Who’s your best friend? It’s a question I expect a primary schooler to ask. But low and behold, there is a day for this.

Most of us have great friends throughout life. Perhaps at any given time, you can even identify who is your “best” friend at the given moment. But “best” and “friend” are not two words that easily relate. A lot of my friends annoy me greatly, on a regular basis. Why? Because they are unique – they are not me. We are not clones. We have similarities, but also many dissimilarities.

Example, one of my best friends right now is a conservative Christian. This is absolutely anathema to my position and perspective on life, the world, and the pursuit of happiness. Hell, I joke with my mom that I was saved when I gave up on the Christian faith she indoctrinated me with. (Though, she’s ditched it too now, so the joke gets a laugh.)

But he’s a good, kind person. It’s not his fault that the media and personal experiences of his life have turned him into what he is. And I don’t base friendships on political perspectives or thoughts on the afterlife; I base my friendships on emotional and mental reciprocity. (I should note that my friend and I both avoid discussing anything political or religious. I have those meaningful exchanges with my other friends; typically, my European ones.)

On any given day after work, this same person is my best friend right now. We loan one another power tools and cheer on one another’s daughters at the local softball games. During work, on the other hand, I have several other people that are take the mantel of best friend.

Heck, throughout life, there are people I’ve hung out with, met, built strong relationships with, and lost touch with, that are still considered some of the bestest friends in my life. They literally shaped my worldview and perspective on things based on their behaviors, quips, and empathy.

Sadly, many, if not most, of those people from the past are now dead. (The bane of being 50, I guess.) I miss them. I miss knowing that they are still somewhere out there fighting the good fight. That there is someone out there that may still smile, smirk, and roll their eyes at one of my slightly inappropriate, off-putting jokes – aside from my family members, that is.

Losing best friends really, really hurts. But it happens. In fact, if you live long enough, you’ll love all of them. (That is the bane of hitting 100 years old, I’ve been told. Not by a friend, but by several 100 year-olds, nonetheless.) I remind my kids of this fact all the time. You’re going to lose friends. Friends die. Friends disappear. Some aren’t even on social media. It sucks. So let them know you appreciate them while they are around.

So today is the day I’m going to take a moment to let some of my friends, indeed not all, but I probably don’t have too many beyond this honestly, know that I appreciate them. Quite a few, as mentioned, are no longer with us. But I figure that if the universe really is just a quantum dataset, perhaps by including them in this digital map they will still somehow get the message. Even if they don’t, it makes me feel better recognizing them.

It’s a real map. A sincere map. And also intentionally vague, because if there is one thing I know, it’s that friends – particularly many of my European friends who foolishly still believe they have a smidgen of privacy from US big tech and Chinese spyware – don’t like to be doxxed.

I know I forgot people. Some were intentionally left off so as to not piss off other friends that may be jealous of certain friends… my goodness, friendship is fun, isn’t it?! But the point is: I am who I am because of these people (and many others not included), and this is my way of recognizing some of you and saying thank you. You’ve been mapped. If friends were colonial possessions, I could now say that you exist and you are mine – because I mapped you. But you’re not a possession. I don’t take you for granted. You’re just a friend on a map.

View Map Here

Prompt to Map My Friends

I would like you to create a very simple, minimalist interactive web map (HTML, CSS, JS, data file) of the attached CSV spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet has a list of my best friends, including place names for where I met them, where we last met, the year of our first meeting, the year of our last meeting, and each friend’s current place on the planet. As well as whether or not the friend is deceased.

I would like to make a simple and vulnerable map of my best friends in life.

Please map the world as an equal area projection using generalized country boundaries. The country outlines should be soft gray. The countries themselves white. The map background should be white. Geography doesn’t matter so much. It’s merely there for global reference.

For the title: “Not all my friends are dead…”
Subtitle: “In recognition of non-blood relative friendships I’ve most cherished throughout my life.”

I would like each person to be represented by a simple, two-dimensional, flat smiley face symbol. The original, simple yellow smiley face, please. 14-20px. Yellow background with simple single line black smile and two black dots for eyes.

When the map loads start showing the symbols one by one based on where we met, in chronological order. Show all of them within 15 seconds.

Then fade in a control panel in the upper right. It should be set to “Where we met…”
When clicked, a dropdown menus should show two more options:
– “Where we last met…”
– “Where they are now…”

When the user clicks on “Where we lat met…” keep the same symbols but relocate them to the places we last met (using lat/lon of that value).

