I’ll start with the good news: These are the best years of your life. That’s right. You are currently at your overall happiest, most attractive, and most employable. (You were better looking in your twenties, but you were also a total nutcase.) This brings us to the bad news: Seriously, these are the best years of your life.

Go ahead. Take a long, hard look at your thirtysomething face in the mirror while you consider all that you have—but mostly have not—accomplished up until this point. Not exactly what you had in mind for your so-called prime, was it?

You thought by now you would have figured all your shit out and evolved into a superior version of yourself. A more financially and emotionally stable You. (You 2.0, if you will.) Someone who lives their passion every single day, has resolved all their childhood trauma, and is at least on their way to becoming debt- and mortgage-free.

Yeah, not quite. Instead, you’ll have to settle for working a job you barely remember applying for while being only slightly wiser and less neurotic than you were as a young adult, mostly because you no longer have the energy to give a shit about half the stuff you stressed over in your twenties. Also, switching from alcohol to edibles has helped.

Another way of looking at it is that your thirties are the least worst years of your life. Sure, you finally have some financial independence, just not the type where you can do things like travel out of state or fix your Camry’s leaky radiator. (Also, you still drive a Camry.) Most importantly, your thirties are when you start to figure out who you truly are as a person, even if you’re not exactly thrilled with what you find.

Your personal relationships are never going to be better than they are right now either. Which is a tough pill to swallow, considering you’re an absolute mess in that department. Just not as big a mess as you were when you first ventured into the confusing world of post-college dating, or will be once the mounting demands of middle age make it increasingly difficult to maintain friendships and devote quality time to your partner.

Yep, this right here is as good as it gets, sadly. Not that you don’t enjoy yourself from time to time. After all, you have your little hobbies, like hiking and napping. Nothing screams “I’m living my best life!” like staying in on a Friday night to watch YouTube videos of a guy eating expired military rations. Still, it must be disappointing to find out that the dials on your excitement meter barely make it past mild mirth, even at your zenith as a human being.

As underwhelming as it may seem, you better savor every mediocre moment of it because it could—and soon will—be worse. Think about what you have to look forward to next: your forties. The age at which all your bad habits become cemented as character traits. You’ll spend the entire decade trying to convince yourself and everyone else that you’re still “young of mind” while your rapidly declining body makes it abundantly clear that you’re on the back nine of your life. More like the back six if you factor in your family health history and poor lifestyle choices.

After that, it’s all downhill. Unless you make enough money—or, more realistically, inherit your parents’ money—to retire early to some beachfront location and turn back your biological clock by getting stem cell injections and testosterone replacement therapy. In which case, your fifties will be the best years of your life.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Mario Golf for the Nintendo 64 contains a hidden “Yoshi Kong” music track, which only plays when the following criteria are met:
-four players are playing
-every player is either Yoshi or Donkey Kong (all Yoshis, all DKs, 2 of each, etc.)
-a course that is not Luigi’s Garden or Peach’s Castle is played.

The music is actually an arrangement of the Palm Club theme from the Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf. Why it was made so complex to access is unknown.

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Miles, kilometers, leagues and chains – you may encounter any of these measurements of distance in a map scale. When our collections cover the entire world and span 700 years of history, you’d expect to find a variety of units used in different places over time. This American map of the Ouachita River in Louisiana from 1804 uses a scale of miles:

This French map of New Orleans uses a scale of toises, a unit of measurement which varied over time but was likely around two meters at the time this map was published in 1764. The term toise comes from the Latin phrase tensa brachia, which means “outstretched arms.”

This 1627 map of Greece and western Turkey includes a four-part scale bar in its lower right, containing scales of four units: “Germanian miles,” French miles, Italian miles, and furlongs. The map was published in John Speed’s atlas A prospect of the most famovs parts of the vvorld; printed in London, it would have been intended for a wide audience.

Modern maps typically express scale as a representative fraction. This topographic map of Ethiopia contains multiple sheets, each mapped at a uniform scale of 1:500,000, indicating that one unit of measurement on the map represents 500,000 units on the land’s surface. Representative fractions are unit-neutral; one inch of the map corresponds to 500,000 inches on the ground, and one pixel on the map corresponds to 500,000 pixel-widths of land.

With such a wide variety of units appearing on maps in the Geography and Map Division collections, you would think that we’ve seen it all. However, I was still surprised when I came across this map of Central Asia. The map includes two scale bars, with units common on maps at the time: English statutory miles, and Russian versts. But hovering above the scale bar, like an unexpected, angular island in the Indian Ocean, are Indiana and Ohio:

This map of Central Asia was published by George Woolworth and Charles B. Colton in 1885. George and Charles were the sons and business partners of Joseph Hutchins Colton, a prolific cartographer and map publisher whose company operated throughout much of the 19th century. Based in New York, the Colton company dominated American map publishing during its day, producing maps of US states and regions; the country as a whole; thematic maps, including hundreds of railroad maps; and atlases.

Colton was a pedestrian publisher of maps for general consumption, and their maps were likely among the first maps of far-off countries and regions – like Central Asia – available to Americans in the 1800s. The small map of the familiar territories of Indiana and Ohio not only provides a sense of scale, it served to improve the geographical knowledge of the average American by relating distant parts of the world to America’s conceptual heartland.

Colton utilized the same technique of geographical comparison in a collaboration with Nelson and Phillips, a publisher of Christian religious books. In 1874, their Sunday School Department issued a massive 8-sheet wall map of Palestine, drawn by G.W. and C.B. Colton & Co., which served as a reference map to numerous place names mentioned in the Bible. One sheet included this diagram comparing Palestine as shown in the full map to both Illinois and several states of New England, “for the purpose of giving a correct idea of its very limited area.”

The Coltons weren’t alone in this sort of areal comparison. Here, the Wells Missionary Map Company demonstrates the area of Africa by dividing it into sections equal in area to the United States and Alaska, British North America, Mexico, and Europe.

Today you can make similar comparisons using sites like The True Size Of, where you can drag and drop one country on top of another; the application compensates for visual distortion near the poles by adjusting the size of each country as you drag it across different latitudes.

If there are other examples of unorthodox scales in the Geography and Map Division collections (maybe someone has measured the Alps in units of elephants?), I unfortunately haven’t run across them. But when our stacks are the length of the Washington Monument, they surely hold untold wonders of creative cartography.

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