explain xkcd:Explanation Improvement Project
After remaining inactive more than a decade, the Explanation Completion Project is back with a new goal and a new name! Explaining every comic was just the start; the key to an active wiki is the maintenance and constant improvements for the existing explanations.
Most new comics receive high-quality explanations thanks to our growing user base and high standards, but our goal is to have a complete repository of explanations for all xkcd comics. Unfortunately, old explanations often do not attract enough attention and tend to be neglected and remain stagnant. This project aims to solve that.
This week's explanation for improvement is:
Get involved with the project: nominate an explanation or vote on current nominations!
There are a total of 3348 explanations on this wiki. Every Saturday, upon completion of This Week's Explanation for Improvement (TWEFI), a new page will be featured in the Main page and in our global site banner with the goal of continually keeping our older explanations as detailed and fresh as possible. Remember; every little bit counts. Even if all you can do is add a sentence or fix a typo, that is still another step taken towards finishing the article.
This project differs from our backlog of incomplete articles, as the former is focused on creating new editors by encouraging them to expand a relatively approachable explanation. For explanations that are mostly complete, topics that require technical knowledge, and some evergreen explanations that are never truly "finished", browse Category:Incomplete explanations or jump to a random incomplete explanation.
Criteria [edit]
The Explanation Improvement Project is primarily focused on improving existing explanations while also helping create new editors. Ideal candidates for This Week's Explanation for Improvement are:
1. In need of significant improvement, with an extensive scope for expansion. Short explanations (view list of shortest explanations) are often the most ideal, but longer explanations also qualify if they are written poorly or fail to explain the joke. Good concise explanations about quick and straightforward comics should remain short, so evaluate explanations on a case-by-case basis.
2. Accessible to a broad audience or otherwise ideal for new editors. This project is primarily focused on helping convert our readers into editors, and the week-long collaborative format (edit-a-thon) works best for relatable comics. Explanations about niche or technical jokes usually belong in the general incomplete explanations backlog instead.
3. (#3 is under discussion, please participate) Old or out of date. While not required, an explanation is usually a good candidate if it predates the creation of this wiki or if it needs to be updated to reflect newly available information (such as future predictions coming true). Starting from the release of comic 1079 in 2012, new explanations were featured on the Main Page for several days and are generally higher-quality as a result. Particularly, recent comics from the last few years are almost never nominated.
Nomination process[edit]
Anyone is encouraged to nominate one or more explanations! If do not have any specific comic in mind, you can start by browsing the list of shortest explanations, but keep in mind that not all concise explanations are incomplete. To nominate an explanation for consideration by the Explanation Improvement Project, follow these simple steps:
- Check whether the explanation(s) you want to nominate meet the three criteria above.
- Click here to add your nomination at the top of the list using this format:
{{Nominate|1234: Title of Comic}} We can improve it by adding ... (say briefly what else we should explain). ~~~~
- Save the page. After nominating, please consider helping us by also opposing or supporting on the other nominations, especially the older ones. We need a minimum quorum of 2 replies for each nomination, any comment would be appreciated!
That's it! In the following days, your nomination will be discussed by the members of the project. All users are welcome to vote on the suitability of the § Current nominations by using the "Reply" button!
Once three members support a nomination, it is moved into the section § Successful nominations (pending) waiting to be featured. After being selected as the Explanation for Improvement for seven days, it gets archived. Instead, nominations which do not meet the criteria are moved directly into § Unsuccessful nominations and archived. In all cases, the "Discussion" section of the comic explanation is marked with a banner with a link to the archived nomination and the nominator's username!
Nominations[edit]
This week's selection[edit]
- This is the Explanation for Improvement for the current week.
| 1008: Suckville | |||||||||||
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The phrase is originally based on the signage commonly used in the United States that says "Welcome to Town X — Population Y". These signs are usually posted on entry roads to towns, and as the name suggests, welcome visitors to the town, generally mentioning distinctive characteristics as well as information regarding traffic laws, the town's motto, founding date, etc. The intention of the statement is to suggest "Suckville" is inhabited solely by Cueball, thus making him "a sucker". Then, Cueball one-ups Megan by indicating there is a city by that name. Since Cueball knows where Suckville can be found in the census data, it's likely that he has received this insult in the past (maybe even from Megan) and searched through the census data to prepare a comeback for this time. it is also possible he has found out about its existence after falling through a Wikipedia rabbit hole, as shown in other comics (i.e 1051: Visited, 214: The Problem with Wikipedia) In the US Decennial (2010, 2020, etc) Census datasets, SF-1 is the Summary File of a Census Report that contains "the data compiled from the questions asked of all people and about every housing unit", and within that, P1 is the main population table. If "Suckville" did exist in the 2010 Census, Megan would have been able to find it in the location Cueball suggests. The title text informs the reader that Suckville is classified as part of the Detroit area despite not being located there. Detroit, of course, is the quintessential example of a city so run down, it might as well really be named "Suckville", or include a district of that name. In fact, the city only recently (2013) declared itself bankrupt. (Fun fact: looking in the US Census Suckville is "corrected" to Saukville, Wisconsin, which is indeed not particularly close to Detroit, Michigan. However the population of Saukville in the 2010 census is given as 4451 for the village, and 1755 for the surrounding town municipality.)
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I think this one needs improvement on the explanation of how the response works. In the explanation, is says that it a "one-up" to Magan. However, this seems incorrect, because it the response seems less like a comeback and more like a confused correction. Essentially, the explanation needs a complete overhaul with this alternate (and in my opinion, more correct) interpertation. FibonacciGuy (talk) 18:24, 26 October 2026 (UTC)
- Randall doesn't give us tone indicators beyond words, so we don't know whether he's confused or smug, so either interpretation seems okay. (And WP:BOLD: if you feel like that's a viable possibility, go add it in!)
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)16:05, 27 October 2026 (UTC) - Support – While the reason given by FibonacciGuy isn't really convincing, I think this explanation can be vastly improved. We can elaborate on "ubiquitous signage you see along American roads", the "population: you" joke which is completely unexplained, what "SF-1 table P1" might mean, explain Detroit better, etc. FaviFake (talk) 23:56, 30 October 2026 (UTC)
- Agree, Support
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)00:59, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
- Agree, Support
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 04:05, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 03:22, 8 November 2026 (UTC)
Successful nominations (pending)[edit]
- Nominations that receive 3 "support" votes are moved from § Current nominations to here, waiting to featured.
| 122: Quirky Girls | |||||||
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This is a fairly classic play on what people say they want isn't always what they mean they want. As per the comic, this is particularly true when it comes to the generalization of wanting someone "different." When Megan opens up to the other character and says how she is "different," she is met with a stereotypical, but more accurate, response of his definition of "different." The title text refers to characters in the famously cliched plot lines of romantic comedies where often the male lead is "uptight" and the female lead is "quirky," and the course of the plot involves the male lead learning to loosen up in order to properly fall in love with the female lead (the same set-up with the genders reversed is also common). The term usually used to describe such characters is "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" (see also TVtropes). Since these movies tend to follow very strict conventions, the definitions of "uptight" (has an office job, is afraid of confronting his boss, timid in public venues, etc.) and "quirky" (abnormally friendly with strangers, loves art, isn't afraid to make a spectacle of herself for fun, etc.) are just as limited and stereotyped as any other characters. This mirrors Megan's frustration that "acceptably quirky" is so narrowly defined.
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The title text has a few sentences of explanation, but the main comic is only half-heartedly summarized in a single sentence, and not explained any further. I don't know what exactly, but I feel like there is a lot more that could be said about this topic. According to the comments, there also is a relevant wikipedia article that could be mentioned, but it doesn't say the article. 93.88.156.24 12:06, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support It doesn't explain the pop-culture meaning of quirky or the trends surrounding it that the comic is referencing at all. Till (talk) 20:07, 28 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support I found the article (Manic Pixie Dream Girl) and added a mention, but a mention doth not an explanation make.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)19:22, 1 November 2026 (UTC) - Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 18:03, 3 November 2026 (UTC)
| 160: Penny Arcade Parody | |||||||
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Penny Arcade is a webcomic, primarily about video games and the culture surrounding them. It is written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik, though they are better known as their comic alter-egos: Tycho Brahe and Jonathan "Gabe" Gabriel. This strip begins as a parody of the Penny Arcade strip, which makes fun of Sony for providing a lack-luster selection of PS3 games available on the console's launch date. However, it quickly turns into the narrator's fantasy of what might happen if Tycho discovered his spoof. The enormous wall of text in the second and third panels may be a reference to the Penny Arcade strip "I Hope You Like Text." The cardboard tube references one of Gabe's alternate characters, Cardboard Tube Samurai.
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This explanation could probably use a fresh set of edits. It doesn't fully explain the joke, and the explanation overall is too short in comparison to the comic's content. It doesn't talk about the title text or how it furthers the joke, and it is also quite an early comic. The discussion also cited a few things that the comic could be missing that should be taken into account if this comic is nominated. The Black Hat Guy (talk) 15:47, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
- Support. Amazing find! There's so much missing here. FaviFake (talk) 22:16, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
- Support. I totally agree. This explanation is very lackluster, it could do with a lot more detail. Till (talk) 20:53, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 00:08, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
| 170: Turn Back | |||||||
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This comic is drawn in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, which was a daily comic drawn by Bill Watterson, published between 1985 to 1995. It followed the imaginary adventures of a young boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, who appears as an actual tiger in Calvin's imagination. The frequent themes of spontaneity, beauty, and adventure that characterize many of Calvin's conversations with his friend Hobbes can also be seen in this exchange between Cueball and Megan as they explore a large desert landscape with various alien-like structures. In C&H, Calvin sometimes imagines himself as Spaceman Spiff, an intergalactic astronaut that is frequently caught on exoplanets, most of which have a strong resemblance to the terrain shown in the comic. The cluelessness and simultaneous wonder that Cueball and Megan feel at their surrounding landscape mirror Calvin's inexperience and curiosity that he exhibits in Watterson's comic. The title text, while unclear if it were actually true or not, reflects Mr. Watterson's reclusive nature. He has never licensed his characters for any use outside of reprints, and he stays out of the public spotlight. Thus, it is very probable that it was true at the time of this comic. The title text also serves to point out the connection between Watterson's work and this comic. However, in more recent years, Watterson has come out of his shell a bit. He collaborated with Stephan Pastis, creator of Pearls Before Swine, to do a story arc where a second grader was a better artist than an actual cartoonist. Stephan Pastis later wrote of the experience: "I began to wonder if [Bill Watterson] even had electricity, then I remembered we were using e-mail to communicate."
