380: Emoticon

Emoticon

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Title text: U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

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Explanation

A basilisk, originating in Greco-Roman antiquity, is a legendary creature reputed to have the power to kill, or turn to stone, any living creature with a single glance (a useful idea for metaphor, as in Shakespeare's Richard III, in which a widow wishes her eyes, praised for their beauty by her husband's killer, were basilisks and could "strike [him] dead"). In this comic Cueball doesn't appear to be turned to stone, he simply appears to have died.

Cueball, who goes by "NICKM", chats online with a user named "BSLSK05" via instant messaging. He quickly learns, much to his dismay, that he is chatting with an actual basilisk, who kills him by texting him a smiley emoticon (a colon and a closing parenthesis: :)), suggesting that the basilisk's power can extend beyond actual physical eye contact and is effective even with a mere visual representation of a pair of "basilisk" eyes as keyboard characters.

The username "BSLSK05" is, of course, the word "basilisk" without vowels and with appended numbers. Most systems disallow the same username for different users, so users often append digits to their name in order to create something unique. These may be digits that have some significance to them, or simply an arbitrary string.

The myth of the basilisk has been adapted into many places in popular culture which the comic may be referencing, rather than the original myth directly. In this comic, Cueball is explicitly not referred to as Rob, since his username implies that he goes by "Nick" (possibly short for "Nicholas") and has a family name starting with "M". This may be a reference to the character Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, also known as "Nearly Headless Nick", from the novel and movie series Harry Potter. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a basilisk is let loose in Hogwarts School of Wizardry, and Nearly Headless Nick becomes a victim of the basilisk's gaze. However, since he is a ghost and has already died, he is instead rendered immobile, or in the book, "petrified". (Another possible reference is the Basilisk monster from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Here, the Basilisk is a monster with the special ability "Petrifying Gaze".)

Cueball's question, "A/S/L?", is an online messaging shorthand for requesting information about someone — specifically their age, sex, and location. This was commonly used when first meeting someone online in text-only mediums, especially in determining how they might wish to continue to converse with their correspondent (whether it might lead to online flirting or finding some other interesting topic of conversation). However, in some contexts, the question was considered creepy, inappropriate or disruptive. For people who were only interested in talking with existing friends or talking about a specific topic, dealing with unsolicited private messages asking "A/S/L?" was generally an annoyance. Such people may have wished for a way to make the questioner go away, though most would not have resorted to petrification to do so.

The term has largely fallen out of use since the comic, with the introduction of avatars, profile pictures, and other methods of presenting a user's identity up front. Modern dating sites such as Tinder have built-in algorithms that automatically connect people whose preferences match, skipping the basic introduction stage of a first-time interaction entirely.

The type of chat system pictured may be Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the earliest popular system used for instant messaging, as most IRC clients share the use of formatting usernames with surrounding angle brackets and prefixing event messages with "-!-".

The title text refers to the Unicode character at code point U+FDD0, which is a non-character — this specific one is permanently reserved for internal application processing rather than regular text, meaning no font sets support the character. If you attempt to render the non-character in a text field or editor, it would either not show up or would display as an empty rectangle (🯄) or an invalid/missing character box (�). Unicode does, however, have many characters for representing images and icons/symbols, such as ✉ (Envelope), ☎ (Telephone), ✏ (Pencil), ✂ (Scissors), ⚙ (Gear), ★ (Star), ancient Egyptian glyphs, and (most popularly) emojis. Ironically, the characters just given may not render in a given browser, including the one of the editor who placed them here, and also appear as rectangular boxes, even if they can be seen and used on the edit page. The title text claims that U+FDD0 is actually the character for the eye of a basilisk (which does not exist), but is not rendered by any fonts for safety reasons, because it may kill anybody who looks at the character.

Transcript

[Cueball sits at computer, typing. The computer screen reads as follows:]

-!- Opening Chat with BSLSK05

<NICKM> Hi!

<NICKM> A/S/L?

[The next panel is unframed, with two smaller frames within it.]

<BSLSK05> :)

[Cueball looks stunned, flies backward.]

[The two smaller frames focus in on BSLSK05's emoticon, implying rotation to show a smile and two open eyes.]

[Cueball at computer slouches in chair, dead, crossbones above his head.]

[At the remote computer, a basilisk is looking at its screen, pleased with its endeavours.]

Trivia

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This is a bit too technical, explain it in simpler terms. You can help by editing the explanation!

The unicode character used as the eye of the basilisk, U+FDD0 did in fact kill at least one chat client, Konversation (and presumably any other Qt-based chat clients using QTextDocument). This was because U+FDD0 is one of the 32 non-characters located in the block “Arabic Presentation Forms-A” used "to make additional codes available to programmers to use for internal processing purposes". According to the Unicode FAQ they are reserved for internal (private) use.

