MS Paint dominated my adolescence in the early 2000s. The “art” I ambitiously tried to make on the rudimentary software — a blank canvas equipped with bare-bones tools like pencil, brush, eraser — was sometimes satirical, mimicking my favorite cartoonists Berkeley Breathed or Nicholas Gurewitch; other times it echoed the hostile geographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Hiromu Arakawa. I had a particular passion for creating imaginary city maps — intricate, brick-and-iron-laden municipalities divided into commercial, industrial and residential zones. After years of admiring beige topographic models of cities and states at highway rest stops, playing board games like Risk and Omaha Beachhead and poring over my brother’s dog-eared atlases, I wanted to become a cartographer of new worlds on Paint.