The Final Design Version
World War II / Undaunted-Card-Game-System-Inspired Mash Up Map

Pop-up style was designed in one-off prompt without me mentioning it at all, because the schema associated the card styles and layouts to map components.

View Map Here

Web Mapper Prompt (www.webmapgpt.com) Single Prompt for each style.

Please create a fun, educational map about snake ranges for World Snake Day. The audience should be targeted at school children who are fascinated by deadly snakes and may ask Google to find a map. (Add some SEO stuff to the metadata at top, please, about poisonous snake maps, ranges, interactive maps, reliable, etc..) I’m attaching a ton of information and data created by another GPT. Use the data that makes the most sense for the easiest, cleanest presentation on an apache website. There is a readme file that describes what the datasets are and what you can visualize. If there is data on number of deaths, etc., perhaps add proportional circles, etc. Otherwise, just ranges are fine. Perhaps take a look at the data and attached style schema before you begin and provide your best style and dsign suggestion. Thank you!

International Body Painting Day (189/365)

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Personally, I’ve never been one for body painting. But alas, there is a day for it. And it was a good excuse to do something a little more lighthearted. Plus, there weren’t many other options on this day, as I recall.

I live in a pine forest. We have lots of birds flying about – and a lot of very large wild turkeys hammering on our windows at their own reflections. If you don’t believe turkeys and windows don’t mix well, check out what they did to the entryway at Science Hall in Madison, Wisconsin, when I worked there.

So as I was walking to my garage and I saw my dog pounce at a robin which, rightfully, freaked out and flew right above my head, a thought entered my brain… remember, thoughts and ideas are just datasets in the quantum verse that use humans as their medium for diffusion in my world-view…

I thought: what about a bird’s-eye view of a human head painted with a stereographic projection? (I opted out of placing a target on it; though, a bird has targeted me in the past with some success.)

The image would presumably be a male, I figured. Though I know female-pattern baldness is increasing in western countries, fewer women have shaved heads to paint, and the ones that don’t are a bit sensitive about it – ask Chris Rock! I also asked for a caucasian male, because I am white and understand the issues with painting and racism broadly.

And already, one of the easiest, most mundane daily maps was turning into a social faux-pas summersault. When imagining a bird crapping on a map on the top of my head, I had no idea there were so many human-constructed, non-tangible, things to consider about the design, worry about getting in trouble for, and consider. So much for a one-off, silly-a** map for International Body Painting Day?!

I didn’t, but I do now. I’ll tell you right now: this is the last map I ever make for this day. Full-stop.

So the “easiest” map I created this week, using a simple ChatGPT Image generator, was also the most difficult in many ways.

I attempted to steel myself for any potential trolling and cancelling by asking my kids to look at the image and try to rip me for anything they can find. Alas, they only gave it a half-hearted effort; they don’t like the brown shoes and said I have a much larger nose and hairier ears than the LLM-generated dude. Fair enough.

Fortunately for the anonymous troll that keeps peppering Ken every day we post a map, my kids don’t critique maps – because they don’t care about cartography as much as I – or apparently the anonymous online troll – do.

So anonymous troll, please let Ken know what’s just a little wrong with this map. I know it’s missing at least one country. Can you find it?! 🙂 I hope it makes you feel better, even though it reminds me of darkroom cartographers ridiculing early, dot-matrix print maps, saying:

“See! Hahaha, digital cartography is not the future. I will not replace, skilled hand-drawn cartography work.”

 

I don’t know if any actually thought this, but if they did, I’m pretty sure it didn’t bode well for their future careers.

So without further ado, happy International Body Painting Day!

View the map image full-size here.

ChatGPT Image Creator Prompt

I would like to create a map image to celebrate world body-painting day. I’m imagining a photo-realistic image top-down on a caucasion’s man’s bald head oval. It should be painted like a stereographic world map using six unique colors. It should look well done and quite accurate (though generalized). Each major country should be colored differently from its neighbors. Oceans should be NC Tar Heel blue. The map should be centered on the north pole. Antarctica and arctic ice should be white. In the upper left, put a prevalent but non-dominant H3 or H4 style heading title, sans-serif font (e.g., Helvetica), from left-to-right: “Bird’s-eye view” In the lower-right, in small and subtle font place a label: CC: 2026, #365DaysOfMaps Include the person’s shoulders, neck, maybe the tip of his shoes or whatever would be in a photo taken directly above a bald person’s head. The background should be completely white – as though the photo were taken in a professional studio. The person should be wearing a white, polo-knit shirt and blue jeans, which shouldn’t be very visible, obviously, but for the parts viewable that is what it should be. Brown shoes like Born or Danskos if any part of the shoes are available. Thank you!