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The current explanation just seems to explain the background behind the comic but not the comic itself. Capycapybara (talk) 20:00, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
- Capycapybara Thanks for nominating the explanation! Do you have any specific ideas in mind for how it could be improved? FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Perhaps more explanation of the landscape, Cueball and Megan's conversation, or how they might have gotten there in the first place? Right now, the explanation is mainly about Calvin and Hobbes instead of the comic; there are only two passing mentions of the comic itself. Capycapybara (talk) 01:45, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support per CCB's reply to FF.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)06:24, 18 October 2026 (UTC) - Support. This could definitely use some work. Titintheword (talk) 21:42, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 07:30, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
| 298: Tesla Coil | |||||||
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Cueball diligently creates a Tesla coil, a device that produces high voltage alternating currents. After that show by Cueball, Black Hat magically shoots electricity from his fingertips. When Cueball asks how he did that, he says that science doesn't really work, then hovers in mid-air, further proving his point. There is simply no apparent explanation for Black Hat's abilities, which means science is still woefully incomplete or, as Black Hat said, simply doesn't work. Black Hat further explained that the reason that nobody told Cueball was because they thought he was "cute when [he] got into something". Implying that everyone else also knows, and only Cueball was clueless. The title text indicates that this was all actually a dream, explaining Black Hat's abilities and pointing out how dreams can be difficult for scientists as they will attempt to analyze and understand everything in the dream according to the laws of science, which wouldn't apply in dreams.[citation needed]
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The explanation is very much a transcript. A true explanation of the joke would be nice. It meets all the criteria I believe. Black Hat's Hat (talk) 15:08, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
- Strong agree. We don't mention BH's classhole tendencies, which seems perfect for the idea of hiding the true nature of reality from someone. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 17:11, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 19:19, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
| 332: Gyroscopes | |||||||
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Cueball is playing with a gyroscope. Even though he has studied them and intellectually understands their behaviour, they still seem somewhat mysterious, which is a reasonable thought. Gyroscopes hold kinetic and angular momentum at a near constant, which allows them to continuously spin for extended periods of time. At the end of the comic however, the gyroscope is revealed to have the power of levitation and to talk with him, revealing that Cueball's gyroscope is actually a sentient lifeform, turning his previously irrational apprehension into quite the understatement. How the gyroscope is able to do this is unclear. This behavior could be specific to Cueball's gyroscope, or it could be that all gyroscopes have this property, and that only this one shows it. Alternatively, their properties could be unknown because no one who has seen them are left alive to tell the story. In the title text, Randall is mocking the Moon landing conspiracy theories and refers to the lunar precession in process. Gyroscopes and the lunar orbit both exhibit precession, a physical concept that non-scientists can find hard to grasp. Thus, it is a perfect subject for a lunar conspiracy theory. He goes on to claim that gyroscopes (which form part of the navigation system of every commercial airplane) were directly responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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Very short explanation that's pretty much just a transcript. Capycapybara (talk) 02:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Support. Just a transcript, nowhere near today's standards. FaviFake (talk) 08:16, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Support per nom.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)19:26, 1 November 2026 (UTC)- Support. Titintheword (talk) 02:52, 3 November 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 18:03, 3 November 2026 (UTC)
| 359: Rock Band | |||||||
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A smug Cueball demeans his friends' fun experience on Rock Band, a video game which allows players to simulate playing real songs, as if in a real band. The oblivious "band" keeps rocking out, and it transpires that his real purpose is not to spread knowledge but to ruin others' fun (to no avail, thankfully). Another common variation of "Stop having fun!" is "Quit having fun!". Another version is "You don't have to enjoy it so much!". However, neither of these has anything to do with the comic. The title text is a comment on haptic feedback, comparing the guitar controllers of Guitar Hero, which make a clicking sound when the user strums, with those of Rock Band, which do not click.
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Again, a very short explanation. We could go deeper into why Cueball doesn't want the other people to have fun on Rock Band. Capycapybara (talk) 02:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Yeah, this one could use some love. Good find! Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:10, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
| 390: Nightmares | |||||||
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This comic shows Cueball's plight with nightmares. Since he's gotten used to normal nightmares, his subconscious has begun giving him dreams where he sees his dream characters imploring him to not wake up, lest they perish, as they only exist in his dream. The horror comes from the idea that by the simple, everyday action of waking up, Cueball would be extinguishing a life. This would also necessitate that Cueball is conscious when he is asleep, a type of vivid dream known as a lucid dream. The title text continues this theme, with Megan claiming that she is really real (presumably in response to the allegation that she isn't real, and merely a dream character), and begging Cueball to stay with her.
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The explanation is nothing more than a transcript, and it's definitely relatable. I've literally had a nightmare where, upon realizing I was dreaming, the various characters in the dream tried to stop me from waking up. Cybermaster 03:58, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
- Cybermaster What do you think could be added to the explanation? It's short, sure, but what else is there to add, in your opinion? FaviFake (talk) 17:12, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
- Some more stuff on what lucid dreams are could be helpful. More specifically, to one who doesn’t have them often, the reason as to why people in the dream are begging you not to wake up could be a bit confusing. 2601:582:C300:E62:F136:9B84:C46B:D9D2 15:06, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
- some explanation on how dreams work, on how disturbing the considerations can be, the existential dread as you actually weigh the consequences of if you're wrong and this really is a real reality that you will destroy if you wake up, real people begging you to spare their families, literally saying they will do anything if you just don't wake up, trying absolutely everything to convince you, promising everything you could wish or hope form, etc. Hi I'm a signature (talk) 21:13, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support I've had this kind of dream a million times, and this explanation is too short for any kind of comic 204.113.154.39 18:31, 26 October 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 16:41, 27 October 2026 (UTC)
| 729: Laser Pointer | |||||||
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It is common to use a laser pointer as a cat toy because cats are attracted to the dot and attempt in vain to catch it in their paws. They will chase the dot as it moves around, sometimes pouncing on it or swiping at it with their claws; but they will never be able to catch it.[citation needed] This is very frustrating for cats (and dogs), because it triggers a hunting instinct, but removes the satisfaction of actually catching their prey. Cueball is messing with his cat with a laser pointer, however he is unprepared when his cat pounces and successfully grabs the laser dot. As Cueball looks around and tries to figure out what happened to the laser, his cat licks it, before eating it and starting to glow with a red light. The cat then shoots lasers from its eyes and disintegrates a surprised Cueball on the spot in revenge for taunting it with the laser pointer. It is then revealed that everything that happened was just a cat's dream. Only in its dreams can a cat successfully enact the rest of the comic.[citation needed] Real cats' eyes (and some other animals' eyes) have a Tapetum Lucidum behind their retinas, which increases their sensitivity in low-light conditions. This can cause their eyes to appear to glow, but they're actually just reflecting light from the environment. The title text makes a pun on the chamber in which lasers are formed, known as a laser cavity.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- I feel like the explanation covers the comic, but it doesn't explain; I'm feeling the lack of the obligatory TVTropes link and the discussion around laser powers. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 22:40, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
Current nominations[edit]
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Welcome! You can follow the instructions above to add your nominations to the top of this section |
| 996: Making Things Difficult | |||||||
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This comic is a reference to the breast cancer surgery that Randall's fiancée/wife underwent, and is one of many comics about cancer he made because of this. This comic is the follow up appointment after the surgery. When doctor Ponytail asks Megan to take her shirt off, she refuses until Ponytail gives her a necklace of purple beads. Younger and more boorish Mardi Gras tourists sometimes offer necklaces in exchange for the exposure of a person's breasts. Megan's line "You know the rules" implies that Megan has stipulated that every time she takes off her shirt for the doctor, a necklace of beads must be exchanged. In the official transcript the doctor is described as an oncologist, a doctor who works with cancer patients, and Megan/Randall's wife is described as a Delightfully Awesome Person. It is also stated that the oncologist fake-annoyedly searches for something in pockets and that it is a Mardi Gras bead necklace she takes out. Below the xkcd logo, in the header at the top of the comic page there is the following text: "Some context for the cancer comics:" and below that a link to a Blag post regarding family-illness that talked about the real world events leading up to this comic. This is one of the few comics where a character wears regular clothes, but doctor Ponytail has been seen before in 883: Pain Rating and later in 1713: 50 ccs. Megan is in both, and Cueball also in the latter. The title text refers to a mastectomy, the surgical removal of one or both breasts. One possible treatment for breast cancer is to surgically remove the breast. After this procedure a false or prosthetic breast is often added to retain the prior physical appearance. The title text suggests this prosthesis could serve as a charging station by including the following features: a spare battery inside the prosthesis, a USB port where the nipple would normally be, and a ring of lights showing the charge level of the battery arranged around the areola (the darker circle of skin around the nipple).
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We can improve this explanation by explaining more about the purple necklace and other elements of this comic. YZ100 (talk) 20:49, 11 November 2026 (UTC)
| 1089: Internal Monologue | |||||||
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Cueball attempts social interaction at what looks like a party owing to the fact that several people have drinks in their hands. His internal monologue is just Cueball trying to make sure he is doing the right things in the conversation, reacting appropriately, and not saying "yeah" too much. The title text is a continuation of the internal monologue. This is common case of anxiety for people who are usually not very skilled in navigating social situations like parties. It can become a vicious cycle in which the fear of handling the encounter badly makes one even more uncomfortable, which in turn results in behaviour as awkward as first feared. Also, for some people it's common to want to map out a pre-planned course of action that should produce desired results, a strategy that is usually doomed to failure when dealing with sufficiently complex and unpredictable scenarios like conversations with other people. This painful, and all too common, situation has been mined for comedic effect since the beginning of human civilization.[citation needed] This situation is especially common and difficult for autistic people, and the learned (conscious or automated) effort to appear neurotypical is known as masking and is a near-constant source of mental drain for many. Small talk and appropriate eye contact, both mentioned in this comic, are well known to be difficult for many autistic people.
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It feels a bit like a transcript and doesn't really get the jokeTicTac_ :P (talk)
- Support, but please sign your comments. This is a pretty good nomination. YZ100 (talk) 20:52, 11 November 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for reminding to sign comments TicTac_ :P (talk) 23:37, 11 November 2026 (UTC)
| 2500: Global Temperature Over My Lifetime | |||||||
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This is Randall Munroe in his role as a meticulous, conscientious presenter of scientific data. The activities shown in Randall's lifeline, whether learning to ride a bike or even getting married, pale into insignificance when the consequences of unprecedented global average temperature rise are understood and accepted. In particular, he shows that back in 1982, two years before Randall was born, Exxon wrote an internal report predicting the rise of global temperatures due to fossil fuel use, and 40 years later their prediction (shown as the X in a circle at the top-right) is being shown to be right on track. Unfortunately, that report was hidden and not seen until much later, and the world has been slow to respond with the urgency needed to reverse the damage being done to the planet. The Wikipedia article global temperature record has some telling graphs to supplement Randall's. This one: Global Average Temperature is the global average temperature change for the modern era, since data started being collected regularly in 1850. This one: 2000 Year Temperature Comparison reconstructs 2000 years of temperatures. And this comic is a small segment of another comic: 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline. The comic itself links to the referenced Exxon document about CO2 emissions. The comic was published on the same day that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2021 Assessment Report One of the entries is I somehow graduate despite spending most of my time playing Mario Kart. Mario Kart is a popular video game series developed by Nintendo, and has been a recurring theme on xkcd. Hewing close to the comic's timeline, 127: The Fast and the Furious, which contains an early Mario Kart joke, was released in July 2006. The title text refers to the fact that Exxon, being a fossil fuel company, is likely to make better predictions on fossil fuel use as they are involved in fossil fuel production themselves.
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The explanation goes over some arbitrary events Randall lists rather than going through all of them equallly. (For instance, it talks about Mario Kart being a recurring theme but fails to mention how the comic also talks about Animorphs, another recurring theme.) Additionally the comic shows the 1982 Exxon prediction for temperature for a date that seems around 2022 (while the comic was written in 2021), meaning we could say if that prediction has held up, and/or what the temperatures of the most recent years look like. NathanS (talk) 04:28, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support, this can be much improved. MikeTheNewGuy (talk) 18:12, 10 November 2026 (UTC)
- Support. Even though it is pretty new, it skims over details. YZ100 (talk) 20:54, 11 November 2026 (UTC)
| 773: University Website | |||||||
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This comic uses a Venn diagram to point out that there is often a significant disparity between what a university displays on the front page of its website and what users — particularly prospective students — are primarily interested in finding there. This is often because those who are making the university website instinctively believe, from their perspective, that the website should contain things that the university is proud of, or that they personally find useful, so they are unable to look at it from the perspective of a person who is new on campus and simply wants to know what number to call for campus security. Thus, simple details like contact information and university data are often overlooked. The title text presents a satirical response from the school defending their site design, consisting mostly of PR worthy of an alumni magazine (a publication that is seldom anticipated so eagerly). It also uses sarcasm to make fun of university websites that have wildly out of date site design (web technology was relatively primitive in 2001)[citation needed] and a CS (Computer Science) student built it instead of a professional.
