It looks so much bigger in person.
70℅ of cartographers: Fake news! No such place exists!
I’ve never seen it on a map
And what’s with the curve on the Earth? Obviously fake.
Lens distortion or something idk.
Yeah, everyone knows it curves the other way!
Do you see how the mountain range coming up from the south starts to splay out and there’s a giant lake?
In 1999, to the south of that lake where that large valley is, Viggo Mortensen broke his toe kicking a helmet in Lord of the Rings.
Whoa, what a cool fun fact! I better bring that one up next time I’m watching LOTR with people.
Go visit the South Island and virtually every local has stories about the filming of LotR. A huge number of them were hired by the production in one way or another, from being extras to providing horses to helping dress all those extras & horses to catering all those people etc.
I love this totally sincere reply to a completely insincere joke. I would love to visit New Zealand for a lot of reasons.
It was definitely a bucket list sort of thing for me. The trip from the northeast US absolutely sucks (20+ hours in the air) but for 3 weeks there it was worth it.
I’m headed there this summer and have asked the NZ Tourism Board if I can leave a plaque on the hill.
In memoriam: Viggo Mortensen’s unbroken toe. You may not have bested that orc helmet, but you didn’t let that ruin the take.
I literally got to be a part of a group that got to chat with astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson on the ISS yesterday afternoon. It was a really cool, candid, behind the scenes experience as she did a little mini-tour through the space station.
The craziest part for me was when she took her phone to the observatory and we watched the sun vanish behind the horizon of the earth. It happened so quickly and so brilliantly that it took my breath away and nearly brought me to tears. It was spectacular.
It was almost two hours with lengthy breaks as we lost contact a few times. But what an amazing experience.
How does an opportunity like that present itself?
It’s very much a factor of right place and right time.
For their mental health, the astronauts are required to have calls with people down here. Tracy is an acquaintance of someone my wife knows, so when the call was set up, we made the invite list.
We have no personal connection, we just managed to sit in the room while others talked. Tracy did put out an offer to come visit her at Johnson when she’s back, so you better believe we’ll follow up on that.
It almost looks like a map for a game, with distinct zones to unlock and explore
I’d love to see the wildlife there in person someday
The greenlands on the bottom would be the starting area and you could either go for the mountain range for a steeper challenge next or progress normally through the area towards north.
Big legendary enemy is on that huge bright blue lake in the middle left with a puzzle quest leading through a maze towards the smaller lake right above it.
has nearly all of Valheim covered. Maybe missing ashlands…
Greetings, traveler. This server owner is waiting for the proper Ashlands patch instead of selecting the public test branch, is all
Lol nice try, I’m not going to get fooled into believing New Zealand is real
New Zealand = Not real
Ohio = Not real
=>
New Zealand = Ohio
You forgot the non-existant city Bielefeld.
Ohio is for lovers; New Zealand is for life.
Come back to Texas!
Or else!
Not on my map! NZ is an Australian conspiracy!
Doesn’t look very new. Are you sure this isn’t old Zealand?
Maybe OP mistook it for New Old Zealand.
One of the best drives I’ve done is from Queenstown (on the lightning bolt lake) up the west coast to Greymouth (on the north west coast where the snowcaps stop, the plain there).
Beautiful scenery - you’d be driving (no speed limit, so you can concentrate on the bends) through rainforest one minute and then emerge onto a vast river delta with a giant wooden bridge, then back into forest, then out onto a plain with towering snowcapped mountains above you, then back into forest, then pop out at a beautiful beach.
Never experienced anything like it, it’s one of my favourite memories of my trip to NZ.
No speed limit? Errr no mate, NZ definitely does have speed limits. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speed_limits_in_New_Zealand
Sorry should clarify - the rainforest road was marked with this sign from the article.
So yes a maximum of 100, but due to the nature of the road there’s no way you could do over that without killing yourself. Most of the time, you’d only have time to get up to 60 (if that) before another blind bend.It just felt nice not to have to worry about speed and focus on the road, because here in Australia they’d have a posted speed limit way too slow and a speed trap around each bend.
That’s one thing I noticed about NZ, during my first trip: the speed limits are generally sane. If anything, the rural speed limits have a genuine sense of reality to them.
In stark contrast, driving in Canada (Toronto area) and the US (Texas) most times I felt I could safely go faster, were it not for the constant threat of speed traps or random / stealth cruisers.
In NZ if you’re doing a long drive and you don’t heed the slower speed limits as you enter a bend in the road, you may have just fucked yourself. Especially if the roads have a layer of moisture, which is likely.
And the more built up areas have a decent amount of traffic calming, which is nice.
Toronto and really all of the GTA need a severe dose of NotJustBikes to get sorted.
I have to take my family and visit NZ one day. Thanks for the pep!
I’ve never in my life felt the compulsion to jump from high places - the call of the void, as it were. But this photo confirms I just haven’t been at a high enough altitude. My brain just started chanting “jump! jump! jump!”
I guess if a space agency was looking for a middle ager with no aeronautical knowledge or experience, I’d have to turn them down.
If it makes you feel better, you would be long dead before you ever hit the ground. Jumping from that point, you would still be in an ever so slightly declining orbit around earth. I am not sure how long it would take you to reenter but you would have died from the lack oxygen long before then. When you do get there, you will most likely burn up in the atmosphere spreading your ashes over whatever continent or ocean happens to be below you at the time. A great way in my opinion to do cremations with maximum spread.
Getting to space is a bit prohibitively expensive for a cremation.
What we need is an incredibly high speed corpse cannon. With a gentle enough acceleration curve and a high enough muzzle velocity, it’ll get whole corpses cremated for a prohibitively expensive cost - but less expensive than launching the corpse into space. At least until someone screws up the acceleration curve and accidentally makes a people soup cannon and the government pays me a visit for posting such weird comments online.I like the way you think! I think we could do it cheaper though. You know how we have that spinney thing at NASA for the astronauts? Well what if we stand that straight up and accelerate it even faster to launch them into orbit? They will already be dead so the G’s taken on by the body should be fine.
I wonder what kind of lens they use to make the horizon curve like that…
/s obviously
I feel like it’s hard to truly comprehend the scale of pictures like this. They always make the world look so small.
This is Houston Control. Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon, and the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. And they’ll be eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?
No, Houston. I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. Instead, I’m… naked in the dark. There’s nothing. Only cold empty space between me and the world.
This is Houston control…why are you naked in the space station again Mr. Frodo? We’ve had complaints.
New Zealand, Missouri and the female orgasm are all myths spread by the CIA to control the population.
Lovely weather just about everywhere except my home town lol.