World Kiswahili Language Day (188/365)

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My good friend, Fuad, from middle school in Beijing was from Tanzania (with Omani citizenship). He spoke Swahili, as did another friend of mine, Evelyn, from Uganda.

Swahili is the best sounding language I’ve yet heard. (Yes, personal preference, but the intonation, word sounds, and cadence are absolutely beautiful to my ears.) Part of me has always wanted to start learning it just for fun. I realize, however, that I probably won’t – too many mapping tools to make, digital board games to design, and baseball to watch. Besides, they should have nano-chip implants before I die that automatically allow me to interpret any language as I hear it – I’m excited for this day!

Even if I don’t learn the language, I was happy to see there is a day for Kiswahili, which translates to “language Swahili”, and hence the name “Swahili” is typically used in English to avoid any Rio Grande River quirkiness.

I decided to create a dataset of where it is spoken natively, where the diaspora is (e.g., Oman), etc. I used Spatial Data Doctor to create the spatial dataset, including CSV and geojson of the countries.

I then asked Web Mapper to create a map with the datasets.

Finally, for fun, I had a new tool I’ve been working on and will release in the near future, a map design schema creator, create a Kiswahili design schema. It’s now available at the Prompt Cartography website.

View map here

Web Mapper Prompt

# Kiswahili Language Day Map

Hi. I would like to make a very stylish and respectful map showing the location and prevelance of the Kiswahili Language in Africa and the Middle East, etc.

I am attaching some datasets I have created regarding the language. Please take a look at them and the Readme file to come up with some good ideas about how best to represent these datasets.

We will iterate from there. Thanks!

I am also creating a new true LLM agent – very early stages – that I will create for others to download and embed in their own workflows and run with their own LLMs at some point. I’ve given it a really inspiring prototype name: Web Mapper 2.0 Beta. 🙂

This one chose to use a stereographic project, which was cool, but the layout and aesthetic direction still need a lot of work in my mind. Always something to do. I include a snapshot of the result below, though, just for fun.

Malawi Independence Day (187/365)

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Today is Malawi Independence Day. On July 6, 1964, Malawi became an independent country. Before this it was a British protectorate referred to as Nyasaland.

I thought it would be nice to make an app celebrating a country who far more recently broke free from British colonial tyranny than another country that did several days ago.

I learned a lot producing this map. I hope others do too. It’s a map of historic and important figures in the Malawi independence movement and the independent state post-independence. Though the list is not exhaustive, and omissions are inevitable, the dataset includes 60 important people over the past 60 or so years.

I created the dataset with Spatial Dataset Doctor GPT. Then designed the map with Web Mapper.

Happy Independence Day, Malawi!

 

View Map Here

Dataset Doctor Prompt (www.webmapgpt.com)

I would like to make a dataset of important and famous individuals in the history of independent Malawi and/or in the history of traditional, indigenous Malawi, and/or as a leader in the independence movement.

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Isle of Man Tynwald Day (186/365)

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As a continuous government, the country that celebrated its independence yesterday is fairly old. But not as old as Isle of Man! Not even close.

Tynwald Day is July 5th. Tynwald Day is the Isle of Man’s national day, marking the annual open-air sitting of the Manx Parliament at Tynwald Hill in St. John’s.

It’s a centuries-old tradition rooted in Norse custom, making it the site of the longest unbroken parliament in the world.

Admittedly, I did not know much about it before I saw it on the list this week, but I thought it would be good to spread the love among the different independence days this week. And this one is epic – over 1000 continuous years of parliament and going!

I used the Sanborn Fire Insurance map design schema from the Prompt Cartography website for this map.

I also had GIS Data Doctor write a turbooverpass-eu query to grab all the non-residential building footprints on the island to see how it would style them. You can turn those on in the Layers panel. Admittedly, this map is a little simple. It was more about experimenting a bit with data hunting and scraping while I hide in my garage under a barrage of fireworks going off. 🙂

Happy Tynwald Day, Isle of Man! And enjoy the long weekend when you get Monday off from work, which is the official day-off for the holiday this year, because it falls on Sunday.

Click to view map

Initial WebMapGPT Prompt

Hi. Please take a look at the attached datasets.

Please create a map using the web_mapper_directive.json schema and the attached Sanborn-style design-schema.

The map should be mobile friendly (phones first) but can use different CSS to provide a view with more whitespace on a laptop if it will enhance communication in those contexts. Thank you. Please stop and let me know if you have any questions before you proceed with making the map but after you have read the map plan and looked at the available datasets. Appreciate it!

US Independence Day (185/365)

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The United States of America (USA) is 250-years old today. The country is now nearly post-geriatric (joining only a few other countries for sticking around this long, such as the Swiss). I would argue its foundational institutions are showing some joint wear recently; others might be forgiven if they opined the country has not entered terminal dementia status.