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explanation is a very short summary, could definitely have some more detail. not sure if it's too niche --Ultsppi (talk) 17:50, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- The Ultimate Support of Ultimate Destiny Relevant to anyone who has considered college; I myself had to deal with this just yesterday, to my great pain.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)19:20, 1 November 2026 (UTC) - support i would support this, needs work 73.247.81.207 06:25, 9 November 2026 (UTC)
| 854: Learning to Cook | |||||||||
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This comic shows the plight of Randall who occasionally motivates himself to cook. After buying ingredients and cooking them, the food always ended up either tasted "kinda good" or not good, therefore - although he puts the leftovers in the fridge - hours later he orders pizza instead of eating the leftovers. A few days later he first throws away the leftovers, and some weeks later also the unused ingredients. After some months he is motivated again to cook more and the loop repeats. This discontinued effort may be part of the reason his cooking does not improve much over time. The title text describes that buying ingredients for a single meal might be more expensive than eating at a restaurant, but it would be compensated if there are enough leftovers to eat again from it or cook several meals. Of course, this idea is vitiated if he gives up cooking after a single try and throws away all remaining food.
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I think that this one falls into similar problems that Laundry does. The explanation is way too brief, basically a transcript, and we could go way deeper. AFella (talk) 13:31, 26 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support per nom.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)19:21, 1 November 2026 (UTC)
| 1192: Humming | |||||||
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Services like MusicBrainz and SoundHound can detect a recorded song's acoustic fingerprint and match it with an existing song. This lets them identify the title and artist of an unnamed recorded musical extract. In this comic, Megan hacks the acoustic fingerprint database to add her own entry with a message to Cueball, in which she asks him to buy cat food. Megan would use this app again in 1199: Silence. HTTP error code 406 means Not Acceptable. When a client requests data from a server, the client lists the data formats that it can accept. If a server is unable to provide data in any format that the client accepts, the server returns error 406 Not Acceptable. For example, this can occur if a client requests XML but the server supports only JSON. In the title text, the standard meaning of the error message is ignored and the text "Not Acceptable" is taken literally: The server is offended by Randall's humming.
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Talk more about the history of live music identification? 206.213.164.62 20:27, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
- Weak support. I like this one, but I'm just worried if it's too technical per #2. Especially the title text. But I'm willing to promote it if it gets a third "support" vote. FaviFake (talk) 17:08, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
| 846: Dental Nerve | |||||||
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Ke$ha is a pop/rap singer, and this strip refers to her 2009-10 hit single "Tik Tok." The song begins with the following lyrics, of which the title text is a parody:
A "bottle of Jack" refers to the Jack Daniel's brand of whiskey. The strip depicts Megan warning Ke$ha not to neglect dental hygiene by using whiskey instead of toothpaste to freshen her breath, due to the severe pain that could result if she let the nerves in her teeth become infected. The title text displays dental-hygiene-friendly lyrics, with emphasis on certain syllables (as all-caps) to imitate the rhythm of the original song.
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This has a light explanation, with nothing about the title text, and virtually nothing explaining the punchline. It is definitely relatable, as some people know who Ke$ha is and many people have had (or just have) infected dental nerves. Also, it was made 15 years ago, and some people might need a bit more explanation for who Ke$ha is, as trends have changed. -- 199.245.146.10 (talk) 01:22, 14 October 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- Support
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)05:48, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
| 2691: Encryption | |||||||
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When teaching encryption or cryptography, it is common to use a story about sending messages from Alice to Bob (Party "A" and Party "B" respectively). Cueball claims to have created a texting app that only allows for this one thing. It does not, however, allow "Bob" to reply, making the usefulness of the app questionable at best. It is unclear how it enforces the name restriction, but it is possible that the app figures out the name of the phone's owner. The title text mentions Eve, who in the typical story represents an "eavesdropper", someone who attempts to intercept the messages between Alice and Bob. The fact that persons named Eve are 'forbidden' from installing the app suggests that it might not actually be as secure as Cueball advertises -- it may be that he naively thinks that it's just the name that makes the eavesdropper, and that by excluding all Eves, Alice's messages to Bob will remain private. It is not clear which phones will support this app, but it appears to be perfectly suited for the xkcd Phones. The comics 177: Alice and Bob and 1323: Protocol are also about Alice and Bob. Even if the assumption that you could divine people's roles and motives from their names were correct, if the names of the users don't need to be verified, it seems possible for a bad actor to circumvent the security features of the app by simply lying about their name. Genuine users could also undermine the security with double installations and a complete mess of a contact list in which everyone's names are somehow identified as "Alice" or "Bob", in order to increase its utility to them. Also, it would appear that "Bob" needn't be the commonly used name of the message receiver, in this scenario – it could also be a diminutive of what he is actually known by. Thus a user might claim to be "Bob" whichever his given name is. This may be related to the announcement that Signal would be discontinuing support for SMS/MMS messages.
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I think the explanation is very disorganised and misses a few things. It fails to completely explain the joke, and instead jumps into many different irrelevant tangents. In comparison, 177: Alice and Bob is much more polished. FaviFake (talk) 16:54, 22 September 2026 (UTC)
- Weak opposition. This is a small comic and has a disorganized explanation. It doesn't need elaboration, but it needs re-organization. If it is marked as incomplete, it won't get enough attention. YZ100 (talk) 04:53, 12 November 2026 (UTC)
| 887: Future Timeline | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This comic uses the same strategy as comic 715: Numbers, in which Randall uses Google to search for phrases and then charts the results. This one is charted as a timeline, whereas 715 was charted as line graphs. It is a list of things predicted or announced by anyone at any time (the ones you see on Google search using "by the year..." or similar statements). "2101 - War Was Beginning" is a reference to the opening narration of video game Zero Wing; the same narration is famous for the internet meme "All your base are belong to us". As there are not any other out and out references in the comic, and the rest are actually results that you can find using Randall's methods, "War Was Beginning" was probably the only thing he got when he googled 2101 as well. Certain events in this comic, e.g., "Social Security stops running surplus", are repeated multiple times. Also, certain bizarre events, like "Apocalypse occurs", or "Flying cars reach market", happen before rather plausible things, like "'Big one' hits California". Certain events, like "Japan is a robot-only country" or "Gillette introduces 14-blade razor" may be related to the recurring theme 605: Extrapolating. According to some official projections, (non Hispanic) White people will no longer be the majority in the United States by 2045 due to low birth rates and high rates of immigration. The title text is Randall's statement that, for both the US and Great Britain, there are so many sources that mention this, for any year he cared to search for and many using more far more doubtful sources (if any), that he decided that it was not worth flooding the chart with all these spurious repetitions, even though he did include other less prolific recurring themes. This comic has similar features to 1413: Suddenly Popular, 1093: Forget, and 891: Movie Ages. The predictions[edit]
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![Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.](/wiki/index.php/File:future_timeline.png)
I'm nominating this explanation because the strip was published in 2011 with predictions for the following century. In the last fifteen years, we've seen things occur that were not predicted until the 2040s. The table should be cleaned up, with the "outcome" fields standardized and color-coded depending on what has come to pass. We should also look for predictions that are unknowable, imprecise, or unquantifiable ("Severe heat waves become commonplace", "India becomes superpower", "US power fades"). 158.173.67.189 01:19, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
- Me again. Come to think of it, anything a timeline of events over the next century should probably be placed listed for frequent reviews. Is there a "frequent review" project? 158.173.67.79 19:42, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
- Not particularly, unless there's some archaic attempt to do so that I've forgotten about/missed.
- There could be maybe some template something like
{{reviewBy|date=2027/09/05}}or even{{reviewBy|year=2027}}(the latter being a simpler shortcut to date=2027/01/01) that could generate a membership of a[[Category:Pages for periodic review]]only once a particularly mentioned (or milestoned) date has passed. - Part of the review process, by the next person to find it being categorised to that effect, would be to reset the date/milestone to the next such review-time. Maybe another parameter (or the unused no-name trailing parameter(s)) could contain basic information like
|may need checking every month,|update to next Presidential electionor|the next hot-dog eating contest after the upcoming gubernatorial election is on somedate. In this case, one could line up the years-yet-to-come and as each 'current target' is reached an specifically checked then the next one can be anually shifted out of the line-up to replace the current one now (apart from any off-schedule updates) fulfilled. - But one can overthink this idea. Perhaps start with just a
{{reviewBy|''some free text''}}that renders such pages searchable-for, before getting too complicated about it! 81.179.200.82 20:21, 5 September 2026 (UTC)- That absolutely makes sense. I suppose it should be paired with a "CurrentyTopical=YN" or "TopicalUntil" tag, so that a strip mentioning events in 2032, for example, is topical for the entire year of 2032, or is topical until 2032-12-31T23:59:59. That would stop people from constantly checking in and posting that California has not fallen into the ocean year, but might before the end of the year. IIRC, most of the Future Timeline strips only mention years, not dates. 158.173.67.213 01:17, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
- Honestly, I have to agree with everyone here, this strip could use a do-over. Titintheword (talk) 15:38, 7 October 2026 (UTC)
- That absolutely makes sense. I suppose it should be paired with a "CurrentyTopical=YN" or "TopicalUntil" tag, so that a strip mentioning events in 2032, for example, is topical for the entire year of 2032, or is topical until 2032-12-31T23:59:59. That would stop people from constantly checking in and posting that California has not fallen into the ocean year, but might before the end of the year. IIRC, most of the Future Timeline strips only mention years, not dates. 158.173.67.213 01:17, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
- Oppose, since it's rather large for a week's go. Maybe mark incomplete if not already.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)20:46, 15 October 2026 (UTC) - My opinion on this nomination changes every week. Some weeks I think that this could have a great scope for expansion, due to how many things can be explained and the fact that each is on a completely different topic. But, on the other hand, as 7amiþ said above, this is really long and the explanation is already well-developed. The criteria are not helping me. This week I'm leaning more towards opposing, but I'm having a hard time with this one. FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support. It won't be finished in a week, but having more eyes on it won't hurt. It definitely needs a tune-up; look at how many entries are marked as "too vague" despite having links to the original claims that go into more detail. Perfect for new contributors to get their hands dirty with. 147.92.98.153 04:27, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
- Yes, we all agree that it is incomplete. The question is whether it is better suited for the incomplete backlog. FaviFake (talk) 17:16, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
- Support. I feel like this could definitely use a gloss-over. Titintheword (talk) 02:52, 3 November 2026 (UTC)
- Support. It's a longer explanation, but it still contains a lot of blanks. YZ100 (talk) 20:34, 11 November 2026 (UTC)
| 411: Techno | |||||||
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This comic is an insult towards techno music, which many non-fans find to be very repetitive. iTunes is a digital storefront for music (in the years since this comic, it has been expanded into other digital media) which provides a 15 second sample to help buyers make sure they are buying the right song. Cueball claims that for any given techno song, the listener can get the same experience for free by just recording the 15 second sample and playing it on loop. The title text refers to the clicking and grinding noises of a dying hard drive, a sound similar to some techno songs. The title text suggests that this actually exists. Techno music is also mentioned in 586: Mission to Culture and 740: The Tell-Tale Beat. Sampling and looping sounds that aren't necessarily musical is mentioned in 2427: Perseverance Microphones.
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I'm not super sure about this one, but it does just seem to have a transcript-like explanation like the ones listed above. Capycapybara (talk) 02:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- This one is kinda hard, but I do agree it could be improved. Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:13, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Support – This one is pretty good. We can explain the title text better and how iTunes worked back in the day or why one would listed to the free sample. FaviFake (talk) 09:09, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
| 1025: Tumblr | |||||||
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Tumblr is a microblogging service, which has become a home for lots of animated gifs and other internet memes, as well as other assorted novelties. There actually are three raccoon sex dungeon tumblrs, which can be found here, here and here. The phrase that Cueball used to use when he heard a random phrase was "would be a good name for a band". With the advent of Tumblr, his go-to response has shifted because of the proliferation of Tumblr blogs with strange names such as "pissvortex", "hardpee", "iguanamouth" and "internetslug". In the title text he muses on the fact that Dot Tumblr Dot Com would be an awful band name. There could be several reasons for this, but he mentions that it would be hard to direct fans to the band's website. As an example, someone who hears "www.thedottumblrdotcom.com" might instead write it out as "www.the.tumblr.com.com", since '.' is often pronounced as "dot." If the band's website was hosted on Tumblr, then their website would be "dottumblrdotcom.tumblr.com", but could be heard as ".tumblr.com.tumblr.com".
