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  "description": "I’ve no exact recollection of that day when the ground shifted around us all. It was day 101 of the Mutatis Mutandis Project and we’d been told to expect a test of the machinery, around midday. Nothing more than that. To be honest, I’d probably not have understood much, even had they tried to further… Read More »",
  "path": "/2026/06/of-perfect-proportions-day-101-of-the100dayproject/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-02T14:07:06+00:00",
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  "tags": [
    "100 DayProject",
    "art",
    "life",
    "The100DayProject",
    "The100DaysProject",
    "writing",
    "Café words",
    "shorts"
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  "textContent": "I’ve no exact recollection of that day when the ground shifted around us all. It was day 101 of the Mutatis Mutandis Project and we’d been told to expect a test of the machinery, around midday. Nothing more than that. To be honest, I’d probably not have understood much, even had they tried to further explain but somehow expected nothing unusual to happen… On a couple of previous occasions, over a post-work beer (non-alcohol for me, still sober after 15 years, yay!) or at the local diner (to celebrate one of the team’s birthday or promotion), the scientists would do their best to simplify the background, for us grunts. It didn’t help. Their sentences were still a polysyllabic mish-mash of words, some of which individually made sense but together might as well have been Mandarin (which I also wasn’t fluent in). But we’d smile at them (all on the same team, right), thank them for their trouble and go back to the beer or the food. The closest I’d got to any understanding was when I was dating a woman from the local university. She taught geography there and we’d got onto why the old style maps (like the one we all use still, designed by Mercator, 450 years ago!) distort both the reality of the world and the perception of how important — and, by implication, how unimportant are others — certain countries are. Take a look at that map on your wall. The rich countries look to be the most important, right? What the science team were attempting to do, she said, was to move, to change, to metapmorphose, the entirety of the world’s maps into a new design, to provide a new view point, thus to perceive the world by equally showing everything spread over the globe. She said it was a bold plan. I wasn’t really listening to be honest, it’d been a long, boring week at work but I thanked her anyway. And so it was that at midday, 2nd June 2026, the physical layout of the world was changed forever. We were to find out that Mercator hadn’t just been a geographer, a ‘mapmaker’. No, he’d been the dark angel appointed to be in charge of the layout of the world. When the science team simultaneously changed every map in existence, to reflect their new reality, the effects rippled through time and space and the continents and seas and oceans all moved, physically moved, instantaneously to reflect this. Hundreds of millions perished as Mercator was banished to the outer latitudes. You that follow will have to live in the new world. We wish you luck. (with thanks to Brilliant Maps for the visual inspiration)",
  "title": "Of perfect proportions. Day 101 of The100DayProject ",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-02T14:07:08+00:00"
}