Finally, when the user clicks “Where are they now…” show where the friends are now. IMPORTANT: if the friend is deceased, change the symbol from a smiley face to a small dark gray tombstone icon. Keep the icon minimalist, simple, and respectable.

When the user clicks on any of the icons, please show the friend’s first name, information about where we met (place name, not lat/lon), where we last met (place name), and where they currently are.

No sources. No reliability scores. No credits. No source modal. Just a very straight-forward, poignant map. Stripped down, like the Beatles White Album.

Thank you!

Streaming services are convenient. I know this. I use them constantly. I am not writing this from a hand-cranked Victrola while yelling at a passing Tesla.

But sometimes, scrolling through endless movie titles on a couch feels less like entertainment and more like a weirdly lonely social science experiment. It reminds me of Bowling Alone — the idea that modern life quietly stripped away many of the ordinary places where people used to gather, bump into each other, make small talk, argue about nothing, and accidentally build community.

Video stores were one of those places.

Before streaming, picking a movie was an event. You met up with friends. You walked, biked, or drove to the local rental place. You ran through the aisles, laughing, holding up terrible-looking horror covers, debating whether a movie looked “bad good” or just bad-bad. Then you rented something, brought it home, watched it together, and either discovered a favorite or wasted 96 minutes of your life in the most communal way possible.

And then there were the clerks.

The best video store clerks were not cashiers. They were priests of the magnetic tape. They knew which movies were secretly related to other movies. They knew what you liked, what you claimed to like, and what you should probably watch next. This was especially true in small, family-operated places.

In Duluth, Minnesota, we had Steve, owner of the famous 8th Street Video — which, when I was 12, suddenly became 8th Street Video on 9th Street because it needed more room. Naturally.

Steve knew your name after meeting you once. He said hello when you walked in. Every VHS rental was always one dollar, no matter how new or old. He only took cash, which was charming, suspicious, and possibly a light embezzlement situation. But the place was magic.

It was where locals gathered. Where you ran into people. Where you found strange treasures like Andy Warhol’s Cocaine Cowboys or the Australian horror film The Plumber. It was a social landscape disguised as a business.

My kids will never fully understand the satisfaction of choosing a movie with friends, bringing it home, opening the plastic case, and realizing some absolute monster had not rewound it. So you waited. Together. Annoyed. Anticipating.

Maybe that’s okay. Technology changes. Culture changes. We gain things. We lose things.

But it is also okay to miss VHS. It is okay to miss the aisles, the weird carpet, the handwritten signs, the clerks, the accidental conversations, and the small social worlds that video stores created.

Today’s map is meant to stir up a bit of that nostalgia — not just for 1980s and 1990s technology and design, but for the places where choosing a movie still meant leaving the house.

Find Your (Former) Store Here

WebMapGPT Prompt (598 Words)

# Intention
Make a retro map of former Hollywood and Blockbuster Video Stores to celebrate National VHS Day.

The map itself is not as important as the nostalgia. These stores used to blanket our landscape. They were meeting spots. Most Americans spent many of their weekend nights perusing the shelves of these stores. The goal is to remind Americans of what once was. Nostalgia factor. They can remember what video stores were once in their local areas.

# Aesthetic
80s/90s pastiche. I want this to look 72DPI through and through. Everything about the map and the interface should be pixelated and blurred like a 72DPI VHS tape. Some horzontal staticy lines should flicker across the window like they would on a VHS. Intermitent choppyness is also good.

# Map
– Opens to entire US with 1980s thick state border lines and very simplified. Albers equal area with alaska and hawaii in lower left. (Probably use D3 for this. No video stores shown yet. This is almost like the main menu.
– User can click on state, which does not highlight and is doesn’t even look interactive. More like a “hot key” where the cursor just changes to a clicking hand.
– When the user clicks the state, load the simplified state outline with 72DPI dots geolocated on top of it. The user may zoom in to see the stores in detail. Dot clusters shouldn’t be used, as the user will want to see where their old store was. But no streets or any details should be provided. They can zoom in up to 8 times the current zoom level, and they can pan the state, but they cannot pan the state off the viewport nor may they zoom out past the state. When zoomed out as far as possible over any state, the state should always fill either the height or width of map canvas.
– When a user clicks on a store, provide the store chain name, address, open date and close date (when available).
– Have a huge BACK ARROW button prominently displayed whenever the user is zoomed in on a state. The back arrow takes the user back to the entire US.
– Also, come up with a nostalgic, witty title and subtitle involving VHS and the socialness of meeting at a location to pick movies.
– Make sure the map works in landscape mode on mobile devices.

