 I wanted to embrace the history of cartography as a way of saying, look, it doesn't have to be just straight lines. 2005, when Google Maps first came out, I mean, I was terrified. I thought our work was over. That's it. The machines have eaten the market and there's going to be no more mapping work to do. So when this came out, it was widely, it was talked about in the press as an alternative to Google Maps. And then more cogently open street map was seen as the alternative to Google Street Maps for a lot of different reasons. So we're kind of part of that conversation. People don't think about who's making these maps or how they get made or how they get updated or any of that kind of stuff. And it's an incredibly complex, fascinating, multi-layered, continuous, ongoing artifact, technical artifact that is made by robots. It's a collaboration between robots and humans. It's amazing, you know? So I didn't want to make a nostalgic gesture, but I did want to call attention to the fact that these maps were being made by people. I really wanted to sort of get this texture of a city to give it almost a hallucinatory quality where you just would pay attention, not just to it as a directional device, but as something with composition. But the composition, of course, is made by the world, not by us. It was mainly a collaboration between Geraldine and Zach Watson. And Mike Mogersky worked with Zach to design a process by which these could be generated using the textures. Geraldine made a number of textures, which we've blogged about, and then Zach Watson and started making maps out of them and sort of putting them through the different pieces of software that he was using. And then he'd go back to Geraldine and say, what do you think about this? And then she would make a new texture for him. And they were able to really adjust the way in which the lines here, you know, you'll see that they're not straight very much by design. They overlap one another, and that's all very intentional. And really the whole point was to make something that you couldn't tell what parts of it had been done by hand and what parts of it had been done by a machine. I wanted that line to be blurred. So it was very much always intended to be and continues to be driven by open treatment. The data that's underlying it is exactly the same, but there's a number of different steps. There's essentially a rendering process that happens to get something that, you know, from a data perspective, looks much more like that to something that looks like that. So there's blurring, and there's noising, and there's purlin filters, and there's blowing out, and there's, you know, there's all that stuff. And the whole point of this was to make it as bone simple as it possible. I mean, to make something that was highly difficult and virtuosistic and took a lot of resources and just flattened people's ability to access it, make it so that it was, it was, you didn't need to, again, you didn't need to sign up. There's no API. There's no technical. You just, you copy and paste this through on your website and you got it. Rather than having to do a screenshot and do all that nonsense, you should just be able to, you know, adjust the size and you can, and then this is where we show you all the different styles that there are, is more than, more than are on the front. So there's these images that get made, and then you can go to results, and you can see all the maps that people have made. This was another thing that was just really distracting to me as the project developed of just like where, where in the world do people care about enough to make these images? And it turns out thousands and thousands and thousands of places. And why did somebody pick this particular, you know, this looks like it was done for a school project, you know, somebody's doing a project about Southeast Asia. You know, people are just making these for use in their, in their projects. And there's, you know, one every couple of minutes. The most viewed place on Google Maps is your house, right? That's, that's where people always go. Like, and it's just, it's amazing phenomenon. Like, you have a map of the whole world. You could go to Petra. You could go to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. You could go to Antark. You could go anywhere, but where do you go, your house? And it's sort of a, and in some ways that's a sort of grounding gesture of like, well, if I know my house is on there, I can recognize that my house. That's sort of a touchstone that means that, well, if this is accurate, then everything else must be accurate. And I think something like that is going on here. People are, this is, people are making maps of the places that they care about, which can be, you know, as broad as Europe or as narrow as, you know, a park. And that's a sort of wonderful thing about these maps and maps like this in general is that there's this kind of, people care about them.