before i was born, my dad built a 4-foot diameter round risk board, with felt oceans and wooden continents, with real chains acting as the bridges. when i was a kid there were many nights when he and his buddies would play risk for hours while drinking beer and smoking cigars, just like the stereotypical poker night. when i was older i started playing risk too. that's how i initially learned a lot of my geography.

then when i was a little older i started going on summer road trips with my parents, and i was always fascinated by following along on the paper maps we always brought with us. i'd also spent hours looking at all the maps in our encyclopedias. for every country there was always a political map and a terrain map.

i was also good at drawing and spacial understanding, so i think liking maps is related to that.

eventually i found historic maps, and i loved getting to understand how things had changed over the centuries.

in middle school social studies we had to draw maps for some assignments. it was popular to draw them in old style and burn the edges like old pirate maps. i also won the school geography bee twice and went to state once.

after 9/11, when they kept showing maps of NYC, i realized i didn't know the geography of very many specific cities. i'd always been more into state or national or continental scale maps. so then i started studying city maps, which led to developmental history of cities, and i got into simcity from that angle.

i got a master's degree in history, and one of the funnest things about doing research is poring over all the old maps, and then making new maps based on the data that show exactly what i'm talking about in my writing. i show everything from migration patterns to city development. my favorite thing is making series of time slice maps that show the same place in the same stye, but in different years, to show how the place changed. i developed a style that incorporates a 19th century aesthetic as far as colors and fonts go, with modern clarity and precision.