# Aesthatic
– 1980s TV newscast style GUI elements (big, brash, large text)
– random and variable VHS style flickering and warpiness
– 1980s TV local newscast colors and graphics style
– Cartography should be grossly simplified. Graphics very large due to bad DPI/resolution. Make this look like 1980s/1990s television recorded on VHS and being played back on a modern a device.

Again, map itself should be very simple state outlines, and point symbols. Hollywood Video stores can be purple. Blockbuster stores blue or yellow.

Include a gaudy note that says “Click a state to find your next rental!”

# Sources modal
Should be very hidden. Don’t want to take away from the aesthetic. lower left perhaps. Perhaps a “Call Now” button or similar. When it opens, very blocky and chunky 1980s style text.

– Cartographer: Ian Muehlenhaus (link to www.muehlenhaus.com)
– Made with Web Mapper GPT (link to www.webmapgpt.com)
– Dataset from GIS Dataset GPT (link to that public GPT)
– Dataset Geopackage (link to the geopackage)
– APIs Used: list APIs
– Dedicated to Steve, former owner of “8th Street Video on 9th Street” in Duluth, Minnesota. “They’re all good movies!” You are missed.

Thanks!

I typically don’t go the war map route, even though I love playing war games and reading about global conflicts.

Heaven knows, an American making war maps is kind of scary! :-\ I would argue the United States has used military force for subpar reasons far more than it has for rational ones.

But… I really enjoyed World War II history growing up and the war in Europe had a huge impact on my family – both here in the United States and my blood relatives and in-laws in Germany.

Moreover, in many ways D-Day was the beginning of US world hegemony militaristically – even though the US had no idea at the time it was. And this year, the day is on a Saturday, a day when very few people view this blog or check out these maps anyway. So I figured: what the heck?!

I pulled out my Longest Day and Patton motion-picture soundtrack LPs – found at a thrift store last winter – and spent a couple of hours building a scalable data-rich web map of the D-Day landings. Nothing breakthrough, but not bad for a couple of hours work. Particularly considering I began with zero and just and idea.

Dedicated to all those who have died or been harmed, and inevitably will continue dying and being harmed in the future, due to the fallacy of nationalist ideology.

View Map Here

Original Prompt (Created with ChatGPT and WebMapGPT)

You are building an interactive web map titled **D-DAY: THE LONGEST MORNING**.

Use the files in your sources as gospel for intent, style, data structure, and interaction rules.

Continue reading →

Unfortunately, in life, we haven’t figured out a way to “undo” things. National Start Over Day is meant to encourage people to embrace fresh starts, shake off past mistakes, and tackle new goals.

Back in 1997, I decided I wanted to become a professor of geography. It became my dream and passion thanks to Estonian professor Matti Kaups. In his Cultural Geography class, he regularly showed Kodak slides he had taken from the decks of icebreakers north of the Arctic Circle.

The most memorable of these slides were of polar bears tearing apart seals just a few meters below the professor, just off the shores of Spitzbergen — i.e., Svalbard. Matti’s courses, along with several other very influential ones, propelled me onward toward my goal until…

I became a professor. At which point, I suddenly realized…

It really is all about the pursuit.

It was quite anticlimactic. The thought of earning tenure and essentially being locked down to one place for an entire career terrified me. I like to switch jobs and geographies frequently. 😉

So this has me thinking…

I think an argument can be made that not achieving one’s pursuits, or never quite getting to the end, is not only okay, but in many cases more exciting. Satisfaction, for me at least, lies in the experience along the path toward the dream. The excitement of going to a concert, attending a sporting event, or seeing where one of my harebrained ideas might end up almost always outweighs the excitement of its achievement.

Case in point: does anyone complete uni because they are excited to attend the arduous graduation ceremony at the end?

Is that what graduates have worked so hard for? To spend three hours in insufferable heat, elbow-to-elbow with strangers whose surnames happen to be close to yours, wearing a silly robe and hat, listening to self-important people drivel on about clichés like “life is the pursuit, not the capture,” only to have your name muddled over a loudspeaker as you cross a stage? An experience during which many of us spend most of our time trying not to trip over microphone cords and PA equipment, while also making sure we shake everyone’s hand we’re supposed to and smile for a robed mug shot?

