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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   537 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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  • Websites listing fan conventions: 1 (including a hidden list of adults-only fan conventions), 2 (apparently poorly translated from French)

  • Websites listing professional conferences: 1, 2, 3

Do you think anybody would attend a meetup on the topic of nonconsensual editing? (This is approximately half a joke.)

My vomit-inducing custom house is approximately three-fourths complete.

  • Photograph 1: Apparently, in plumbing the modern practice is to divvy up all the water pipes through a "manifold" (like a circuit-breaker box), which looks pretty cool.

  • Photograph 2: Spray-foam insulation

  • Photograph 3: Behold! A boring beige box!

Which variations of the cylindrical equal-area projection are your favorite?

I am inclined to pick Behrmann (standard parallels ±30 °, so that exactly half of the map's area is stretched vertically and half is squashed vertically; aspect ratio ∼2.4) and Smyth/Craster (aspect ratio 2∶1; standard parallels ∼±37 °).

Which variations of the cylindrical equal-area projection are your favorite?

None, all of them should be illegal and punishable by getting run over by a steamroller.

That's a rather harsh response. What are your preferred map projections, then? (They had better not be compromise projections.)

None! None! Map projections are madness! Use satellite imagery, or globes, or just go outside and look at the world with your own eyes! Maps should not attempt to show two sides of a sphere at once! It's unnatural!

Use satellite imagery

Sure! I'll just display those images on my flat monitor by ... hmmm ...

No, you don't understand. Just look at the original image, not some strange collage glued together from several images.

Just look at the original image

Which follow-up joke would you say is even harder to miss: "Okay: 100100101011010101011...", or "I'd love to, but my spacesuit is still in the shop"?

Google Earth is a thing. Having a monitor/phone and other modern tech actually decreases the relative utility of a flat map projection, as opposed to the days of yesteryear where it would have been much more convenient to carry an easily storable map around instead of an unwieldy globe, and most people's practical use of maps would (usually) have been in local small-scale contexts where the distortion would have been negligible. Now, though? I wonder why there are any map apps that don't project their satellite imagery onto a sphere.

Google Earth is a thing.

It is! It uses a near-sided perspective projection.

You may have missed the joke.

The sphere of Google Earth is projected onto the rectangular plane of your phone screen.

How is transforming the 3D surface of the sphere that Google Earth internally manipulates into a 2D image that can be rendered on a planar phone screen not a map projection?

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