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This could use an explanation of why people say (blank) would be a good band name, i don't hear people say that all that often nowadays. what's a signature? (talk) 01:11, 10 November 2026 (UTC)
| 330: Indecision | |||||||
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These two friends appear to feel obliged to engage in sexual experimentation to alleviate boredom, simply because they read a rule that demands this in a book. Such experimentation would usually violate the expectations of a previously platonic friendship, so most people would not take the book's suggestion, and it may even make them feel embarrassed and awkward. The second friend's demeanour suggests he has no great enthusiasm for participating, but that he believes he has no choice in the matter, as it's in 'the rules'. The friends are presumed to be male, since both are Cueballs. If the friends are heterosexual, there would typically be a particularly strong social taboo about this behavior. Even if both men are gay, the fact that they're friends (as the rule in the book describes them) suggests that they are not currently having sex on a regular basis. The book the rule is found in appears to be some sort of all-encompassing rule book, its reach including the social sphere. Obviously, this book is fictional, but the line "I think there's a rule about this" sounds like a reference to folklore rules or guidelines like the "five-second rule." The book may be expressing a supposed descriptive rule, rather than a prescriptive one. Crisco is a brand of shortening, a fat that is solid at room temperature and frequently used in baking, though is also sometimes used, as implied in this instance, as a sexual lubricant. Crisco was referenced again in a sexual context in the title text of 414: Mistranslations and later as a part of a weird dream also in the title text of 557: Students. The title text could be spoken by either one of the characters or Randall. It attempts to pre-empt any awkwardness or judgment the reader may have about this situation by transferring responsibility to the rule book.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Hmm, this explanation was copyedited by an IP after being nominated. But it is extremely relatable and satisfies #2 with flying colours! I wonder what Black Hat's Hat or others think of this; should we feature great comics even when the explanation isn't too bad? (put another way, what could be improved about this explanation?) FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
| 640: Tornado Hunter | |||||||
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This is a play on the occupations/hobbies "tornado chaser" - someone who, instead of evacuating the area like normal people, actually goes in to get a closer look at the tornado - and "big game hunter", who often kill for trophies. Tornado chasers are typically, but not always, meteorologists. Here, the tornado chaser actually hunts the tornado with a gun like big game, the joke being that this is not possible in real life.[citation needed] The "F-3" is a reference to the Fujita scale used to classify tornado intensity. It goes from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest, with an updated Enhanced Fujita scale, as mentioned in the title text, being used in the US since 2007. The title text is an aside from Randall, saying that he finds the notation for the Enhanced Fujita scale (EF-#, for example EF-5 for a level 5 tornado) to be stupid, and suggests that we continue to use the Enhanced Fujita scale to measure the strength of tornadoes, but abbreviate it to F instead, leading to the non-stupid "F-whatever" notation, 'whatever' signifying the number of the tornado on the scale. This is the second comic about tornadoes, a recurring subject on xkcd, but it was the first to actually show a tornado. Storm chasers hunting tornadoes was also mentioned in the first comic about tornadoes 402: 1,000 Miles North and they were also shown in 752: Phobia.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- I'm not fully convinced by this one. It is short, but the joke is pretty simple. But we could add an explanation of what tornado chasers usually do! FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
| 795: Conditional Risk | |||||||
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The comic deals with the difference between the general probability of a certain event based on history and the probability of the same event in particular circumstances. The chance of any American selected randomly from the general population to be killed by lightning is very low (actually on average about 28 people die in the U.S. each year), but part of the reason for this is that an average American would seek shelter and safety when caught in a lightning storm. The joke is that someone armed with this particular statistical knowledge would not take the normal precautions and therefore leave themselves far more vulnerable. In the title text, since the statistic provided talks only about Americans, the other character wrongly assumes that lightning strikes only happen to Americans, rather than the data for lightning strikes for other nationalities being simply not included in the discussion. Because of this, as a non-American, he believes his chance of being struck by lightning is nonexistent – which underlines the difference between knowing a certain event can't or didn't happen and not having any data about the event. The "one in six" statistic is probably invented by the author – which also illuminates the danger of dealing with "statistical data" provided by random sources without any attribution to actual statistical surveys or hard data. And of course, now a lot of xkcd readers know the statistic, likely bringing down the death rate. A similar situation is referred to in the what if? article Hailstones.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- On the one hand, this comic is really funny. On the other hand, its explanation doesn't seem too bad at first glance? I wonder what 7amiþ or others think about this one. FaviFake (talk) 17:05, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
- darn, missed ping. I personally found the comic funny, but thought the explanation was a bit of a headache to sort through, but IDK if that deserves featuring.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)19:26, 1 November 2026 (UTC)
- darn, missed ping. I personally found the comic funny, but thought the explanation was a bit of a headache to sort through, but IDK if that deserves featuring.
| 366: Your Mom | |||||||
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"Your mom" jokes could be considered an example of fraternity humor, and are seen by most adults as being a sign of immaturity, especially when overused. They generally involve the speaker making indelicate references to the mother of the person to whom he is speaking. They are a distinct variation from the more traditional "yo momma" jokes (as in, "yo momma is so fat..." or "yo momma is so stupid..."), which are merely insulting. "That's what she said" is a supposedly funny retort to an innocent looking statement, the intent being to recast it in a sexual light. It gained its most recent surge of popularity as Michael Scott's catchphrase on the television series The Office. xkcd contains only failed attempts at "that's what she said" jokes, such as 436: How it Happened. The phrase is a simplified version of the older, British expression "...said the actress to the bishop". We enter in the middle of a conversation between Cueball and Megan about the status of their relationship. Megan has apparently just said that Cueball turns every conversation into a "your mom" joke and it's becoming unbearable. Cueball immediately turns that sentence into a "your mom" joke. When Megan makes it clear that she has had enough and that she is leaving, Cueball, in a heroic effort to make things even worse, can only respond with the "that's what she said" joke. Megan agrees with Cueball that it is exactly what she (Megan) said, and is obviously about to break up with him. The title text stretches the joke further, Cueball suggesting that many men have been with her mother, but perhaps as a last resort or under duress. This is, if true, even more offensive than his previous efforts.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Support, this is perfect! A very notable comics about a common joke that has a terrible explanation! Great find! FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
| 680: December 25th | |||||||
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On Christmas Day, most kids whose families celebrate the holiday get Christmas presents. And kids who were actually born on the 25th may feel a little put off because they don't get a special day all to themselves like their siblings and friends do. A lot of families alleviate this by celebrating the child's birthday on a day other than the 25th, so the kid will still get their own party. Unfortunately, the child may not get double presents, but may instead end up getting one gift per gift-giver as both a Christmas gift and a birthday gift. In the title text, Randall provides a "lovely" image for the people turning 27 on this date (Christmas Day, 2009) that would surely have them reaching for the brain bleach. He describes the prospective 27-year old reader's mother naked, immediately before the sexual encounter in which the reader was conceived. Such a sexual encounter may have been expedited by the (compulsory) seclusion enforced by the blizzard that ravaged New York and New England (where Randall is from) in April 1982 - the blizzard left some people trapped in the houses by snow-drifts and blocked transport for days on end. Given the severity, unexpected nature and location of the blizzard, Randall might well have heard about it as a child, as he was born a mere two years after the event.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Could you maybe elaborate a little bit? It does feel pretty short but I feel like its not that applicable to most people, since this only applies to 1/366 of people. Titintheword (talk) 18:06, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
- I'm not BHH, but birthdays are
accessible to a broad audience
; everyone has one, even if it's not on Christmas. Support nomination, fwiw.7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)20:40, 15 October 2026 (UTC)- Yeah I see what you mean, I rather just wanted a bit on why this was nominated, but still support. Titintheword (talk) 23:25, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
- I'm not BHH, but birthdays are
- I agree that this is accessible to a broad audience per #2, but I don't think there's anything else we can add to this, unless I'm missing something obvious. Is there an
extensive scope for expansion
for this explanation, per #1? FaviFake (talk) 17:05, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
| 1165: Amazon | |||||||
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The Amazon River in South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow. Amazon.com is a website that specializes in commerce and selling goods over the internet. The "round 14" suggest they are being compared in different criteria in a sort of competition. With such different systems, we can assume that most of those comparisons were similarly funny. The title text mentions two other criteria of comparison. The measure of flow for the Amazon river (cubic meters per second) indicates the volume of water that passes a given area in the river at any second. To illustrate how much 220,000 cubic meters is, the comic shows a car parked next to 220,000 cubic meters of water. 220,000 cubic meters equals a cube with an edge span of 60.4 meters. By comparison the 0.9 cubic meters (900 L) of goods that are shipped by Amazon.com seems very small (note that 900 liters of goods per second is still a lot). To illustrate this size, the comic shows an Amazonian fish (or possibly an Amazon river dolphin) investigating the packages. Iquitos and Manaus are cities near the source and middle respectively of the river; the title text suggests that it is shorter to have a package shipped between the two than let it drift downstream. "Minutes to skeletonize a cow" refers to piranha, an Amazonian predatory fish with a popular reputation of being capable of the mentioned act when hunting in groups. (It should be noted that, while not fictional per se, the legendary cow-killing piranhas had been starved beforehand by local humans.) In 1599: Water Delivery Amazon.com delivers water, as a direct reflection of what the Amazon river actually achieves by default.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe we could give the reader more up-to-date stats, since the comic was published more than a decade ago? FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Agree. Support
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)20:41, 15 October 2026 (UTC)- I'm not sure this passes #1. Is there anything else we can ask users to add, besides
more up-to-date stats
? Couldn't this be a simple incomplete comic? FaviFake (talk) 16:58, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
- I'm not sure this passes #1. Is there anything else we can ask users to add, besides
- Agree. Support
Archived nominations[edit]
- This is an archive of all explanations nominated since August 2026. For those featured on the previous iteration of this project, browse the page history instead.
Past successful nominations[edit]
- Successful nominations are moved to /Successful nominations after being featured for seven days. View list of comics.
