3256: Nostalgia Content

Nostalgia Content

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Title text: Gen-Z got a chunk of the Carboniferous, and now all their memes are about how pathetic and small today's dragonflies are.

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Explanation

This is one of 44 incomplete explanations: This page was created by a Parataxtite. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic is a joke about nostalgia content. In it, a database for creating nostalgia content has accidentally included some Early Devonian features in it. These features, while certainly being old, are far too long ago for anyone to be alive at the time,^{[citation needed]} let alone remember it, hence defying the purpose.

In the example in this comic, Cueball puts the more new creations of Pogs & Tamagotchis (previously the subject of another comic) with the Devonian Prototaxites and armoured fish - with the ridiculous age comparison between them part of the joke. (Pogs became a fad in the early 1990s, and Tamagotchis came into production in 1996, while the Devonian period ended 359 million years ago.) Prototaxites (here formerly referred to as Parataxites) were huge fungi that lived during the Devonian. The armoured fish Cueball speaks of are from an ancient class known as Placodermi, which appeared during the Silurian and Devonian. Placoderms were among the first jawed fish, and the first fish clade to have pectoral fins. Devonian placoderms include Dunkleosteus, Titanichthys, Bothriolepis and Rhamphodopsis. Silurian placoderms include Xiushanosteus, Anglaspis, and Poraspis. There was also Sacabambaspis from the Ordovician.

The title text shows another example of nostalgia content warped by the accident, where Gen Z memes got a chunk of the Carboniferous in their nostalgia database. During the Late Carboniferous, species such as Meganeura were prolific, which resemble today's dragonflies, with the notable difference of having wingspans of up to 65 cm long, which would obviously dwarf modern dragonflies. However, this change happened over millions of years, and in Gen Z's time the dragonflies are as small as ever, hence the ridicule.

Transcript

This is one of 26 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Cueball is standing, with his arms out, in front of a Prototaxite towering over a mossy landscape. To his right, a Tamagotchi (bottom-left) and milk-caps (referred to in this comic as "pogs", top-left) appear. The 3 milk-caps that can be seen show a skull with a snake through its eyeball, a figure 8 & a star (3 more milk-caps are also shown, but have obscured pictures).]

Cueball: Who else remembers pogs? Tamagotchis? Vast forests of Prototaxites towering over the mossy landscape as armored fish stir in the deep?

[Caption below the panel:]

Due to a database error, millennial nostalgia now includes a portion of the early Devonian.

Trivia

Cueball has incorrectly refered to the huge fungi as Parataxites. They are actually called prototaxites.

The text in the comic on xkcd's site was later corrected to read "prototaxites".

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Discussion

I'm not a paleobotanist by any stretch of the imagination, but the comic contains an error. It should be `prototaxites` instead of `parataxites`. Blagae (talk) 12:57, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

This has now been fixed on the main website, not sure how it propagates to explainxkcd. 2601:241:8002:3E0:E405:A8CA:8B60:4A9C 04:35, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

Explainxkcd was down when this comic came out, which I would assume is why the explanation is blank, but I'm just glad the page is back up. K9Dragon23, or RainWingSquares (talk) (talk) 13:56, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

So it wasn't just me! When I saw it was down I just thought it was just a problem with my computer!GSLikesCats307 (talk) 14:35, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

It was a "global problem", effectively, from the message I was getting. I'd decided it was one of three things:

• Some (new?) editor had tried something fancy that accidentally broke the whole site (hoped not, and it's fairly rugged against the obvious accidental errors)
• Someone had deliberately broken it, as above (again, hoped not...)
• Some extrernal system had started trying to scrape the site for data, with absolutely no thought for throttling this down to non-disruptive levels.

Given no signs of error-prone edits, now it's back, the last of these is now the most obvious. The cloudflare gateway obviously didn't prevent it, originally, but may yet have added this particular inconsiderate attempt by now (maybe why it's working right now... leaving it up to the instigator to decide whether or not to reconfigure to hammer here again... unless they already realised they were hammering it, and had turned off/tuned down to correct that error).

Though there's at least two further possible reasons, that I'll not bother mentioning. 82.132.239.2 15:42, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

If someone deliberately broke it, then it could’ve been to create a real database error, in accordance with the comic. Logalex8369 (talk) 16:06, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

That explains why the "Random comic" link showed me cave drawings earlier today.^{[citation needed]} 64.201.132.210 18:40, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

I saw this page without any transcript and I thought "Hey, I could do that." So I did. I hope someone else edits the explanation for me, for I have very little knowledge on paleobotany. Clarkexckd8 (talk) 14:39, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

I remember back in the good old days when people used to link to real Wikipedia pages. --2A10:D586:3E93:0:6485:4264:AFE9:80FF 14:41, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

That's about as far back as nostalgia googles can go, given the difficulty of glassmaking before the evolution of woody fibers in plants. RegularSizedGuy (talk) 20:33, 9 June 2026 (UTC)
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