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.
While most new comics receive high-quality explanations thanks to our growing user base and high standards, our goal is to have a complete repository of explanations for every comic. However, some old and neglected explanations do not attract enough attention and tend to remain stagnant. This project aims to solve that.
This week's explanation for improvement is:
172: Skateboarding is Not a Crime
Get involved with the project: nominate an explanation or vote on current nominations!
There are a total of 3328 explanations on this wiki. Every Monday, 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, which mostly includes the most recent comics and some evergreen explanations that are never truly "finished". For those, 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 for improvement, but longer explanations also qualify if they fail to explain the joke and are written poorly. Good concise explanations about quick and straightforward jokes should remain short, so evaluate explanations on overall quality rather than length.
2. Accessible to a broad audience or otherwise ideal for new editors. The week-long collaborative format of this project (edit-a-thon) works best for comics about relatable topics. Explanations about niche or highly technical jokes, as well as those detailing the inner workings of the comic, usually belong in the general incomplete explanations backlog instead.
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}} I'm nominating this explanation because ... (say briefly how it can be improved and which criteria it meets). ~~~~
- Save the page.
Done. Your nomination will be discussed by the members of the project in the following days!
Any user is welcome to vote on the suitability of existing nominations as well! To help us select the best Explanations for Improvement, use the "Reply" button to comment on existing nominations. Based on community consensus, successful nominations are moved into the section § Successful nominations (pending) and will be featured week-by-week. Unsuccessful nominations will instead be moved into § Unsuccessful nominations. In either case, the top of the § Discussion section for the comic is marked with a banner that includes the nominator's username!
Nominations[edit]
Current TWEFI[edit]
- This is the Explanation for Improvement for the current week.
| 172: Skateboarding is Not a Crime | |||||||||
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The skateboarding subculture has taken up the phrase "skateboarding is not a crime" as a protest against many cities banning skateboarding in certain areas, such as parks. Some people dislike skateboarding because they see it as connected with dangerous people or deem it unsafe. Another concern is a belief that many skateboarders drink or do drugs and people don’t want this to rub off on their children. Skateboarders, in particular, are associated with juvenile delinquency, such as truancy and underage drinking. What annoys people about these stickers is that it makes skateboarders seem like they have a persecution complex. Randall apparently really does not like these stickers and states that when/if he becomes president (a common expression equivalent to "If I were in charge, ..."), any and all displays of stickers bearing the phrase (like the one on the locker in the comic) will be considered a felony, though skateboarding itself will still be legal. The title text also shows another protest phrase, "arrest me, I'm a skateboarder", that Randall appears to hate even more than "skateboarding is not a crime", potentially for the more standoffish tone of the message. This phrase has basically the same message, so it is unsurprising that he hates both, if he hated either.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
Successful nominations (pending)[edit]
- Successful nominations from § Current nominations are moved here waiting to featured.
| 1334: Second | |||||
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Google is a popular search engine.[citation needed] Google's searching algorithms are widely regarded as the most accurate and useful. If your search terms were sufficiently detailed, you will be able to find what you were looking for on the first page. Having to view the second page indicates your search terms were too vague or the answer to your query doesn't exist. When the search results typically number in the tens of millions (or more; in fact, more popular search results are in the billions), only the very first results are mapping to the real idea of the user. The second page is not helpful for the issue. Cueball, after failing to find his query in the first page of results, takes a curious peek at the second page. This is represented by a not-at-all subtle metaphor in which Cueball is about to wander into a sun-baked desert. According to the title text, he finds one vaguely relevant webpage, but the copyright starting with '19', i.e from the 1990s or older, means that it's likely too old to be of any use. The title text refers to webrings. Webrings consist of multiple websites that are connected together, usually with a common theme. They connect from one website to the next, eventually leading back to the starting site. They were popular in the 1990s as a way of boosting your search ranking, but newer algorithms in Google and other search engines are now detecting and penalizing web sites for such tactics.[actual citation needed] Webrings were also used in pre-Google days to make it easy to find websites sharing a common theme, but since one site going down broke the ring, they were very inefficient. Seeing a webring typically means a site has not been updated since the mid 90s, though there are some people trying to bring them back for nostalgia reasons.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 301: Limerick | |||||