August 2026[edit]
| 380: Emoticon | |||||||
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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: The username "BSLSK05" has a common form for internet usernames of a group of alphabetical characters followed by some numerical characters. 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. However, in this case it likely represents basiliskos (βασιλίσκος), the Ancient Greek word for "basilisk" with the digits being a 'disguised' 'O' and 'S'. 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
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This is amazing! It has a relatively deep but simple joke, a weak explanation, and a reference to an old internet custom! FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 11:03, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
September 2026[edit]
| 331: Photoshops | |||||||
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This comic is part of the My Hobby series. It plays on the internet meme "This Looks Shopped". In the comic, Cueball states that his hobby is insisting that real-life items can be digitally manipulated, even though it is generally not possible to do this to actual physical objects outside of a computer. The comic then demonstrates an example of this hobby: Megan claims that the sabre she found is a 19th-century heirloom, but Cueball insists that the sabre "looks photoshopped", implying that it looks like it has been edited via image editing software. It is unclear whether he is doing this with the intent of irritating Megan, or whether he is just enjoying surrealist humour without intent to annoy. The description of "insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped" implies that Cueball is aware that physical objects cannot be altered in Photoshop. Continuing the joke, Cueball then goes on to rationalise his insistence that the sabre is photoshopped by explaining, "Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped." This is also likely to be a direct reference to the internet meme "This Looks Shopped", which often utilises phrases such as "I can tell by the pixels". Digitally edited images can show errors which reveal that the image is not true to life - shadows which don't align with the direction of the light in the image, reflections that don't match the surroundings they are reflecting, or individual pixels where the colours do not align with the rest of the image. Phrases such as "I can tell by the pixels" are a reference to this trait. If Cueball were sincere in his statement about reflections, then it would be a bizarre claim to make, because real world objects generally cannot cast "wrong" reflections, unlike digitally manipulated images. Alternatively, calling the artifact "photoshopped" could be Cueball's way of suggesting that the item is a fake or a replica, such as it being a 3D printed model of the stated object rather than a historical family heirloom. The joke could be a reference to the paranoia some internet users have when trying to discern whether images online are real or edited, suggesting that this behaviour might extend into real-life situations such as mistaking actual physical objects as "photoshopped" edits. As explained below, this uncertainty among internet users has only grown after the use of generative AI images. The title text contains a more obvious reference to the internet meme, the complete text of which is: "THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME." Most people have seen this from the popular image format JPEG, which uses an image compression algorithm that works by converting an image's color data into small blocks, changing those blocks into cosine frequency patterns, rounding off details human eyes cannot see easily, and packing the final data tightly. This works remarkably well, but can sometimes leave artifacts (noticeable distortions or errors in the image) that are visible when zooming in far enough. Cueball is treating Megan's eyes as literal digital images on a screen, claiming that he can tell that he and Megan are "wrong for each other" based on the supposed JPEG artifacts and pixels her eyes are made of. Seeing "something in someone's eyes" that indicates that two people are wrong for each other is a common poetic/clichéd expression for the experience of one person suddenly recognising, from something in the other person's expressions or wider demeanor, that the relationship will not work between them. This is normally based on recognising incompatibilities (or a simple lack of attraction) based on the other person's behaviour, attitudes or priorities; it is not usually based on the physical appearance of their irises. Photoshop and internet culture[edit]Adobe Photoshop is a popular image editing application first launched in 1990, which reached its peak popularity around the 2000s, when it was considered the industry standard for editing graphics. Adobe Photoshop is still considered a prominent image editing service (as of 2026), but has since lost its monopoly in the market. The verb "photoshop" (as in "to photoshop an image") is a verbalization of the noun "Photoshop", referring to the act of using editing software to digitally alter an image. Its derived adjective "photoshopped" and its shortened version " 'shopped" are applied to an image that has been manipulated in this way. This editing, or "photoshopping", is often performed for marketing purposes to make an image look more appealing or dramatic, or to combine two or more images into a single seamless picture via image compositing rather than needing to capture all elements of an image in a single photo. The deliberate image manipulation or altering of images has also been used to mislead people into believing an edited or created image is "real" (an unedited photograph taken from life) and showing a true object or scenario. This is widely seen in the beauty industry. In internet culture, this deliberate "photoshopping" or altering of images is sometimes used to for humour by making falsified scenarios, such as editing an image of a person to making someone look like they're holding a rapier when in reality, they were not holding one in the original photograph. Humorous use of "photoshopping" (image editing) can be simply to create an image that others may find funny, without an intent to mislead the audience into believing the image is unedited. However, it may also be done with the intent to trick the viewer into believing the image is "real" (unedited), where the creator derives humour from misleading the viewer. Parallels with generative AI[edit]This comic also unintentionally foreshadowed the rising and unavoidable presence of AI-generated or AI-edited images online, which began several years after the comic's publication. Manipulating images on social media to create misleading content has remained commonplace, though the techniques most often used (Photoshop, AI image generation) have changed as technology has developed. Today (2026), people online often accuse content creators, businesses or websites of using images generated by AI rather than created by humans. Creating images and other content using AI is broadly frowned upon due to:
Identification of photoshopped images and AI images may both follow the same base principle of examining minute details for inconsistency. With photoshopped images, it can include inaccurate reflections (as mentioned by Cueball) and differences in quality in sections of the image; with AI, the best tell is inconsistencies with reality.
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Very short, and only does a surface graze of the topic. Parallels to AI image editing, anyone? 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 06:03, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
- This is a great one! I was about to say the same thing, it can be updated by better explaining the reference and to add modern parallels. FaviFake (talk) 19:36, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Archived but marked as still incomplete. Unfortunately it still needs some serious copy-editing. FaviFake (talk) 16:44, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
| 395: Morning | |||||||
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  This comic plays on the idea that physical reality might be a simulation running inside a supercomputer. This idea has been explored in popular culture, as mentioned in the comic itself, but the second panel argues the revelation would still be a deeply existential horror if it were true. The first panel mentions The Matrix, a 1999 action movie where the main character Neo discovers that the world he thought he knew was actually a simulation being run by an army of robots, who keep the human race hypnotized inside the titular simulation. It is perhaps the most famous work of fiction to touch on the theme of reality being a simulation, and an easy cultural touchstone at the time this comic was written (thus Megan's claim "We've all seen" it). The reveal of her reality being a simulation comes when she sees "dead pixels" in the sky. In LCD screens, especially TFT LCD, a dead pixel is a pixel that does not work properly, usually set permanently as black, or as some other color. LCD screens were a more common standard when this comic was written, but have largely been supplanted by LED screens wherever possible. Megan realizes that the reality is a computer simulation when she sees dead pixels in the sky, indicating that what she sees is an LCD screen. In the last panel of the comic, there are three pixels — two red and one green — that look exactly like actual dead pixels. Note that the trees are not pixelated, meaning that only the sky is a giant LCD screen. Regarding the question in the first panel, "What resolution is life?" (by which "life" presumably means the "real world" or lived experience, not living biochemistry), the most scientifically meaningful response would involve Planck distance and Planck time, the smallest units of distance and time that time-space can be broken down into. These are the fundamental building blocks of the time-space around us, similar to pixels (picture elements) on a screen, or a bit (one-or-zero) of data. Datum. Data. Humans, of course, cannot perceive changes on that scale - our experience occurs at a much less fine-grained level, with the human eye having a resolution of about 576 megapixels. The comic could also be interpreted differently as a comic about getting old. The dead pixels could be floaters in Megan's eyes, which could have gotten weaker with age. The title text refers to common techniques for fixing a dead pixel. One way is to apply pressure and release it, which isn't possible for Megan due to the distance of the sky. Another is to make the area of the screen that the dead pixel is on change colors really quickly, which could happen if the day-night cycle was fast enough, or if the clouds overhead were sped up.
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This explanation is just seven sentences and three small paragraphs. It also doesn't explain the title text or first panel well enough. This has to be the most incomplete explanation that isn't marked as incomplete. YZ100 (talk) 20:55, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. Jeez. You're right; if this comic were released today, its explanation would be at least several pages long! FaviFake (talk) 17:04, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 17:04, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
- Archived but marked as still incomplete. Unfortunately one late suggestion from the talk page wasn't addressed. FaviFake (talk) 00:01, 21 September 2026 (UTC)
| 1066: Laundry | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In the United States of America, college (or university) is the usual form of education following secondary education (e.g. high school). College life typically offers the student much more freedom in their habits, especially if they live in a dormitory. For many college students, this represents the first time they have had to do their own laundry, or at least the first time a parent isn't there to nag them into doing it properly. This comic is about how the laundry habits of such independent college students degrade over the course of time. In each panel, circles represent certain locations for clothes, while directed paths connect the locations, representing the movement of clothes. As such, each panel is a kind of graph. The black paths appear to represent the regular or usual movement of clothes, while the grey paths show the change from the previous graph and may represent the occasional/less frequent movement of (some) clothes.
An unmentioned possibility is that, when the student can't be bothered, they can simply continue to wear the same pair of clothes. This would decrease the work to zero, but would increase odor problems and be a detriment to personal hygiene. Another work-eliminating trend not mentioned is saving dirty laundry until visiting parents; however, this runs the risk of either being forced to wash all the garments at the parents' residence or getting a lecture.
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Short, relevant to the public, and I'm sure we could go way deeper into washing clothes and adjacent habits. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 21:32, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Wow, this simply doesn't even have an explanation at all. It's basically just a transcript in the wrong section. Great find! FaviFake (talk) 22:50, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Good pick here! Needs some help for sure Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:08, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 08:16, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 00:08, 21 September 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 16:59, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
| 172: Skateboarding is Not a Crime | |||||||
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The comic depicts multicolored lockers, often used in American high schools, gyms, or colleges, with one of them having the "Skateboarding is not a crime" sticker. Skateboarding culture emerged in the 1980s, especially among young people (high schoolers, college students) as a countercultural movement initially associated with the "punk" movement. In addition, because skateboarding can take place in public locations with railings and benches, many cities have adopted specific measures to either increase the difficulty of skateboarding (Skatestopper), or by trying to pass laws to prohibit the act of skateboarding in public parks. In addition to the stated public safety concerns of fast-moving skateboarders among pedestrians, many cities unfairly associate skateboarders with those who drink, do drugs, or engage in acts of juvenile delinquency, such as truancy or underage drinking. As a result, the skateboarding subculture has taken up the slogan "skateboarding is not a crime" as a protest against these restrictions from cities. This slogan began in 1987, and since then, several skateboard manufacturing companies have adopted it. At one point, the slogan was a countercultural push against those who would consider skateboarding to be a crime, but as the phrase became more popular (by 2006, the time at which the comic was posted), there was likely a backlash against the slogan. Perhaps some people, both within the community of skateboarders and outside, would consider this sticker to be obnoxious, or to appear to have a persecution complex. For instance, in this comic, the slogan is the *only* sticker displayed on these lockers, perhaps put there as a way of the locker owner trying to stand out, in a "not like the other girls" manner. Randall apparently really does not like these stickers, to the extent that he states that when he becomes president (a common expression that is equivalent to "If I were in charge, ..."), stickers bearing the phrase will be considered a felony, though skateboarding itself will still be legal. Actually implementing this in the US would be against the first amendment and would be unlikely to ever become a real law. Even if it did, the rule would be so trivial and disproportionate that it would be unlikely to be enforced. Still, some schools and other establishments ban or restrict stickers on lockers, and may use a similar rule. The title text comments on another protest phrase, "Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder", that Randall appears to hate even more than the first, potentially for the more confrontational tone of the message. It is unsurprising that he hates this phrase, as it has a similar message and tone.
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Short short. Intriguing, though slightly niche, and dated. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 05:55, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
- Agreed. We could explain more the controversy around skateboarding, and the stickers and similar occurrences Black Hat's Hat (talk) 19:53, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 17:53, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 22:35, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
October 2026[edit]
| 186: Console Lines | |||||||
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This comic relates to video game consoles. At the time this comic was published, there were three major competing products: the PlayStation 3 by Sony, the Xbox 360 by Microsoft, and the Wii by Nintendo. The Wii was released on November 19, 2006, the day before this comic was published. It was Nintendo's 5th generation home console, succeeding the GameCube. When a game console gets released, fans are often seen queueing outside the stores or camping on the pavement in order to be among the first to get their hands on a console. The comic shows such a console camp and suggests that there are differences between the fan communities. While the fans waiting in line for a Sony or Microsoft product are very rude, the Nintendo fans are apologetic and try to comfort (that is to say, console) those who arrived too late to obtain a package. There is a cliché that Nintendo fans are nicer and more polite than fans of other consoles. This may be attributed to the fact that the Wii is targeted at children and families with children, while the PS3 and the Xbox are targeted at the more "serious gamer" market. Nintendo's demographic seems to have changed more recently, with newer Nintendo consoles (Switch & Switch 2) being targeted at all audiences, not just the younger age groups. Despite the changes Nintendo has implemented, elitism among Playstation, Xbox, and PC remains rampant. The comic may also contain a subtle pun on the fact that 'console' has two meanings. A game console (noun) is a device that allows you to play video games, taking control input from one or more users and displaying the progress of the game as video output. However, to console (verb) means to make someone feel better when they are upset, as those in the Wii queue are attempting to do for the latecomers. The title text primarily expresses Randall's distance from the console wars (he has never owned a game console before), but also indicates an inclination towards the Wii, which was known for its (at the time) innovative motion controls. The fact that he indicated that alongside this comic suggests that he may have been influenced by how he perceives the Nintendo fan community. Then again, maybe Randall is just unable to get a PS3 or Xbox because of the line situation illustrated here.
