Hello everyone.

I'm a PhD student in geography, with a life-long love of maps, mapping, mappers, mappees, etc.

I've been imagining worlds in my head since I was a kid, and lately have been trying to render those worlds visible to others. I've run into some problems, though, and googling for answers led me here.

Oddly enough, my research doesn't use cartography or GIS hardly at all (my ArcGIS skills are rusting away...), so the stuff I'm doing here is completely for fun--though I'm drawing on 10+ years of education and experience to do it.

I'm probably going to annoy people by asking questions about stuff... but I'm a well-rounded geographer and I'm pretty good at technical stuff, too, so I'll try to be an asset.

Oh, and I speak Arabic, so if anyone has any questions about the Middle East or Islam, I can probably answer them... even if the answer is "ma ba'raf" ("I don't know").