I would argue… but that’s not why I’m here today. Today I’m posting a map for US Independence Day.

If there are two things I’ve noticed observing teenage Americans, it’s that many are completely naive to the larger world around them aside from what they see on formerly PRC-controlled TikTok or tech-bro-controlled US social-media feeds, which means… they have a more warped and bias perspective of the world than LLM you’ll meet. And they often don’t know much about the US either – more on that toward the end.

But first, because I can’t help but digress… It truly vexes me that in all the discussions I see online about the dangers of LLMs increasing and promoting hidden biases, few if anyone has had the guts to confess that their children and many citizens are no different than the LLMs.

Our kids consume our biases – heck, they are essentially preprogrammed by us through mimicry at a young age and are then funneled institutional and corporate bias non-stop as soon as they are exposed to any type of media. (And yes, that includes Sesame Street. Puppet idolatry is a real thing!) Once teenagers are exposed to social media, your kids essentially turn into sponges soaking up a surfeit of garbage data and all the inherent biases gazzillionaires and pseudo-intellectuals provide. In turn, like trusty LLM agents, they spread a ton of their teen hallucinations to their peers.

I guess what I’m saying is: it may behoove all of us to think a bit more critically before we go around criticizing LLMs for doing things we have been doing ourselves as a species since the beginning of time. Hallucinating… you should listen to my niece spread rumors about Bill Gates dropping poisonous ticks from airplanes at a family reunion… After all, she “researched it” on YouTube.

So let’s “stop othering LLMs!”

(Very tempting to create t-shirts to hand out at conferences.)

LLMs are a silicone reflection of us as a species – based on a very large, though not complete, sample size. And we our species offers us a lot of warts to look at.

Now that this is out of the way…

Alas, fortunately today is US independence day, not national reflection day.

And to celebrate, today I have two things to share – one a map app and one a geography/fact trivia game!

Why two?

Well, at first, I thought I’d make a quiz app about the US and its ranking in the world. I did create it, actually. That was the initial post and I’m retaining it below – a US trivia by guessing sort of game.

But then I realized, there wasn’t even a real map in the game. I had asked for a simple animated one in the original prompt and I could have spent several more prompts updating it, but I was trying a new tool instead of WebMapGPT, and well… if you see the map, you’ll understand why I thought: this isn’t going to cut it.

So instead… I created another web app – one hopefully useful for the teenagers I come across naive to the world and US. (Though, I really do think the kids will be alright; their thinking is just alien to me.)

Exhibit A: one of my daughters is really NOT into geography. (I kind of applaud her for being different from her parents. That’s not easy!)

So she hasn’t even bothered learning all the states and capitals yet. (I swear this is partially to terrorize her parents.)

It’s summer; it’s independence day. After seeing the map in the first app, I figured:

Why not create an app and game where she can learn them by the end of the summer?

So today, I also produced a video game map called, wait for it… “The US States and Capitals Game.”

I know… the title?! I’m running out of steam, though. I have to get some sleep before I make tomorrow’s map! 🙂  I an add a new name in the future.

The US States and Capitals Game

Play the game here

States and Capitals Original Prompt

I have created a dataset with state facts. I would like to create a map-based game for grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers called: “50 Nifty”. The goal is to teach students facts (very low on Bloom’s Taxonomy, but that’s okay) about different states.

There will be different games they can pick from. I would like you to look at the dataset and come up with some ideas that I may have missed, and no matter what, I’d like this app to built so it’s scalable.

Mandatory Game PoC:
– States and Capitals: a state is highlighted on an Albers equal area projection of the coterminous US with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left under CA, AZ, and NM. After a second for contextualization, the map will zoom to the state so it fills much of the display. Six state names are shown on buttons at the bottom of the screen in random order, with one being the state being shown. The student must guess.

If they click the correct state, a “ta-da” sound plays, the state fills with a solid “completed” color and a small star symbol appears on the map where the state capital is (this is probably best achieved with a state capitals point dataset?), and four capital city names are shown on the bottom of the screen in random order (one being correct). When they click the correct one a “ta-da” sound plays – all the ta-da sounds should be the same and should roughly mimic the energy and tone of the Duolingo sound when you get something right, please –  the star fills in with a prominent dark color (the same for all completed capitals) and the map zooms out to show the entire US again. Then, after a one or two second pause, the map zooms in to a state that has not yet been passed.

When a user guesses the wrong state name, play an empathetic bouncy noise that grade schoolers and middle-schoolers would like, not a buzz or anything… we want positive reinforcement! 🙂

Then show the state name and a random fact about it (not about the prison, though): e.g., the state bird, state flower, or perhaps the name of the largest city, or the state’s total population… etc. Random every time. Then zoom back out to the US and pause a second or two before zooming in on another random state. When a student misses a state, unless there are no other states left to randomly select, do not select that state again until at least six other states have been shown.