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A limerick is a well-known type of poem that is usually humorous or bawdy. Technically, a limerick is primarily anapestic trimeter: each line contains three "feet," each foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. The rhyme scheme is AABBA: the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme, as do the shorter third and fourth lines. Almost anyone can instantly recognize a limerick after hearing the first line. Slashdot is a venerable techie site. On many sites, the user base can vote comments "up" or "down," but at Slashdot, only moderators (these are randomly drawn from the pool of registered users) may up or down vote comments, and the moderator may select a reason for their up or down vote. Instead of a simple +1, a comment may be voted +1 (Funny). Similarly, instead of -1, a comment may be voted -1 (Off-topic). +5 is the maximum positive score. A comment rated +5 (Insightful) has been upvoted at least 5 times, and has a plurality of "Insightful" votes. Cueball's limerick says that he does not like Slashdot anymore, because his sarcastic comments are being treated as "insightful" by the very people he's being sarcastic to. The title text refers to the notoriously awful comments on YouTube, many of which are so idiotic that they're interpreted as jokes. In both cases, Randall is invoking Poe's Law. Both sites have become so full of extremes that you can no longer mock the extremists without looking like a sincere extremist yourself. 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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]Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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). 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 430: Every Damn Morning | |||||
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Cueball has had a wondrous and striking dream, but is unable to recount it to Megan, as he has forgotten it. The title of the strip suggest 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. 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." An effort to remember dreams was made in 269: TCMP.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
- 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. Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 09:09, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
Current nominations[edit]
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Welcome! Follow the instructions above to add your nominations to the top of this section. |
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
- Amazing find! There's so much missing here. FaviFake (talk) 22:16, 24 September 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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."Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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Very short explanation that's pretty much just a transcript. Capycapybara (talk) 02:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Yup. Just a transcript, nowhere near today's standards. FaviFake (talk) 08:16, 28 August 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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".Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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", which could either be in response to seeing what Black Hat is doing or 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. Given Black Hat's personality, it is unlikely he himself 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.[citation needed] An alternate interpretation is that many men feel self-conscious (or anxious, as the title puts it) about their size when flaccid,[citation needed] and thus might wish to "put their best foot forward" and look their best. 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. 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
| 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
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" is, of course, the word "basilisk" without vowels and with appended numbers. Most systems disallow the same username for different users, so users often append digits to their name in order to create something unique. These may be digits that have some significance to them, or simply an arbitrary string. The myth of the basilisk has been adapted into many places in popular culture which the comic may be referencing, rather than the original myth directly. In this comic, Cueball is explicitly not referred to as Rob, since his username implies that he goes by "Nick" (possibly short for "Nicholas") and has a family name starting with "M". This may be a reference to the character Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, also known as "Nearly Headless Nick", from the novel and movie series Harry Potter. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a basilisk is let loose in Hogwarts School of Wizardry, and Nearly Headless Nick becomes a victim of the basilisk's gaze. However, since he is a ghost and has already died, he is instead rendered immobile, or in the book, "petrified". (Another possible reference is the Basilisk monster from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Here, the Basilisk is a monster with the special ability "Petrifying Gaze".) Cueball's question, "A/S/L?", is an online messaging shorthand for requesting information about someone — specifically their age, sex, and location. This was commonly used when first meeting someone online in text-only mediums, especially in determining how they might wish to continue to converse with their correspondent (whether it might lead to online flirting or finding some other interesting topic of conversation). However, in some contexts, the question was considered creepy, inappropriate or disruptive. For people who were only interested in talking with existing friends or talking about a specific topic, dealing with unsolicited private messages asking "A/S/L?" was generally an annoyance. Such people may have wished for a way to make the questioner go away, though most would not have resorted to petrification to do so. The term has largely fallen out of use since the comic, with the introduction of avatars, profile pictures, and other methods of presenting a user's identity up front. Modern dating sites such as Tinder have built-in algorithms that automatically connect people whose preferences match, skipping the basic introduction stage of a first-time interaction entirely. The type of chat system pictured may be Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the earliest popular system used for instant messaging, as most IRC clients share the use of formatting usernames with surrounding angle brackets and prefixing event messages with " U+FDD0, which is a non-character — this specific one is permanently reserved for internal application processing rather than regular text, meaning no font sets support the character. If you attempt to render the non-character in a text field or editor, it would either not show up or would display as an empty rectangle (🯄) or an invalid/missing character box (�). Unicode does, however, have many characters for representing images and icons/symbols, such as ✉ (Envelope), ☎ (Telephone), ✏ (Pencil), ✂ (Scissors), ⚙ (Gear), ★ (Star), ancient Egyptian glyphs, and (most popularly) emojis. Ironically, the characters just given may not render in a given browser, including the one of the editor who placed them here, and also appear as rectangular boxes, even if they can be seen and used on the edit page. The title text claims that U+FDD0 is actually the character for the eye of a basilisk (which does not exist), but is not rendered by any fonts for safety reasons, because it may kill anybody who looks at the character.