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The explanation is short and is pretty much a transcript; and it doesn't actually explain the joke No (talk) 02:14, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
- Support Indeed too short, and only touches the joke tangentially. Would be nice to see how well this aged.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)04:34, 30 September 2026 (UTC) - Support – The actual explanation is one sentence. So much left to explain! FaviFake (talk) 23:38, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 22:29, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 22:34, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 12:09, 11 October 2026 (UTC)
| 430: Every Damn Morning | |||||||
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Cueball has had a wondrous and striking dream (seemingly involving various action-packed escapades with Megan and/or on board a Zeppelin), including, among other things, a swordfight and a nuclear detonation, but is unable to recount it to Megan, as he has forgotten it by the time he reaches her at the table downstairs, indicated by the dream fading and losing detail. The title of the strip suggests that this is a regular occurrence: he wakes up with vivid memories of elaborate and fascinating dreamscapes, but is unable to tell anyone about it, because the memories fade so quickly, he's lost almost everything before he gets the chance. Most people have trouble remembering the majority of their dreams, or only remember the most significant or recent parts. A contributor to this phenomenon is that the ability to store long-term memories is largely switched off during REM sleep, meaning that experiences within dreams typically only last from a few minutes to seconds in memory. Furthermore, levels of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter critical for attention and memory formation, also drop to near zero during REM sleep. Without this chemical signal, the brain cannot encode experiences normally. There are also theories that the brain naturally discards memories from dreams so that people do not confuse those mental fabrications with real-life events. The title text is a reference to C. S. Lewis's novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Lucy Pevensie reads a story that “refreshes her spirit” – “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years.” – but afterwards can only remember that it had something to do with "a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill." A cup and a sword are also present near the center of the dream, with a large mushroom cloud in the background that could be misinterpreted upon recollection as a tree; these items possibly serving as another reference and/or providing further context to the title text. The various parts of the dream are common in xkcd. Zeppelins were seen before in 73: Zeppelin and 288: Elevator, and continue to be a recurring theme. Another effort to remember dreams was made in 269: TCMP.
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The explanation doesn't really seem to fully explain the comic. It just seems to give an overview. Capycapybara (talk) 02:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Agree; I feel like we could also assess the occurrences in the dream. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 19:25, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 12:47, 11 October 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 20:19, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
| 976: Sail | |||||||
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A billowing sail sometimes looks like the first stage of blowing a bubble. A strong gust of wind blows by and fills the sail, which Cueball is clearly surprised by and fights to keep the sail under control. As the wind continues, the sail warps and begins actually acting like a film of bubble soap, eventually separating into its own bubble and floating off. The sail reverts to the original position as the gust of wind dies down. Sails do not typically act like this under strong winds.[citation needed] If the booms and mast were actually attached by a rope across the hypotenuse, the sail frame could function as a large bubble wand. Commercial 'bubble ropes' can have an area of at least a couple of square metres, but it would need the right velocity and consistency of wind to sustain the bubble long enough to separate cleanly from the sail. This could, theoretically, be possible under the right wind conditions, with wind strong enough to detach the bubble, but not so strong or gusty that it overwhelms the surface tension and pops the bubble. The ideal strength of wind would depend a lot upon the nature of the bubble liquid. The title text suggests that the water the boat is sailing in is a soap solution that can be used to create the bubbles. If the boat was partially overturned (deliberately capsized) in such water, a new film could form between the mast and the boom. With each bubble that is released the liquid originally held by the frame would be lost, until the film would be too thin to sustain itself. At this point it would need to be refilled by capsizing again. While this arrangement could be used to produce large bubbles with a sufficient film, Cueball would likely not have to pull on the mainsheet as hard as is depicted in the comic, as the 'sail' isn't mechanically attached to the vessel for long, since it is a bubble film and not a piece of cloth. His effort is probably more to keep the bubble-blowing 'wand' structure perpendicular to the wind-flow for maximum bubble-blowing effort.
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the explanation is short even though the comic seems to be a least sort of relatable, seems to function like a transcript Titintheword (talk) 15:04, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
- It does seem to work like a transcript, but I wonder if there's anything else we could add. Criterion #1 says
Good concise explanations about quick and straightforward jokes should remain short
, so how could this be significantly expanded? FaviFake (talk) 22:40, 14 October 2026 (UTC)- Maybe explaining a bit about how sails actually interact with wind, or why this idea would not work in practice Titintheword (talk) 22:54, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
- Sounds good! We are due for more straightforward candidates, in my opinion. FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe explaining a bit about how sails actually interact with wind, or why this idea would not work in practice Titintheword (talk) 22:54, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 16:09, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
| 1334: Second | |||||||
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Google Search (or Google) is the most popular search engine on the Internet. A search engine is an application that helps provide hyperlinks to webpages in response to a user's query. Google, like most search engines nowadays, use algorithms to sort the list of hyperlinks, usually by relevancy in terms of a user's query, before being paginated into a generated collection of webpages. Since Google Search is widely regarded as the most accurate and useful search engine, thanks to its optimized algorithms, a user can easily find the information they are looking for on the first page of results, if their search terms were sufficiently detailed. Because of this, it is rare for a user to ever view the second page of Google results, as it would imply that the results a user is looking for are either obscure, non-existent, or were not indexed. This is especially true for users who would rather improve their search query, which can be done at the top of the first page, than view (or perhaps discover) the link to the second page of Google results at the bottom of the first page. According to a study by Chitika from 2013, 91.5% of all Google results traffic come from the first page, while a measly 4.8% are from the second page. A joke that spread around, even before this comic's release, is that the second page of Google results is the "best place to hide a dead body". Cueball taking a desperate peek at the second page of Google results is represented by a not-at-all subtle metaphor, in which Cueball is about to wander into a sun-baked desert. He is also told by a talking rock in the desert that he must abandon his search, as the rock claims that the desert will yield none of his answers. However, according to the title text, he ignores the rock and searches further. He shortly finds a vaguely relevant webpage, but rejects it as "the copyright year starts with '19'". This refers to copyright notices that can be included in websites under copyright, which are usually found at the bottom of webpages. Website copyright notices often include a year. Because they tend to sit in footers, which are infrequently updated, and annual tasks such as updating a current year are easily forgotten about, that year often represents when the website was last significantly refreshed, so a year starting with '19' implies that the current content may well date to before the 2000s. Since Cueball rejected it, perhaps he is looking for a website to be read and used for research purposes, and a website active from the 90s or earlier would probably contain information too outdated to be of any use to him. After the rejection, Cueball is horrified at the sight of a webring navigation bar. A webring is a web directory of links to multiple websites, usually with a common theme and curated by a 'ringmaster'. They connect from one website to the next, eventually leading back to the starting site. Webrings were popularized in the 1990s by the titular webring, "The Webring" (later WebRing). In general, web directories fell out of use with the rise of search engines, so seeing a webring could mean a site has not been updated since then. Yahoo acquired WebRing in 1999 as part of its acquisition of GeoCities (a popular webhosting service at the time) and rebranded the service as Yahoo! WebRing in 2000, leaving ringmasters "angry", in part because their customizable homepages had been replaced by the design of Yahoo! WebRing. Taking off in the early 2020s, people have been creating new webrings, often in connection to the web hosting service Neocities, launched in 2013 and inspired by GeoCities. At one time, the importance of a webpage was judged partly on the number of pages linking to it; a webring has at least one page (the previous page in the ring) linking to it but often nothing else (if they were notable enough to be otherwise linked, they were less likely to be on a webring), meaning that reaching a webring meant that one had reached the one-incoming-link level of unimportance.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- In my opinion, this could be a good candidate, even if it's relatively newer and not too deep. The quality of the explanation is not good. FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Strong agree, especially considering AI summaries and promotional content. 12 years is still a long time. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 04:49, 19 September 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 23:15, 19 September 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 16:16, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 22:58, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
| 301: Limerick | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A limerick is a well-known type of poem that is usually humorous or bawdy. A limerick is five lines long and has the rhyme scheme AABBA; the first, second, and fifth lines share one rhyme, while the third and fourth lines share another rhyme. The third and fourth lines are also usually shorter. Limericks, like the one written in this comic, primarily feature amphibrachic (◡–◡) trimeters, but they can also include anapestic trimeters (◡◡–), as well. Almost anyone can instantly recognize a limerick after hearing the first line.[citation needed] In poetry, a foot is a pattern unit of stressed (–) and unstressed (◡) syllables in a line. A meter measures the amount of feet per line. In this case, an 'anapestic trimeter' is a line of three anapests, where an 'anapest' is a foot that consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. Slashdot is one of the oldest forum and social news websites focused on science and technology. It was launched in 1997 and is still active to this day, although with much deterioration and little activity. The decline of Slashdot may have been caused by the lack of newer updates, and the rise of newer competitors, like Reddit and Hacker News. In Slashdot, each article submitted by a user has a threaded comments section where other users can discuss the article. On many comments sections of forum websites, the user base can vote comments using an upvote/downvote system, however in Slashdot, only moderators have this privilege. Slashdot moderators are drawn from the pool of registered users based on their good amount of karma. They are also given 'moderation points', where each point is spent on voting a comment. All users have at least one chance to be a moderator, but they have a limited time to be one, with a limit of three days. A moderator can also choose to cast a predefined descriptor for their upvote/downvote towards a comment. For example, instead of a simple +1, a comment may be voted "+1 (Funny)". Similarly, instead of -1, a comment may be voted "-1 (Off-topic)". Comments have a maximum positive score of five; a comment voted "+5 (Insightful)" means it was upvoted at least five times and has a plurality of 'Insightful' votes. Cueball's limerick states that he does not like Slashdot any more because his sarcastic comments are being treated as insightful by its moderators. The line "the iconoclastic / keep modding to plus five (Insightful)" state that the moderators strongly oppose the views of Cueball, but since they misinterpret his sarcasm as sincere, they translate his criticisms as insightful opinions that reinforce their own, which would warrant an upvote. This would frustrate Cueball if his goal was to mock the behavior of Slashdotters. This is an example of Poe's law, which is an Internet adage that states that a sarcastic expression without clarification can be mistaken by readers as sincere. This can be especially true if the expression mocks extreme beliefs and the readers who mistake it share those same beliefs; you can't mock the extremists without looking like an extremist yourself. A scansion for this poem (in the macron and breve notation) is as follows:
The title text refers to the notoriously awful comments on YouTube, many of which are so idiotic that they're interpreted as jokes. 301, the number of this comic, is also a number often associated with YouTube. At the time this comic was published, view counts on YouTube videos would often freeze at 301, as YouTube would switch between view-counting algorithms when the number of views exceeded 300. Therefore, the comic number itself may be a reference to the title text.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This looks like a great candidate! Despite being slightly longer than the others, it doesn't really explain the core joke of the comic. FaviFake (talk) 18:55, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Agree with FF. The explanation doesn't go into why the upvoted sarcastic comments would cause Cueball's emotion. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 22:38, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 08:16, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 23:00, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
- Archived. FaviFake (talk) 03:18, 8 November 2026 (UTC)
Nov 2026[edit]
Unsuccessful nominations[edit]
- Unsuccessful nominations are moved to /Unsuccessful nominations and should not be re-nominated. View list of comics.
August 2026[edit]
| 1506: xkcloud | |||||||||||||
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To experience the interactivity of the game, visit the original comic.