Once a state is filled in, the student is half done with the state. If they miss the capital city name, they aren’t completely done, however. You will eventually need to return to the state, and the student will have to pick the correct name again, and then they can be shown the capital city star again and try to answer that correctly.

Once the student has solved both a state’s name and its capital name, the state is considered completed and will never be randomly selected again. It is filled in. States that have not yet been identified remain a lighter color (pick a cool, modern, and kid friendly color aesthetic for this game). States where the student has successfully solved the state name but not the capital should be a color value between the lighter (not passed) and (passed states).

When the student completes all 50 states and capitals, I would like applause to and cheering to play and a big “Congratulations! You now know all the 50 Nifty States and Capitals!”

Add a share button and when clicked pop up a modal with the following share links to Instagram | Facebook | Snap | X | Bsky | LinkedIN | Copy. Also add a Cancel button. Once they close this modal or hit Cancel, show the opening splash screen (described below) again, please.

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Be sure to use a state geometry set that exludes the great lakes, please.

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Please design the game to look like a modern, mobile game. It should work on mobile devices first and foremost, as that is what kids use, as well as on Chromebooks without stuff going below the fold in teh browser window. Portrait mode is a must.

The capitals should only appear on the map when the states are zoomed in on, not on the national map.

Give the app an opening splash screen 50 Nifty (in a Day) and a subtitle “Ace that states and capitals test tomorrow morning!”

Underneath, have a button “How to Play” that opens a modal (wiht a close button in the upper-right) that explains how to play the game and how it works with a button to start the game at the bottom that will start it.

Next to the “How to Play” on the Splash Screen have a button that says “Play”, which will remove the splash screen and begin the game by showing the US and zooming in on a random state.

Add a third button called “Race the States”. When a user clicks this button, the game plays almost as normal, but instead they have 150 seconds to race through all the states and capitals. This version does not zoom across the map but instantly shows a zoomed in on state with its capital already showing. They must select the correct state, then capital, and then another random state (that they haven’t yet solved the state name and capital name for) is shown. They don’t have to wait for the zoom in and out. It’s a speed game. If they don’t solve it within 150 seconds, they get some optimistic, try again short music bit and they are shown the splash screen again.

Include an About modal and mention the game was created using WebMapGPT by Copyright 2026, Ian Muehlenhaus. Provide links to both webmapgpt.com and muehlenhaus.com.

In here please provide a list to the dataset CSV (for educators) and mention that the map used whatever geojson files were found and used to create the map, as well as D3, etc. Do not mention aything else that you normallyl do This will be an app for school kids to learn from, not a bonafide map.

Thank you! If you have any additional questions before you begin, please let me know!

Completed with two prompts total. Original and revision. Done. Woohoo! I love prompt cartography! 

 

USA Facts Game

If you have ever played any of the Wits & Wagers board games, it should feel familiar to you.

The premise is simple and can be played by anyone in the world. You don’t actually need to know facts about the US to play or do well; it’s all about common sense and conventional wisdom.

Turn-by-turn, you will be presented with a statement with a missing phrase or a fact about the US, along with four four (not necessarily correct) “answers” to choose from. Important: these aren’t necessarily the correct answer, just random answers that surveyed people have given.

Example

“The United States is the ______ most visited country in the world by non-domestic tourists.”

Answer options: | second | sixth | thirteenth | twenty-first | 

Your goal is to pick the value, of the four given, that is higher than the actual answer but closest to it.

Again, you want to be higher than the actual answer, because most of the facts are about rankings, and lower rankings are higher numbers.

Once you’ve selected which one you think is closest and higher, the answer will be shown.

Also important to note again: there is a great chance that none of the answers shown are correct. Your goal is to pick the answer closest to the factual answer that is higher.

If the answer to the above question was truthfully “fourth”, then you would score if you had picked “sixth”, because you didn’t overestimate the US ranking and picked the closest answer that is higher.

Keep going until you miss three times.

Every time you get one correct, you will score two points. Every time you get one wrong, you get minus-one point.

Also, please post your scores on social media and share the site to help celebrate and diffuse factual knowledge about the United States of America on its 250th Birthday!

P.S. Cousin Allie: I finally made a game that isn’t so hard it’s impossible to play. I listened to you at the family reunion. 🙂 Thanks for playing!

Important Note

Though this game was tangentially inspired by the board game, this map and all affiliated websites and maps have no affiliation with Wits & Wagers and merely shares a similar game mechanic. This map is not affiliated with that board game in anyway. 

View Geography Quiz Game Here

Codex Agent Prompt (I’m experimenting with agent building in OpenAI Codex… mapmaking is not its strength)

The United States of America (USA) is 250-years old today.

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