493: Actuarial

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 23:23, 6 June 2013 by 178.107.63.150 (talk) (Explanation: Ok, so in leiu of the OP providing one, is this explanation satisactory enough for starters at least?)
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Actuarial
I started to do the tables for more famous people but it got really depressing and morbid and I had to go outside. Hat guy wins again.
Title text: I started to do the tables for more famous people but it got really depressing and morbid and I had to go outside. Hat guy wins again.

Explanation

Once again, Black Hat is provoked into on-line retaliation bordering on the sociopathic, choosing a form of retribution that doesn't necessarily break any written rules but strikes directly at the heart and/or mind of his opponent. Cueball reflects that he doesn't wish to become the target of such ire himself, but (without apparent malice on Black Hat's part) still suffers from a piece of memetic shrapnel from the original attack.

Transcript

[A dialog between Cueball, seated at a computer terminal, and Black Hat, seated in an armchair reading a book. They are facing away from each other.]
Cueball: I know you shouldn't feed the trolls, but sometimes they just provoke me to where I can't help replying.
Black Hat: Yeah, me too. Yesterday this guy kept spamming "First!", so I got a set of actuarial tables and spent twenty minutes telling him when all his childhood heroes would likely die.
[Cueball turns around in his chair.]
Cueball: ...
Cueball: Remind me never to upset you, ever.
Black Hat: 2038: Last of the original Star Wars cast dies.
Cueball: Augh!
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Discussion

I have no time for searching right now, but I'm sure there is a graph comic related to this sentence: "2038: Last of the original Star Wars cast dies." BTW: please create only pages with an proper explanation. --Dgbrt (talk) 16:45, 6 June 2013 (UTC)


While I'm not the guy/gal who created the page, I thought I'd supply a short explanation, to be refined as necessary. BTW, the linkies at the bottom suggest that this is a "Comic with colour", but I only see monochrome. Is this a human error, or is it an automated response to the supplied image (while being black on white, or maybe greyscale) 'officially' having a colour palette or something in its header? 178.107.63.150 23:35, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

His choice of year 2038 could be related to the year 2038 problem. If we assume that C3PO and R2D2 run Unix, then the year 2038 would be the end of Unix time, and they would therefore die. 141.101.80.212 11:18, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

No, Randall wrote an actual Python script to calculate these. I'd give a link, but he's since removed them from the site. He made a blog post, though.108.162.216.113 01:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Found a github copy of the script at [1]. Bronze2018 (talk) 03:18, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Randall called Black Hat "Hat guy" so maybe we should, too. 162.158.111.217 07:37, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

"Hat guy" is too ambiguous, considering White Hat and Beret Guy. That said, I think it's at least noteworthy that Randall calls him this by name. I'm not sure when else he's done that, but I'm not an expert. 108.162.246.82 06:06, 7 August 2022 (UTC)