3188: Anyone Else Here

Anyone Else Here

|< < Prev #3188 (December 31, 2025)

Title text: Anyone else watching this Youtube video in 1954? If so, my last trip definitely messed with the timeline.

|< < Prev Random Explanation

Explanation

This comic jokes about a familiar pattern in YouTube comment sections: people often leave comments announcing the year they are watching a video. These comments serve no practical purpose, but are nonetheless a harmless compliment implying the video is "timeless" and a memory worth revisiting.

The comic reframes this behavior as the actions of confused time travelers. Since YouTube comments frequently include statements like “Anyone else here in 2017?” or “Watching this in 2025,” the strip humorously suggests that people displaced in time use comment sections to confirm what year they’ve landed in.

The title text escalates the joke by placing a commenter in 1954, decades before YouTube existed. This absurd anachronism implies that the time traveler’s last jump went so badly that it altered the timeline enough for YouTube to exist in the mid-20th century. Rather than questioning the impossibility of the situation, the time traveler treats it casually, blaming themself for breaking history.

The humor comes from:

Recognizing a real, mildly annoying internet habit

Treating YouTube comments as a universal, cross-timeline reference point

The understated admission that history itself may be broken, delivered with the same casual tone as typical comment spam

Like many XKCD comics, it mixes everyday internet culture with science-fiction concepts, using a dry, matter-of-fact tone to make an absurd premise feel oddly reasonable.

Transcript

This is one of 34 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

  Add comment        Create topic (use sparingly)       Refresh 

Discussion

Anyone here in 2050? King Pando (talk) 22:20, 31 December 2050 (UTC)
oh that's what that type of comment's about Treeplate (talk)

Anybody reading this in 2525? Is man still alive? Did woman survive?Lordpishky (talk) 22:28, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Did they fall in love? --Aaron of Mpls (talk) 22:46, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

What did they find?Lordpishky (talk) 02:03, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Any read this 1000000 BC? Do Kroog make fire? --User 8496351 (talk) 22:46, 31 December 1000001 BC (UTC)

I'm here from exactly two years in your future. Well, perhaps not your future because... ah... best not say, just in case. 92.23.2.208 11:19, 1 January 2028 (UTC)

Why does the end of the explanation appear to have been written by AI? Am I going crazy or does that look like how ChatGPT would describe xkcd? CreatorOfWorlds (talk) 22:52, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

"Anyone else here?" vs. "Anyone else now?". It's always fun overanalyzing why *this* point in space-time is a here or now, while *that* point in space-time is a there or then. 84.233.216.138 00:31, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

I’m surprised there’s no “Anyone here in 2026?” yet 50.239.67.6 05:58, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

I've travelled [1] all the way from the year 2025 to say: happy new year! 185.36.194.156 02:31, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

Anybody else get a wave of Déjà vu from this? 134.231.105.61 05:36, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

I think the explanation discounting it as a "trick" is disingenuous. It would be like calling a forum user creating a new topic "engagement farming". 64.114.211.52 06:41, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
        Add comment