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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 is another comic in the My Hobby series. It plays on the then-popular internet meme "This Looks Shopped". Adobe Photoshop is a popular image editing application that was first launched in 1990, and it reached its peak in popularity around the 2000s as the industry standard for editing graphics. The verb "photoshop" (as in "to photoshop") is a verbalization/denominalization (informally known as verbing) of the noun "Photoshop", referring to the act of using editing software to digitally alter an image, often to make the image look more appealing, dramatic, or to trick people online. Its derived adjective "photoshopped" and its shortened version "shopped" are applied to an image that has been manipulated in this way. One particular popular usage of Photoshop is image compositing: combining two or more images together into a single, seamless picture. This allows the digital artist to create humorous and/or falsified scenarios, like making someone who does not hold a rapier hold one. Adobe Photoshop is still considered a prominent image editing service, but has since lost its monopoly in the market. Cueball insists 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.[citation needed] Megan claims that the sabre she found is a 19th-century heirloom, but Cueball is insisting for fun that the sabre is in fact photoshopped, presumably for fun or to rile Megan up. He then goes on to cite the wrongness of the shadows as why the sabre is photoshopped. This is an especially bizarre claim to make, because real world objects generally cannot cast wrong shadows, unlike a photoshopped image might. Cueball could also be trying to annoy Megan by insisting it's photoshopped, and potentially 3D printed into an object that makes it look real. Alternatively, calling the artifact "photoshopped" could be Cueball's unique and strange way of suggesting it's a fake. The joke could also refer 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, mistaking actual physical objects as "photoshopped" because of how petty such people can be. This comic also unintentionally (probably) foreshadowed the rising and unavoidable presence of AI image creation and editing on the internet, several years after its publication. However, manipulating images on social media to create misleading content has been and still is very commonplace. Today, people would often accuse content creators or websites of using images generated by AI, as creating visual aids and content this way is considered lazy and minimizes the purpose of human artists. Identifying both photoshopped and AI images both follow the same base principle of examining minute details for inconsistency. With photoshopped images, it can include inaccurate shadows (as mentioned by Cueball) and differences in quality in sections of the image;[actual citation needed] with AI, the best tell is inconsistencies with reality. The title text contains the second part of 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 file 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 in someone's eyes that you're wrong for each other is a common poetic/clichéd expression for the experience, during intimate moments, of recognising from something unidentifiable about someone's expressions or wider demeanor that there is a lack of personal chemistry between you. It is not usually based on the physical appearance of their irises.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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 dead pixels could be floaters in Megan's eyes and this could be a comic about getting old. However, there is no evidence to prove that this is a comic about getting old. 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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.
Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
October 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]
Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
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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). Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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.
Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)
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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]
Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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]
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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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 or connection is disconnected, which normally causes them to terminate. However, the popular utility screen enables a user to detach the output from the session and reattach that output later, thus surviving over sessions. The joke in the final panel refers to the command line interface being called a shell, and to a particular type of shell called zshell ( su command, which stands for substitute user) without needing the target user's password, as would normally be necessary, which in this case would give the impression that sam's ghost were using the account.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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 (and Randall, for that matter) 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.Comment on this nomination by clicking "Reply" below! What could be improved?
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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)