Alas… this blog post is starting to drone on like the graduation speeches I just dissed.

I do apologize. It’s difficult not to wax on and on when the day we are celebrating is National Start Over Day.

In honor of the day, I took a fresh approach to how I create these daily maps. Today, I wrote a prompt and ran it through three paid-for LLM subscriptions to compare and contrast what they produced. The prompt asked each model to create a heavily edited map showing the parallel between map iteration and creation, and life choices and fresh starts.

Just as there is no perfect or final map — until your boss says it’s time to wrap it up — there is no perfect route or way to experience life, either. At least not until our time is up.

Here is what each of the models came up with. Choose your favorite. Or better yet, create your own.

No matter what, try not to get too frustrated. As the philosopher Billie Joe Armstrong once noted: “Always move forward; going straight will get you nowhere.”

RESULTS

[please insert drumroll sound effect here]

ChatGPT 5.5 Image Creator

This is my favorite by far. But perhaps I’m biased. Same exact schema and prompt as was given to paid Gemini and paid Claude versions. This one feels most like what I wanted.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Thinking)

This one was heading the right direction but… Claude being Claude, likes to code things. So it attempted to create it using SVG output. As a huge fan of vector-based design, I am not opposed to this. But then it basically gave up and thought good enough, I feel like. It also said I could try again if I like. Not bad for SVG output, but not a winning first-draft either.

Google Gemini 3.1 Pro

Nice looking base map, but everything else is and/or feels a bit off. :-/

PROMPT SCHEMA USED (created by Ian with help from ChatGPT)

Title: “Revision Is Not Failure: It Is Cartography”

Core Concept

Create a static, poster-style map for National Start Over Day, a day about accepting past failures, learning from them, and beginning again. The map should use the visual language of cartographic revision: erased routes, crossed-out labels, ghosted linework, pencil marks, corrected legends, redrawn paths, marginal notes, and replacement symbols.

The central metaphor is that maps are not born perfect. They are drafted, corrected, revised, and improved. Human lives work the same way. Starting over is not erasing the past; it is redrawing the route with better information.

Intended Emotional Effect

The map should feel reflective, warm, intelligent, and quietly encouraging. It should not feel cheesy, motivational-poster-ish, corporate, religious, or therapy-branded. It should feel like a thoughtful cartographer made a poetic field map about resilience.

Continue reading →

I spent most of my working career in the Dairy State (Wisconsin). It’s an idiosyncratic kind of place. A place where people literally don styrofoam cheese hats on weekends and happily refer to themselves as “cheeseheads.”

I do love cheese (and yogurt and milk), but not enough to become a naturalized Wisconsinite. Nope. No way, no how.

I’m also a bit of a hypochondriac. So I often worry about the damage my cheese intake is doing to my heart. (No, this doesn’t mean I will stop eating cheese. I just worry; changing my cheese-eating behavior requires too much self-control.)

So I decided instead of taking the easy route and mapping dairy farms across the US, or drawing a map of US dairy production on the side of a cow, I would instead combine my love for all things dairy and my fear of heart disease into a bivariate map. After all, nothing screams “celebration” like a bivariate dairy and heart disease map!

Today’s map explores whether any (very likely, almost absolutely, spurious) correlation  exists between dairy production and heart disease geographies. There are myriad reasons why these two things shouldn’t be statistically correlated, but I thought it would be interesting to see which counties have high dairy production and high heart disease, and also to figure out my odds of getting heart disease based on the places I’ve lived.

More importantly, in my mind, it would be cool to see if ChatGPT could pull off a passable bivariate map draft from a single prompt. (Note: it did! Though I added a follow-up prompt to add the zoom to state feature.)

You can look at US counties as a whole or zoom into your state. Counties are ranked for heart disease by both US and state placement.

A very odd, absolutely ridiculous map. But then again, the day it celebrates is as well. 🙂

View Map Here

Web Map GPT Prompt

Please take your time and create a bivariate, interactive webmap that I can host on my apache web server that does the following:
– shows all US counties (or similar in Alaska) in an equal area Albers or Lambert projection with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower-left part of the browser window
Continue reading →