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Speedrun

|< < Prev #3246 (May 15, 2026)

Title text: Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

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Explanation

This comic shows Cueball sitting at a desk complaining that his speedrun got deleted off of Speedrun.com, which is a popular leaderboard aggregator for speedruns.

A tool-assisted speedrun (or TAS for short) is a speedrun that uses software tools to make certain hard or even humanly impossible inputs easily. Lateralus and Ænima are albums by the band Tool. This comic makes use of a pun, where rather than using third party tools to assist him in beating a video game as quickly as possible, Cueball is getting "assistance" from the rock band Tool in the form of background music to help him concentrate. In real life, a speedrun would be unlikely to be removed based on the music one is listening to while completing it, though it may be considered similar to using a metronome, a controversial topic. The comic could also be referencing Alex Honnold’s ascent of the Taipei 101 tower, during which he listened to Tool.

The title text is a pun on the word "speedrun". Usain Bolt's 100-meter dash record is a world-record "speedrun" in the sense that it is literally a speedy run and also an attempt by someone to complete a task as fast as possible (it is common on the internet for people to jokingly refer to a task they are completing very quickly as a speedrun). The notion of such a record being classified as a legitimate speedrun isn't farfetched as Speedrun.com has some leaderboards for In Real Life records. The use of "speedrun" to refer to an actual fast run may be considered to be a case of 3123: Canon.

Transcript

[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a laptop. Megan is standing behind him.]

Cueball: Aw man, Speedrun.com removed my world record just because I listened to Lateralus and Ænima to get in the flow.

Megan: Oh, a copyright thing?

Cueball: No, they don't allow Tool-assisted speedruns.

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