explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

935: Missed Connections

2013-12-17T03:20:50Z

Amurfalcon: Explained title text

{{comic
| number = 935
| date = August 8, 2011
| title = Missed Connections
| image = missed_connections.png
| titletext = The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.
}}

==Explanation==
Missed Connections is a page on Craigslist in which people who saw each other briefly and want to reconnect attempt to find each other again. If I was to hazard a guess, I would imagine it works .0001% of the time. In the case of missed connections, one person describes themselves "Me" and describes the other person "You" in order that the second person would recognize themself and try to reconnect.

The first one is a goofy joke as far as I can tell, although there have been many {{w|Wienermobile #Mishaps and other incidents| Wienermobile incidents}} in the past. Given the timing of this comic, one can't help but wonder if it might also be a pun referencing the then recent resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner over tweeting pictures of his, well, wiener with his mobile device.

Oddly enough, the second entry could possibly be a reference to [http://fairlyoddparents.wikia.com/wiki/Wishing_Well this] episode of {{w|The Fairly OddParents}}.

The third one is a reference to networking. UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. UDP packets don't use handshaking to verify they have contacted the correct host, so they can get lost or confused. The Cisco router location is just a reference to a block of IP addresses. Cisco is a company that makes networking equipment. This is a play on a missed connection for someone who was lost and asked for directions.

The fourth one seems to be a joke as well. For those outside of the US (or those inside as well), Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic Leader of the US House of Representatives. The (D-CA) is a common notation for politicians which notates party (D for Democrat) and state (CA for California). The joke is that, as a more liberal female (and grandmother) Democratic elected official, she is not exactly the type of person one would expect to be trying to reconnect with a follower of the rather unpolitically correct Insane Clown Posse she glimpsed across the room at a party.

The fifth is a straightforward joke. One of the two people getting married was so distracted by his phone he has no clue where his wife (or husband) is now, or even who they are.

The sixth is a reference to how the Google Street view van was not only recording photos of the street in 360 degrees, it was also collecting data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. The comic takes this to the next level, that the Google Street View van also scans what we have in our pockets and does a retinal scan. In this case, the social security number referenced is [http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/misused.html the most used SSN of all time.]

The last suggested the Babe Ruth, the American baseball slugger of 1914-1935 is actually a Time Lord. Time Lord is a reference to the popular sci-fi series "Doctor Who" in which The Doctor, who is a Time Lord, uses a TARDIS, which is a time travel machine. Possibly because he was a baseball player "ahead of his time".

The title text is a reference to privacy concerns surrounding google street view, to which Google responded by claiming that the street view camera wouldn't capture anything that someone walking by wouldn't be able to see.

==Transcript==
:[The page is set up like the missed connections area of Craigslist, with a list of messages from an individual to a person they weren't able to communicate with at the time.]
:Personals > Missed Connections

:You: Clinging to hood of your stolen wienermobile, trying to reach into engine to unstick throttle
:Me: Screaming, diving out of the way

:You: Vaguely human silhouette
:Me: At bottom of wishing well with harpoon gun

:You: Confused UDP packet
:Me: Cisco router in 45.170/16 block

:You: Baddest fuckin' Juggalo at Violent J's party
:Me: Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca)

:You: Getting married to me
:Me: Also getting married, but distracted by my phone

:You: Cute boy on corner of 4th & Main, 5'11, 169lbs, social security number 078-05-1120, pockets contained $2.09 in change, keys, and a condom. Retinal scan attached
:Me: Driving street view van

:You: George Herman "Babe" Ruth
:Me: Fellow Time Lord. Saw your tardis on third moon of

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-17T03:10:52Z

Amurfalcon: Blog subjects, still need descriptions

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Lower half of the map unfinished.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007; at time of writing this, it is nearly seven years later. The internet can change a lot in seven years.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamopus for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Island other possibilities.]

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace]]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. Blurty is, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blurty according to Wikipedia,] an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'':
* ''Cory Doctrow's Ballon'':
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''XU Jingali(?)'': Can't read the name very well
* ''Point east of XU JinGali'': Can't read it
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'':
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer Peer to Peer]", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'':
* ''LastFM'':
* ''DeviantArt'':

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as Wikipedia and chat programs such as IRC.

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'':
* ''4Chan'':
* ''Digg'':
* ''Fark'':
* ''Reddit''
* ''Something Awful''
* ''YTMND''
* ''Stumble Upon''
* ''Del.icio.us''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': '''PLACEHOLDER'''
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engrish Engrish] dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia].
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life]. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Technocrati,
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

461: Google Maps

2013-12-10T21:09:27Z

Amurfalcon: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 461
| date = August 11, 2008
| title = Google Maps
| image = google_maps.png
| titletext = Apparently Google assumes you're traveling during the ferry's normal operating hours. We lost two hours circling that damn lake (to say nothing of the Straw Man).
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete}}
{{w|Google Maps}} is a web mapping service application, which among other things, offers a route planner. The comic pokes fun at Google Maps for occasionally giving suboptimal directions, taking it to the logical extreme of giving directions that resemble the plot of a badly-scripted horror/action movie or an old {{w|text adventure}} game.

Luckily Cueball's brother realizes that the directions are weird when he notices that they're supposed to take a ferry after midnight. However, the title text implies that despite the bizarreness of the directions, the brothers still took them. They also apparently woke the Straw Man.

