Don’t peek if you’re a 90s kid.
Even if they’re not sold as poppers, you can still just buy a tennis ball and cut it in half. That’s all they are.
But yeah, I had to resort to explainxkcd myself.
Huh. The ones I remember we’re closer to the size of a small rubber ball, the ones the size of those used in jacks (i.e., about cherry or cherry tomato sized).
Huh? We played with these in the 70s. It’s not exactly a high-tech item.
Is it just me, or did anyone else look at that and wonder what a space capsule was doing on top of a birth control diaphragm?
Not being a kid or a parent in the 90s I was mystified too.
I figured it was some kind of hat /skullcap from anime or superheros comics or somesuch that all the Cool Kids wore for 6 months before pretending they’d never ever seen such an outrageous fashion faux pax. Sort of the 90’s equivalent of the
Which I just learned is about 10-15 years older than I had thought.
Although ref @QuickSilver the birth control diaphragm idea did flit through my thinking on the way to my equally wrong conclusion. 
I think that was the point 
. I’m not sure when they first appeared, but it was one of those fad toys for a while in my era, like slap bracelets (made from recycled tape measures!) or Beanie Babies. Or… POGs! Fidget spinners would be a modern-day example.
A birth control diaphragm was in fact one of the possibilities that made its way through my head. Another was that it was a pusher-plate for an Orion bomb drive.
And there’s a limit to the energy per mass you can store in elastic rubber, which mans that no matter how big you make one of those things, they’ll all only jump a few meters. Which would be rather underwhelming in one of the depicted size.
Lame is the nicest word I can come up with. And I know “lame” is a politically sensitive term these days.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
That’s the greatest amount of hyperbole ever uttered in not just the entirety of the future and past of this universe, but of all the infinite universes.
And just how familiar are you familiar (and how are you familiar) with all that other hyperbole?
I’m the most familiar with all the hyperbole of anyone ever.
I’m super familiar with hyperbole! You can have x^2/a - y^2/b = 1, or you can have ep/(1 ± e sin(theta-phi)) for e > 1. And all you need to sketch them are a couple of asymptotes, and maybe a distance between the vertices. Or you can trace them out with a couple of foci, or a focus and a directrix.
I mean, what else is there to know?
I thought Conan came from Hyperbole?
Randall’s got a point. Given a computer and enough some time, folks can create absolute fantasy with a sky background. And have been. BFD.
Hieronymus Bosch could do the same 500 years ago with more imagination and better demons.
Eh, seems unfair to me. Pretty much all photography is just standing in the right place at the right time. Computers might tell you where to stand for these types of shots, but you still have to put in the legwork. And the data systems out where for tracking where all the different objects are going to be aren’t all that well-unified. I’m pretty sure the well-known photographers use their own homebrew software.
I’ve made this point in other astrophotography threads before.
If the scene you take an image of is real and is minimally processed, label it a photograph. If the scene not only did not exist in real life but could not exist in real life and is simply a careful overlay of other images, call it artful interpretation. It may represent great skill and great effort. it doesn’t represent great documenting of reality.
It doesn’t matter if the artist used a computer or old-fashioned film techniques straight from the 1940s. The point remains that for an observational science like astronomy to be littered with fictional artworks mislabeled as photographs of reality is a travesty.
We’ve all seen drawings / paintings labeled “Sunrise on Phobos” or whatever with a craggy landscape, a pointy rocketship, a few folks in spacesuits with one upraised arm, and some wild planets and such in a dead black sky with a piercingly bright half Sun on the horizon. Nothing wrong with that; it’s clearly labeled as fantasy, albeit plausible fantasy.
NASA APOD shows entirely too many equally fake photos. IMO YMMV. Harrumph! 
Randall correctly pokes fun at this arms race for ever more over-the-top fakery mislabeled “astrophotography.”