In this interactive April Fools' Day comic Cueball, presumably representing Randall, admits to the readers he built a flimsy cloud services company using spare computers and parts. Included in the cloud hardware are (from left to right) a Macintosh, several old laptops, an Alienware tower, a Nintendo Virtual Boy, an old desktop with the cover off, and an Atari Pong Console. He named the company after xkcd, xkcloud being a portmanteau of "xkcd" and "cloud", here pronounced XK-cloud. The portmanteau incidentally still contains all four xkcd letters in the correct order: xkcLOUd. This was later reused for the xkcd keyboard in 2150: XKeyboarCD, where the word Keyboard, has an X before the word and a C before the D with the xkcd letters capitalized. After providing his services to various (very big) companies (Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr), that are very concerned with securing the users data, his setup failed (some portions may even have caught fire? He is not sure). This has caused him to lose the data he was required to preserve as part of his service. He thus requests the readers help to make up and re-imagine the lost data by pressing the large red button at the bottom of the comic. Preferably before Facebook & Co notice we lost it. If you take him up on his request and push the button, you will be taken to a "survey" where you will get the chance to help by either trying to combine a posted picture with its lost text or, vice versa, by trying to combine a posted text with its lost picture. In either case you get a selection of texts/pictures to choose from but can also choose to write your own text or even draw the picture. After doing this you get to see this combination in the news feed together with several other posts (which other people have helped combine from other lost data). And then you can continue helping as long as you like. The content of the "surveys" appear to come from reader submissions, and are different upon every click. This is thus both an interactive and a dynamic comic with only the first picture shown on top of this page. By inviting the xkcd readers to add content that will be displayed in the comic later, the result of all the interactions leads to the generation of crowd-sourced content. It was not immediately clear if the reader-created drawings or captions are, in fact, being cycled into the surveys and feeds, or if the displayed items were all created by Randall and the reader-created content is simply discarded. With the huge amount of different comments and drawings that already appeared on the first day, and since especially the drawings look like they are created in the simple Paint app (i.e. not by Randall), there can be no doubt that most of the content is created by the users. However he must have made some pictures to get it all started, and at least one of these can be seen here. This comic resembles last years April Fools' Day comic 1350: Lorenz where user input also generated a very complex crowd-sourced comic. In both comics it was possible to create a permalink to save a given version of the comic to share with others. An earlier comic was also related to problems with cloud computing: 908: The Cloud. Due to the very complex nature of this comic, there are lots of details that may need an explanation. This can be found in the sections below. Note that there have been some changes and bugs regarding this comic after it was first released. Some of the pictures that are referenced below were saved before these changes took place. So consult these changes if the pictures do not match the expectations. Extra xkcloud pages[edit]Since this comic is so big and complicated, extra pages have been created to include much more information than is wished for on this main page (which is already of considerable size). These pages are listed here for convenience, but they are also listed in the relevant sections below:
Functionality[edit]
News feed[edit]
Permalink[edit]
Details on the permalink[edit]
Our policy regarding your personal data[edit]
Don't contact us[edit]
We are open for anyone to chat here. Hey you! Come right over and say hello to us! ~ Undocumented Feature[edit]
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April Fool's Comics are always a big task to handle and require a lot of work to fully explain (some of these are from a decade ago and aren't completely explained yet). tori :3talk to me! 21:56, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete (fails criteria #2 and #3) per my comment at the unixkcd nomination below. FaviFake (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
| 1975: Right Click | |||||||||||||
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 At first, the comic seems like the most simplistic xkcd comic possible - Cueball standing and doing nothing. The "editor's note" tells you to save a copy of the image to "view the full comic". To save an image from a browser most people would right-click on it (or long-click in mobile devices) which normally leads to a "context menu" allowing several actions related to the image, including saving/downloading. This is what you are encouraged to do by the editorial note as well as by the comic name and title text. However, the context menu opened is not the default context menu of the browser but an elaborate context menu containing many nonsensical options. At first it also seems impossible to save the image using that menu. However, after exploring the context menu you can find an "easter egg" in one of two different places (see below) which unlocks the save option. This save option gives you a different image than the one you see, which can be thought of as "the full comic" although the meat of the comic is actually in the interactive context menu itself. Note that "cheating" by disabling JavaScript and other methods that allow you to directly save the image won't get you that "full comic" image. This comic pokes fun at how hard it can be to save an image or to just navigate context menus in some computer programs. The "easter egg hunt" might be related to the fact the comic was released during Easter (which fell on April fool's in 2018). It might also be related to the movie "Ready Player One" which was recently released when the comic was released. In the movie, based on the book by Cline, finding an "easter egg" in a VR world was a central plot point. The title is reminiscent of one of the first interactive comics 1110: Click and Drag, where the title explains what the user should do to experience it. However, that was not a fools' day comic. The comic uses JavaScript and HTML5 to override the standard context menu. Since modern browsers use the same features to integrate Add-ons into that menu, the behavior may be different depending on the browser environment. Browsers with JavaScript disabled, either totally or by using NoScript, won't access the functionality of the comic, but of course can easily save the image (not "the full version" but the image that is seen initially).
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The Spells section has a lot of busy work that doesn't seem too hard to explain. A week of concentrated collaborative effort should do the trick. tori :3talk to me! 21:56, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete (fails criteria #2 and #3) per my comment at the unixkcd nomination below. FaviFake (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
| 2288: Collector's Edition | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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To experience the interactivity of the game, visit the original comic!
This comic is a large draggable image that acted as a shared virtual sandbox for users to interact. Chests are "Items" (small and often humorous images) which could be collected from other comics, and then placed in this image by viewers, but today they are no longer dropped. The collection then updated for all viewers in real-time. Multiples of the same item are often seen. There is a "backpack" at the bottom, similar to backpacks in video games containing items collected by the player. As hinted by the title text, items could be found by visiting different xkcd comics/pages. Randomly, some pages would have a treasure chest which contained the sticker related to the page. The hint would refer to the page which currently had a chest. The image at the origin is a reference to 1450: AI-Box Experiment. The comic contains 32993 separate images. The sticker images can be seen at xkcd.com/2288/collectors/static/loot/loot_XXX.png, where XXX is a number from 001 to 253. Additionally, some images can be found at custom URLs, for example the periodic elements can be found at https://xkcd.com/2288/collectors/static/loot/element-XX.png, where XX is the element, and text loot at xkcd.com/2288/collectors/static/loot/loot-words-X.png, where X is the sentence. The source code for the comic was released on GitHub. Placement is limited to 10,000 horizontal units and 5,000 vertical units from the origin. Users received no messages if they try placing something outside the boundary, with a silent fail and the object not being placed. The coordinates are relative to the bottom left corner of the canvas. As the default coordinates are (-370,-277) and the origin is in the center, the displayed portion of the canvas can be found to be twice this in magnitude, 740 x 544 units. The most common image is loot-30.png, which appears 2576 times.  Hints[edit]For a more minimal list of the stickers found in the comic, see 2288: Collector's Edition/Stickers.
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THE BANE OF MY WIKI EDITING EXPERIENCE. I've always been frustrated by how sparse this article is and how many things were missing when I found it. I've uploaded quite a bit, but some are still missing and require some digging to find/explain (because I really suck at drawing connections and recognizing where the Loot come from...) tori :3talk to me! 21:56, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete (fails criteria #2 and #3) per my comment at the unixkcd nomination below. FaviFake (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
| 3074: Push Notifications | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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To experience the interactivity of the game, visit the original comic!
The comic uses push notifications to change the comic image over time and make other statements. Upon viewing the comic for the first time, a sequence of notifications will be rendered over the comic itself. The notifications have a fade-in animation and appear one after another. The sequence is divided into several "groups" of notifications, each containing up to 4 regular notifications and an interactable button, which has a circled arrow icon to the right as well as a different text color. Clicking the arrow removes all notifications on screen and proceeds the sequence to the next group. At the end of the sequence, a red-background option to sign up for xkcd notifications is presented. This part differs depending on if the user is "playing" from a mobile or desktop browser.
Once the game begins, you are provided with two buttons: one labeled "Emergency Stop", and one labeled "Silence notifications at a cost". Clicking the "Emergency Stop" button allows you to either restart the full game or to subscribe just to thrice-weekly notifications for new xkcd comics, while the second button will temporarily silence notifications, supposedly at the cost of notifying two random people. The title text references the Lernaean Hydra, a multi-headed serpent-like monster from Greek mythology; the Greek hero Heracles was tasked with slaying the Hydra as the second of his twelve labours. When he cut off one of its heads, however, two heads would grow in its place, resulting in more heads than before; Heracles soon realized he could not kill the Hydra in this fashion. It describes a similar situation with the "Notification Hydra": a push notification "head" of the Notification Hydra was dismissed, which subsequently spawned two more push notification heads providing updates about the status of the dismissal. If one of these new notifications were to be dismissed, it would again spawn another set of the same two push notification heads; thus, the Notification Hydra is unkillable in a manner similar to the original. Up to 7 clickable cats periodically spawn at predetermined positions around the page, including one on the edge of the Emergency Stop button. The subdirectory where the images and scripts for this comic are stored is titled 'marconi,' which is likely a reference to the Italian engineer and inventor of the same name, Guglielmo Marconi, who is credited with inventing the radio, and did much work in the field of early communication systems. Notifications[edit] A general list of notification types include:
The full list of known notifications is available below, while all the known zoom notifications are on the right.
Comic images[edit]
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Sort out the explanation structuring, explain further the delay of the comic, upload all pictures from [1], add a transcript for each image in the image gallery, explain the table of all notifications. tori :3talk to me! 21:56, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete (fails criteria #2 and #3) per my comment at the unixkcd nomination below. FaviFake (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
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On April 1, 2010, Randall altered the xkcd website to mimic a Unix shell. This interface is still available on uni.xkcd.com and the source code is available on GitHub. This fool itself does not warrant its own comic, however. unixkcd is a portmanteau of Unix and, of course, xkcd. Additionally, the subdomain of where the interface now lives is a domain hack that incorporates this portmanteau. It can be humorously said that unixkcd is a public shell that is able to access comics from the xkcd web server. Unix is a family of operating systems that share multitasking, multi-user, and modular features. These operating systems are said to be Unix-like or comply with the Single UNIX Specification. The first, early set of versions of Unix, also known as "Research Unix", were developed in Bell Labs as a result of its predecessor and former OS, Multics, due to it becoming increasingly complex. Unix still lives on today. Examples of Unix-like operating systems are macOS, iOS, Linux (more specifically its array of operating systems or "distributions" shipped with the Linux kernel), Android, and BSD with its derivatives. All interactions in an operating system are done via system calls by computer programs, which are fulfilled by the kernel or another program with absolute control over the system. One special type of programs for these interactions are called shells, and they are used for executing any command or task that the operating system can perform, often using other computer programs. Hence the name, the shell metaphorically wraps around the system. Unix shells, in particular, are shells that interact with a Unix-like operating system. The first influential shells developed in Research Unix were the Thompson shell, the C shell, and the Bourne shell (which was the most popular one at the time). Currently, Bash is the most popular Unix shell, inspired by the Bourne shell (hence the Bash acronym, as it stands for the Bourne-again shell), that is provided by many Linux distributions. Bash is likely the shell being mimicked by unixkcd. Most Unix shells use a command-line interface that provide a command prompt, which must be run in a text terminal emulator in order to enter such commands. Since these emulate real computer terminals, such text terminal emulators are normally shown as a black screen behind white or green text. The terminal only lists a few available commands, but most commands are undocumented. Documented commands[edit]
Undocumented commands[edit]All commands can be seen by inspecting the source code.
Game commands[edit]There are also some other commands borrowed from a Zork like text-based adventure game.
Konami code[edit]
After entering the code at least once, commands such as "shutdown" and "apt-get update" will function as if you were using sudo. Note that the last step is broken in 2026. The page xkcd.com/unixkcd/over9000.png still exists, but uni.xkcd.com/unixkcd/over9000.png gives a 404.
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I don't know how unix or linux or code or bash or anything like that at all. Please...I need help explaining this comic :C tori :3talk to me! 21:56, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for commenting! Unfortunately I think all of the five April Fools' explanations that you nominated don't meet the criteria #2 and #3, specifically the part about being "ideal for new editors" and interesting to explain. I think this sentences particularly applies: "The one-week edit-a-thon format of the project is well-suited for comics that cover everyday, normal topics. On the other hand, comics about obscure and deeply technical topics usually belong in the Incomplete explanations backlog instead." Essentially, this project is very focused on one specific goal precisely to avoid becoming a bloated mess like the Incomplete explanations backlog.
