Dear ~club:
Just to give myself some breathing room, I'm going to reduce these workshops to one ever two weeks. I hope at least some of you are enjoying them. They're moderately fun to write, in any case.
I have a different sort of idea for this workshop. Rather than all going off and doing our own thing on our own pages, let's use this mailing list to work collaboratively on something.
Yesterday's xkcd[0] was about putting some effort into a response to a pun or similarly repellent joke by forming a sentence out of place names and linking them together with driving directions. (And if you think that was easy to explain in text, then you're wrong.) I think this is a great idea, but I don't happen to have a list of word-to-place-names ready at hand. How am I supposed to make witty comebacks without a list?
(Incidentally, you might call this list that links words to place names a... map.)
My first thought was to try to come up with this list myself, but that's a lot of work. Then I thought that lots of other readers of xkcd might want a list, too. Why not distribute the work amongst us so that we all may benefit? I'm sure there are already groups out there who are doing this exact thing, but I say we give it a shot anyway.
~club, your challenge this bi-week is to reply to this message with some common words or phrases expressed as place names. I'll start:
friend ---> Friend, Nebraska[1]
I'll keep track of the mappings we come up with---feel free to do the same---and I'll post them on my tilde.club page. Also: bonus points if you've been to any of the places you reply with or know something neat about them!
If you're looking for ideas on what words to use, consider drawing from the most common English words[2]. They'll be the most useful.
Good luck, ~club, and happy mapping,
Bradley
[0]: https://xkcd.com/2260/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend,_Nebraska [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English