Jerry's Map

wanderer2323

The most Borgesian thing to ever be posted on HN.

RobKohr

It would make an interesting map generation algorithm that could feed the card data and specified map tiles into an image gen AI system that would have to take the map tiles and try to follow the rules.

spencerflem

People Make Games just did a terrific documentary on this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N7B9b0GQ&pp=0gcJCUECo7VqN5t...

archermarks

There's a good People Make Games video about this from a few days ago https://youtu.be/Is8N7B9b0GQ

jihadjihad

From the first sentence and image on jerrysmap.com I seriously thought it was Jerry Garcia's doing for a second.

vannfreed

Looks like the OG fortnite map to me

mdtrooper

I know Jerry Map (I hope that someday will be a exposition in Spain) because I love it, I love the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art . The people who maybe mad and they built a world with own rules. I remember the book of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress or Cataclysm DDA . And weird games as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic .

dhosek

I used to do things like this when I was a kid (less extreme, never more than a single sheet of paper), where I would create some natural features: a lake shore or river, maybe a freeway or two or a railroad and then start platting out a subdivision in the open spaces. It was a delightfully meditative practice and maybe I should start doing it again.

Fraterkes

You guys are welcome: https://marcmajcher.github.io/jerrysmap/

deadbabe

In high school I remember entertaining myself in class by using grid paper to draw little tile based maps. It’s like playing Minecraft by hand. I imagine the concept is lost to a lot of Gen Z or Gen Alpha by now. Too much imagination required.

oniony

Reminds me of _Journeys Into the Outside_ by Jarvis Cocker. And that reminds me of the time when I saw him in passing in a corridor at King's Cross Thameslink and my hand was halfway up into a wave before I realised that he wouldn't know who am.

wxw

> The entire process is driven by instructions on a card drawn from a special deck created by the artist. I like this. I like that his system pushes the creative process forward without relinquishing the actual creative part of it (making the map tile).

macintux

Reminds me a bit of the truck driver who's been building a scale model of NYC for 20 years. That crossed HN 3 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657268

ralusek

My favorite part about this/what blows my mind is that his system has him editing singular tiles at any given time. He seemingly only gets to see what it actually looks like at intervals like 15 years apart. There are probably entire epochs of his system that he'll never actually see laid out because they've since been overridden.

rode1974

The card deck procedure is the most interesting part to me. It makes the map feel less like a drawing and more like a system Jerry is observing over decades. Maybe i need to follow his rules for a map of my own.

FarmerPotato

Whoa. In my grade school years, I made many maps of my imaginary world. By high school, I was putting them into my computer, one 16x16 grid at a time. Had to make sure the edges matched up. Then I wrote code to print them on the Epson MX-80 dot matrix. The poster-board I tiled them on was still in the basement, though many of the squares were falling off. It was easier after I coded a moving 64x64 buffer.

solomonb

There was another project I saw years ago that this reminds me of. It was a guy who had been running a simulated city/community for like 20 years. The whole thing was done on pen and paper and used complex rule system he had devised. Similar pre-internet outsider art vibe.

graphviz

Once upon a time, people worked on making imaginary maps https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~kobourov/PROJECTS/maps.html to visualize datasets like TV and music recommendations. It was fun. In a 2026 context, one might use AI to post process the maps and make them even better.

DannyPage

First found out about Jerry’s Map over 10 years ago thanks to this video on Vimeo and it really stuck with me. Glad to see the project continue. Also I miss finding these smaller documentaries on the site, so many neat subjects covered before Youtube became the home of all things video. https://vimeo.com/13596774