- For example, the tasks you cited, such as explaining why a comic was released late or downloading and uploading images from the xkcd.com website, are not really interesting, which is why they've sat in the backlog for a decade. Most editors come here because they want to explain Randall's clever jokes. The Incomplete explanations backlog isn't monitored very often, but it is linked from every new explanation and the main page. If even all that "foot traffic" didn't result in meaningful improvements over so many years, I think it's unlikely that featuring those explanation from the sitenotice (which will mostly attract new and inexperienced editors) will do more harm than good. In the best case, there will be no significant improvements except from a few power users like us. In the worst case, it damages the reputation of this project as a means to update neglected explanations.
- The Incomplete explanations backlog was a result of the failed Explanation Completion Project, aka Explanation of the Day. In my opinion, the project's goal was too broad and this led to it becoming less and less relevant over time, as the explanations became more and more similar to technical manuals of how a comic works. The last few explanations featured in the sitenotice were precisely this kind of pages and it didn't work. FaviFake (talk) 23:03, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Oh, I see how this works now. Shame on me for not reading through everything thoroughly...thanks for the feedback tori :3talk to me! 00:53, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
- No worries! Putting my goal into words helped me understand them better as well. I've marked the explanations you mentioned as incomplete per this nominations and moved your suggestions there. FaviFake (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
- Oh, I see how this works now. Shame on me for not reading through everything thoroughly...thanks for the feedback tori :3talk to me! 00:53, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete (fails criteria #2 and #3) per my comment above FaviFake (talk) 21:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
September 2026[edit]
| 686: Admin Mourning | |||||||||||
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The background images show the output from the When a session is closed, its descendent processes are sent the HUP (Hang-up) signal — a signal sent to a process when its terminal/connection is disconnected or their broader session terminated, which normally causes them to terminate as well. However, the popular utility screen enables a user to detach the output from the session you are viewing without terminating the process, instead switching it to its own session managed by the screen utility (hence the specification of a screen session), and reattach that output and process later to a new session so you can recover everything, thus surviving between sessions. A system administrator (sysadmin or admin) is a person who maintains a computer system, such as a server used by multiple users, or some other computer with multiple. An admin is typically a superuser, which has higher privileges than the common user. This is what allows them to actually control the computer and prevent users from causing problems for other users. Superusers are called "root" in most Unix systems because of the root folder that contains every other folder and file on the system. Only accounts with root access can create, edit, and delete files/folders throughout the whole filesystem, so root became the common term. This comic depicts an admin at a dilemma. The admin is hesitant to reboot a server that still has active processes from a deceased user named "sam", as the admin is afraid it might erase the last artifact of the user. However, it is a good habit for an admin to reboot a server, as it can help update software and cleanse possible memory leaks or corruption, which can mitigate security issues. The prose is ended with a pun on the expression, "Ghost in the Shell", which is the title of a popular manga series. It originally derives from the expression "ghost in the machine", used by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe Descartes' theory of mind-body dualism. The pun refers to a shell called the Z shell, where the path to it can be shown as " The phrase "su to the user" can mean the act of switching to another user using the
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This explanation would be a perfect candidate if it weren't about a complex topic, imo. I think it doesn't satisfy criterion #2 and it should probably be marked as {{incomplete}}. FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete as the explanation remains too technical and should use simpler terms. FaviFake (talk) 10:32, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
| 925: Cell Phones | |||||||||||
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This comic is a good explanation of the correlation/causation fallacy, where one party states two unrelated events and posits that they must have influenced each other. After hearing about the "Cell Phones Don't Cause Cancer" study, which refutes a claim made by the World Health Organization (just Google the debate or check out Wikipedia's article on it, the comic doesn't focus much on it), Black Hat plots "Total Cancer Incidence" per 100,000 and "Cell Phone Users" per 100 on the same graph. The graph in frame 3 shows an exponential rise in cancer in the 70's and 80's, followed by an exponential rise in cell phone usage in the 2000's. Black Hat reverses the correlation/causation fallacy, and comically comes to the conclusion that cancer causes cell phones. The comic highlights a well-known fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, often shortened to simply post hoc. The Latin translates to "after this, therefore because of this,” (the simpler "after this" therefore implies “because of this”; post hoc, as it were!) referring to the common mistake that because two events happen in chronological order, the former event must have caused the latter event. The fallacy is often the root cause of many superstitions (e.g., a person noticing they wore a special bracelet before getting a good test score thinking the bracelet was the source of their good fortune), but it often crosses into more serious areas of thinking. In this case, the scientific research community, which often prides itself on its intellectual aptitude, is gently mocked for being nonetheless prone to such poor reasoning all too often. The different possibilities are generally known as causation, when one thing is proven to cause another, or correlation, when changes in one thing are aligned with changes in another, but there is no proof that they are directly related. The title text refers to the way Black Hat holds the laptop in panel 2. Being that Cueball (like Randall) is quite into computers, the potential damage to a laptop screen either from the weight of its lower body or the pressure of the user's fingers on the LCD screen is enough to make him squirm in discomfort. The risk of dropping the computer is also present. Both the fallacy and the way Black Hat is holding his laptop contribute to the "problems" that Cueball mentions.
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It doesn't explain why the lines don't line up.. Velocifyer (talk) 22:19, 25 September 2026 (UTC)
- I don't see what you mean. This explanation seems pretty thorough. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 00:00, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
- I think I get what they're trying to say. They don't understand why there's a 25-year gap between the two lines. I guess that gap usually represents the time it takes for something to cause effects (e.g., if people start smoking today, they will start dying only 30 years from now). The explanation is not written in simple terms and I can see why one could get confused: it glazes over the main point and instead uses some weird sentences like
the scientific research community, which often prides itself on its intellectual aptitude, is gently mocked for being nonetheless prone to such poor reasoning all too often
. - I'm not sure if this specifically qualifies for This Week's Explanation for Improvement based on the #criteria, but at the same time I think it could be improved and streamlined a bit. But what do you think? FaviFake (talk) 00:32, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
- Yeah, it could use some copyediting. Perhaps mark as incomplete, with bullet points
Explain why there is a gap between the two lines
andClean up the article so its tone is more accessible
? 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 01:36, 26 September 2026 (UTC)- Good idea! FaviFake (talk) 17:15, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
- Yeah, it could use some copyediting. Perhaps mark as incomplete, with bullet points
- I think I get what they're trying to say. They don't understand why there's a 25-year gap between the two lines. I guess that gap usually represents the time it takes for something to cause effects (e.g., if people start smoking today, they will start dying only 30 years from now). The explanation is not written in simple terms and I can see why one could get confused: it glazes over the main point and instead uses some weird sentences like
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete as it fails criterion #1 but is still poorly written. FaviFake (talk) 17:15, 27 September 2026 (UTC
October 2026[edit]
| 2171: Shadow Biosphere | |||||||||||
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A shadow biosphere is "a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that uses radically different biochemical and molecular processes than currently known life. Although life on Earth is relatively well-studied, the shadow biosphere may still remain unnoticed because the exploration of the microbial world targets primarily the biochemistry of the macro-organisms." Because organisms based on RNA would not have ribosomes, which are usually used to detect living microorganisms, they would be difficult to find in normal circumstances. The comic suggests that this hypothetical biosphere exists, and its study is funded by "shadow biotech" corporations. The field would be called "shadow biology", so people that study it would be "shadow biologists". However, this is reinterpreted to mean "shadow" biologist, meaning that anyone that studies it becomes undetectable. A "shadowy" figure, presumably a shadow biologist, is telling this to Megan and Cueball, but they are not shadow biologists and can't hear him. If people who study the shadow biosphere become part of it, then it will be very hard to get a lot of evidence without becoming it. The title text references desert varnish, an orange-yellow to black coating found on exposed rock surfaces in arid environments, which has been suggested as a potential candidate for a shadow biosphere. Unless a building was made with already-varnished rocks, it would be impractical to cover a building in desert varnish (it forms naturally on rocks over thousands of years). Ignoring its impracticality, the joke is that if a building were covered in desert varnish, it would supposedly be invisible to biologists who don't study the shadow biosphere.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Definitely needs more explanation, but I feel like the topic may be a bit niche. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 22:35, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Agreed. FaviFake (talk) 16:02, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete. FaviFake (talk) 16:02, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
| 1447: Meta-Analysis | |||||||||||
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In the scientific literature, meta-analyses are studies which compare multiple studies on a single topic, with the aim of giving a balanced overview of the known results. Medline, Embase and Cochrane are medical research databases which give access to studies on drug effects or results of other medical procedures. This comic explores the idea of iterating the process, going from meta-analyses to meta-meta-analyses (which actually exist, though not necessarily by that name, see below) and hence to a meta-meta-meta-analysis. Of course, the title text adds another level of meta-analysis, since he wants to make a meta-analysis of rejection letters which concern his meta-meta-meta analyses. All of the cited meta-meta-analyses are real: M. Sampson (2003), P. L. Royle (2005), E. Lee (2011), and A.R. Lemeshow (2005). The phrase "too meta" can be found in the comments of videos, blog posts, and other internet content for which the commentator claims they are so abstract that they can't be easily interpreted. It refers to the thing in question being too self-referential, but could just be a cursory dismissal of the presented content. Comic 93: Jeremy Irons similarly states a slightly absurd "life goal". 917: Hofstadter is "meta"-related.
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15 comics nominated. All of the comics below are somewhat niche, but broad enough to be good for new users, and in need of some revamping and improvement. Most are before 2013. To be fair, I came upon with this list before the criteria was put down. Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This is a pretty decent one, with a pretty good room for improvement in my opinion. But maybe the topic is a bit too technical? FaviFake (talk) 18:55, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Still unsure about this one, but Im trending towards opposing at the moment, due to #2. Feels a bit too niche. FaviFake (talk) 20:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete as it is seems technical to satisfy #2 but still sucks . FaviFake (talk) 04:01, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
| 779: Anxiety | |||||||||||
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Some people are upset about airport security policies that mandate the use of backscatter X-ray machines, since the machines can create an image of the subject naked. In protest, the travellers in the lineup (or at least the male ones) are taking Viagra, sold to them by Black Hat; there is a heteronormative expectation that the male security guard will be disgusted at being forced to look at erect penises. (An expectation which is supported by the guard's thought bubble of "Oh God" in response to an unseen person, presumably sporting such an erection, already in the scanner.) Alternatively, the guard may just be worried by the fact that Black Hat is selling unidentified pills which might contain harmful ingredients. Realistically, given the size of the line, there would be insufficient time between consuming the pills and entering the scanner for them to take effect. Given Black Hat's personality, it is unlikely he is doing this in protest; rather he is monetizing the opportunity, a supposition reinforced by the inflated price ($20 for a single dose) at which he is selling the medication. An alternate interpretation is that many men feel self-conscious (or anxious, as the title puts it) about their size when flaccid, and thus might wish to "put their best foot forward" and look their best. In the title text, one of the people in the line explains he has a fetish with being X-ray scanned, and thus doesn't need Viagra to achieve the above effect.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This is pretty good, the explanation definitely needs some polishing and the joke isn't too obvious. FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- I am not so sure of this one myself. I feel like we should explain stuff like powerscaling and similar activites (which this comic seems based off of) and some updates stats, but it is not too much in need of help otherwise Black Hat's Hat (talk) 17:44, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- I'm not sure either, this explanation isn't far enough from complete to need this, there isn't much to be fixed. Till (talk) 21:10, 2 November 2026 (UTC)
- I am not so sure of this one myself. I feel like we should explain stuff like powerscaling and similar activites (which this comic seems based off of) and some updates stats, but it is not too much in need of help otherwise Black Hat's Hat (talk) 17:44, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination unsuccessful but marked as incomplete per above. It's incomplete, but not by much. FaviFake (talk) 17:58, 3 November 2026 (UTC)