However, some cross-platform software development frameworks used to create graphical user interfaces, such as QT's UTF-8 encoder, let it through anyway. QT's qtextdocument (i.e. the container for richtext formatted content) uses U+FDD0 as non-printable text frame delimiting character. When this is appended to a QTextDocument, which is a container for structured rich text documents that provides support for styled text and various other types of document elements, the internal counters used to keep track of depths of embedded content have been incorrectly adjusted, to the degree that it eventually may crash the software using it.

D-bus closes the connection and crashes the client when it encounters illegal UTF-8, and KDE's notification system works through d-bus.

The problem was fixed after the xkcd "report" and Konversation now handles unicode normally.

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Discussion

The explanation for comic 380: Emoticon was selected by the Explanation Improvement Project as This Week's Explanation for Improvement after being nominated in August 2026 by Black Hat's Hat. During that week, editors focused on expanding and polishing this explanation as part of an ongoing effort to keep older or under-developed explanations fresh and complete. (compare before and after)

This may also be a reference or allusion to David Langford's basilisks, which are computer-generated images (mostly fractals) that kill or otherwise incapacitate people by triggering faults or overloads common to human neuropathways. ...I think it's just about the humor in a mythological basilisk's power transferring via emoticons, though. JET73L (talk) 16:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Cognitohazards are fun! Whoop whoop pull up (talk) 21:54, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

<BSLSK05> :) 173.72.159.14 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Perhaps Cueball isn't dead, but petrified, because he saw the eyes indirectly? Like in Harry Potter. 121.99.61.70 21:10, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The X'd eyes and skull floating above Cueball indicates that the basilisk was, indeed, successful in its task. For those concerned about the paradox between "Cueball"'s untimely demise in this comic and his future appearances, consider this a parallel reality. Your brain is safe! Thokling (talk) 05:50, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Maybe a Poincaré recurrence time passes between this comic and the next one. 108.162.219.5 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

...or just consider that 'Cueball' is simply the name of the 'species' of stick figure here. Otherwise, the Cueball here would still be missing a hand, literally. Greyson (talk) 03:16, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Of course, there's no way we can tell it's not a prosthesis. --Alex (talk) 19:51, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Is this the last comic with a CRT monitor? 89.243.117.162 20:57, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Good question, I did add a category for this so we can collect them.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:26, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

The CTR category was deleted by Davidy so the puzzle is left unsolved Kynde (talk) 12:10, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

It would be extraordinarily like xkcd to include a reference to [Roko's Basilisk] and make it literal, in a manner similar to how other debates and ideas in computer science, mathematics, and other fields became actual battles. Consider [Pumpkin Carving] or [Principle of Explosion], where ideas from set theory and logic manifest directly in the world. Warning: some folk find the thought experiment of Roko's Basilisk disturbing. 108.162.238.166 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

As noted above, the reference is more likely to Langford's basilisks (though the rest of your comment fits just as well). Though now I at least have an idea why is Roko's Basilisk named that... I kept wondering "why is this thought experiment in any way similar to a basilisk?" --141.101.81.74 06:37, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

For that matter, this particular comic is early enough that it actually predates the Roko's Basilisk story. --141.101.81.78 15:24, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

What's up with the explanation??

The explanation is super messy, can someone who understands it fix it? 162.158.133.120 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Why is the Basilisk a 5 year old male? 173.245.52.145 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I second this. It doesn't seem to follow from anything. --VannaWho (talk) 11:52, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Maybe because snakes grow to maturity much quicker than humans? 172.70.230.250 (talk) 01:30, 8 June 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Or the username is chosen to match the original Greek βασιλίσκος (*basiliskos*), which can be used to refer to a basilisk, an Egyptian cobra, a minor royalty, a wren, the star Alpha Leonis, or a kind of shoe. 2a09:bac3:517e:2878::408:c (talk) 09:22, 5 September 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Page Cleanup

I've had a bit of a look at this page. What's with the wierd trivia, by the way? GSLikesCats306 (talk) 12:45, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm surprised there isn't more mention of the Harry Potter connection here: this cartoon came out about 5 years after the film with the basilisk and there was a character called Nick who it turned to stone. --Darth Vader (talk) 14:32, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Oh yeah! It even matched the initals NickM. Added a section about that -- Black Hat's Hat (talk) 15:25, August 28, 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I fixed the title text and added some extra information Morpheus (talk) 23:38, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Very unsure how to obey {{incomplete|This is a bit too technical, explain it in simpler terms.}} for the Trivia section. There's very little in the current statements that can be removed to make it more understandable, and still accurate. Yet I suspect that adding more detail would also defeat the purpose. Can we have a serious discussion about which main bits are not being understood, and maybe suggestions as to what simpler terms would be acceptable? 92.23.3.28 17:53, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

I believe it's the stuff about QTextDocument and qt. Perhaps adding a short explanation about what that is might help. Morpheus (talk) 03:15, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

I added some short (well, shorter than they could be!) explanations for such terms as might need this. Tried to make it halfway readable, and not actually 'wrong', but I'm not at all confident I managed that. 92.23.7.14 13:13, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
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