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[...]when I leaned back to wipe the sweat from my brow, expecting to experience Michelangelo's satisfaction after unearthing David's finger from the marble, I found instead a hideous mess of crisscrossed black lines forming indecipherable blobs, dotted with jagged explosions of artificial color. 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. 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.