2472: Fuzzy Blob

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Fuzzy Blob

Title text: If there's no dome, how do you explain the irregularities the board discovered in the zoning permits issued in that area!?

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a UNIDENTIFIED FUZZY BLOB. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

It's a finger

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

Cueball takes picture: CLICK

Caption: What the...

White Hat: What's that fuzzy blob next to your house? It's huge!

Cueball: I don't know! I looked up and it was gone!

White Hat: How can a giant structure vanish?

White Hat: ...Cloaking device?!!

Reporter: The fuzzy blob, dubbed "flob" by internet sleuths, has city planners stumped.

City Planner 1: No, that's not any type of building I'm familiar with.

City Planner 2: Could be an experimental military dome.

Zoning Board Representative: The zoning board investigation has found no evidence of a cloaked dome structure. The historical commission will be joining the research into these domes and other unusual buildings, such as the historic 4th ave church...

Reporter: This only raises more questions.

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Discussion

That bot description is comedy gold, I think the page is already perfect. "It's a finger." 141.101.98.60 02:30, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Really, what more explanation do we need? 172.69.63.13 02:39, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

The only thing I could see being added is if there is a sub joke regarding the historic 4th ave church being unusual. It might just be an unimportant detail, but most of Randell's jokes have something extra behind them.Andyd273 (talk) 03:28, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

That didn't come from the bot, it comes from anonymous user 162.158.62.37. Fabian42 (talk) 09:46, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

The NAVY UFOs are the same type of feature; a little bug is inside the camera, sitting on the lens inside the aircraft window. You can see the insects feet, blurry, of course, and you can watch it turn around.172.69.35.186 02:48, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Nice of the insects to show up on radar too, for consistency.Andyd273 (talk) 03:28, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

The people in the comics are stick figures. Their limbs and appendages are simple lines. Why would they know that the blob in the image is a finger? That’s a construct for the 3D world of people.

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Someone showed me a photo of a "spirit guide" - a strange glowing fuzzy orb, floating near a group of spiritually-minded people in a dim room. I thought a few minutes, threw a pinch of flour into the air in a dim room, took a flash photo, and there were dozens of little fuzzy orbs in the photo! 172.69.35.72 06:29, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

That's why ghosts are white, obviously. They keep throwing flour around, and end up covering themselves. ;) 141.101.98.36 08:54, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

I have photos full of fuzzy orbs from tunnel. I'm not sure what EXACTLY those are, but I think bad lighting has more to do with them than ghosts. Unless there were much more causalities building that tunnel than reported. -- Hkmaly (talk) 03:54, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Will there be an explanation of “zoning permits” joke? Sounds like something local to US. 162.158.222.122 07:02, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

I just did add something, but without seeing your request here so maybe I need to dig up a Wikilink for that definition in particular. But I always understood Zoning Permits as being roughly equivalent to Planning Permissions in the UK, or close enough. That's from my exposure to US films/TV, where it can be a (usually) minor plot-point. 141.101.98.36 08:54, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Addendum: Yeah, it's like Planning Permission (skewed towards Land Use designations, but the two systems are overlapping in concept). What I found funny was that "Euclidean zoning" was not actually named for the coordinate system. ;) 141.101.98.46 09:12, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

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What's the joke about 4th avenue church? Google fins a 4th avenue church, but it doesn't seem to be related to any mistery.--Pere prlpz (talk) 10:24, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

It might just be that churches tend to employ unusual architecture, and historic churches tend to employ a combination of antique and unusual architecture, making them distinct from the surrounding buildings, especially in urban areas. Maybe people seeing the churches would think that there's some hidden conspiratorial meaning behind their structure. 172.70.117.38 14:12, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Could be this church: https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x88690d53a414c0ff%3A0x38c51a845c08ff8a!3m1!7e115!4s%2Fmaps%2Fplace%2F%2522historic%2Bfourth%2Bavenue%2Bchurch%2522%2F%4038.2373688%2C-85.7595726%2C3a%2C75y%2C190.58h%2C90t%2Fdata%3D*213m4*211e1*213m2*211s8YHVWQJ-DS513U1EBHZ7Tg*212e0*214m2*213m1*211s0x88690d53a414c0ff%3A0x38c51a845c08ff8a%3Fsa%3DX!5s%22historic%20fourth%20avenue%20church%22%20-%20Google%20Search!15sCgIgAQ&imagekey=!1e2!2s8YHVWQJ-DS513U1EBHZ7Tg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUmdTU94XxAhXaMlkFHfpaAZMQpx8wBXoECDQQCA. There's a blur in the middle of the lens.

This comment is underappreciated... Although for this specific image, moving forward and backward show the same blob, so it's likely a camera/software problem. *ahem* A ghost sticking to car on one side! *gasp!* --Eelitee (talk) 22:33, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

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Should it mentioned that these are stick figures, and usually don't have "fingers"? Also, why is it (white) flesh-toned instead of (ink) black? 172.69.71.178 23:59, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Rand's white, so he probably didn't think of that and would possibly be embarrassed or change it if brought to his attention. 172.70.110.226 00:59, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

A finger in front of a lens blocks light from reaching the film, or the sensor array. Why, then, is the finger a light shade of supposed skin tone? Isn't that another reason why it should appear black instead? These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 04:40, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

The convex nature of a fingertip means often plenty of side-lighting is available (unless you've stoppered the whole finger right straight over the whole aperture and have no exposure at all, never mind an off-focus finger). I can confirm a finger-blob looks lit and skin-coloured (assuming daytime/lit-room photography) from a non-zero number of photos returned from the lab (remember those days?) with a sticker on them to suggest that their sharp-eyed QCing (and possibly statutory "illegal/immoral content guardianship" filtering) had determined that there was an obvious technical fault with the image, but it wasn't their fault/nothing they can do about it, and next time don't stick your finger there (or shake the camera, or fail to use a flash, or get the basic focal length right, or whatever). But an easily removable sticker, because maybe you were a budding experimental photographer not yet with your own darkroom to see your results quicker than an hour (drop-in photography shops) or a few days/couple of weeks (postal processing).

((There's also precedence for the 'stick figures' having close up details, but I'm not going to reference them, because having it not be a flesh-pink blob, but something more stick-figurey would remove a layer of viewer certainty in interpreting the desired joke. And, possibly, there's a little bit of an echo of Spiderman Noir (from the "Spiderverse" film) and the Rubik's Cube, making it actually and legitimately surprising to stickworld civilisation...)) 141.101.98.38 07:23, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Clearly this really is a conspiracy and it runs deeper than us. Is Randall part of the NWO?!?!!!?! 108.162.216.10 18:26, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I removed the incomplete text because I think this is done. 108.162.246.18 00:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Ok --172.68.133.161 11:00, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Who's going to turn this into a joke SCP? Wilh3lm (talk) 15:16, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

There are actually a few hypothetical methods of 'cloaking' an object, including optical metsmaterials, metascreens and active camoflage. See this Wikipedia article for more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device 172.71.94.151 17:53, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

(Firstly, if the above editor cares to, they could use the {{w|Cloaking device|this Wikipedia article}} style of wikimarkup, or at least edit out the ".m" to not initially force the mobile site on others. Anyway...) The current Explanation sentence "In this strip Randall appears cases where phenomena have been caught on film, but are generally unclear and ambiguous." seems to be missing words. "...appears to be portraying cases..."? Not sure exactly what the exact intent is and not sure if I'm missing some alternate grammatical correctness. 172.71.178.186 00:30, 31 January 2023 (UTC)