==Transcript==
:My road trip with my brother ran into trouble around page three of the Google Maps printout

:[Google Maps printout:]
:← 70. SLIGHT '''LEFT''' AT '''RT-22''' -- GO 6.8 MI
:→ 71. TURN '''RIGHT''' TO STAY ON '''RT-22''' -- GO 2.6 MI
:← 72. TURN '''LEFT''' AT '''LAKE SHORE RD''' -- GO 312 FT
:→ 73. TURN '''RIGHT''' AT '''DOCK ST''' -- GO 427 FT
:[Water replaces an arrow.] 74. TAKE THE '''FERRY''' ACROSS THE '''LAKE''' -- GO 2.8 MI

:[A car is driving in the dark.]
:Cueball: Okay, now take Dock St toward the ferry
:Brother: We're supposed to take a ferry? It's past midnight, and these woods are creepy.
:Cueball: Google Maps wouldn't steer us wrong.

:[Cueball and brother stand outside the car. The ferry has a sign on it reading CLOSED.]
:[Cueball stands holding the Google Maps printout next to brother in the dark]
:[Still standing in the dark]
:Cueball: Let me see those directions.

:[Google Maps printout:]
:[Water replaces an arrow] 74. TAKE THE '''FERRY''' ACROSS THE '''LAKE''' -- GO 2.8 MI
:↗ 75. CLIMB THE '''HILL''' TOWARD '''HANGMAN'S RIDGE,''' AVOIDING ANY '''MOUNTAIN LIONS''' -- UP 1,172 FT
:↷ 76. WHEN YOU REACH AN '''OLD BARN,''' GO AROUND BACK, KNOCK ON THE '''SECOND DOOR''', AND ASK FOR '''CHARLIE''' -- GO 52 FT
:[A van] 77. TELL '''CHARLIE''' THE '''DANCING STONES''' ARE '''RESTLESS'''. HE WILL GIVE YOU HIS '''VAN'''. -- CAREFUL
:[A picture of the straw man] 78. TAKE '''CHARLIE'S VAN''' DOWN '''OLD MINE ROAD'''. DO NOT WAKE THE '''STRAW MAN'''. -- GO π MI
:← 79. TURN LEFT ON '''COMSTOCK'''. WHEN YOU FEEL THE '''BLOOD''' CHILL IN YOUR '''VEINS''', STOP THE VAN AND '''GET OUT'''. -- GO 3.2 MI
:↓ 80. STAND VERY STILL. EXITS ARE '''NORTH''', '''SOUTH''', AND '''EAST''', BUT ARE BLOCKED BY A '''SPECTRAL WOLF'''. -- GO 0 FT
:[A picture of a spectral wolf] 81. THE '''SPECTRAL WOLF''' FEARS ONLY '''FIRE'''. THE '''GOOGLE MAPS TEAM''' CAN NO LONGER HELP YOU, BUT IF YOU MASTER THE '''WOLF''', HE WILL GUIDE YOU. '''GODSPEED'''. -- GO ?? MI

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

Talk:461: Google Maps

2013-12-10T21:07:03Z

Amurfalcon:

By the end, it's really starting to sound like a text-based fantasy adventure game, or possibly a game of D&D. This adds an additional level of humour: using Google Maps to navigate around virtual worlds.

I particularly liked the "Go pi miles", and the "Careful" instructions in the Google Maps "Action" column on the right. ''--[[User:MisterSpike|MisterSpike]] ([[User talk:MisterSpike|talk]]) 18:58, 26 June 2013 (UTC)''

:Yes it is very much like old text games. [[Special:Contributions/184.66.160.91|184.66.160.91]] 04:18, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

The Spectral Wolf plays a role in World of Warcraft, but as I am not a WoW player, I don't feel qualified to update the explanation. Any WoWians want to add a paragraph on the Spectral Wolf?[[User:Nsimonetti|NikoNarf]] ([[User talk:Nsimonetti|talk]]) 19:17, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
:I am one, but the Reins of the Spectral Wolf were not released until the Cataclysm expansion (December 2010). Thus a WoW-related explanation for the wolf would be anachronistic. [[User:Amurfalcon|Amurfalcon]] ([[User talk:Amurfalcon|talk]]) 21:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what is meant by the use of the term "Straw Man" instead of scarecrow or some other spooky or Halloween-themed equivalent. Perhaps it is a reference to the fallacy, but the fallacy is unassociated with "waking" unless maybe it's loosely related to the aggression that generally accompanies the attack of a straw man. {{unsigned ip|173.245.56.66}}

256: Online Communities

2013-12-10T20:52:55Z

Amurfalcon: Work in progress

256: Online Communities

2013-12-10T20:41:31Z

Amurfalcon: /* Explanation */

Talk:256: Online Communities

2013-12-10T20:30:41Z

Amurfalcon:

I'm gonna try and put together some sort of explanation at all for this one. A couple of things I could use help on in terms of location if people want to chip in: series of tubes within myspace; the Icy North; the islands bounded by the Ocean of Subculture, Sea of Memes, and P2P Shoals; and the location of some of the tiny islands around the map (e.g. why is the Lonely Island near friendster, Google's Volcano Fortress off the IRC Isles, etc.). Thanks in advance!! [[User:Amurfalcon|Amurfalcon]] ([[User talk:Amurfalcon|talk]]) 20:30, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Talk:256: Online Communities

2013-12-10T20:30:24Z

Amurfalcon: Created page with "I'm gonna try and put together some sort of explanation at all for this one. A couple of things I could use help on in terms of location if people want to chip in: series of t..."