98: Fall Apart
| Fall Apart |
 Title text: #pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them. |
Explanation
Despite Randall being enthusiastic about receiving ink pens, his first experiment with them has resulted in a rather bleak comic.
Instead of multiple panels, the entire comic is a single drawing, with an apparent passage of time as we travel down the page. The frame, which represents the world of the characters, gradually disintegrates and leaves them falling helplessly. At the top, we see some people standing alone, apparently happy enough, and a couple. As we descend the page, we see examples of a couple split by a narrow chasm, someone huddled isolated and alone on their own world fragment, a couple desperately trying to hang on to each other, and a single figure falling chaotically and without control.
The comic seems to be expressing what it feels like to someone when a relationship breaks up — their world falls apart, and one of the implications is that the process cannot easily be reversed -- an idea further explored in 104: Find You.
The identity of '#pugglewumper Tashari,' the supplier of the pens, is not known. Judging by the use of the hash sign, it is someone with whom Randall communicates in IRC. In fact, 'pugglewump' appears to be an IRC channel. Although hashtags later came to be strongly associated with Twitter, this was not true at the time the comic was drawn.
Transcript
- [Various people struggle as the comic disintegrates. Toward the top, people are standing calmly, some holding hands. As the parts of the comic break apart, people try to reach for each other, hold parts together, or curl up into a ball. By the bottom, a Cueball is falling, surrounded by pieces of the comic.]
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Randall must have been eaten some mushrooms right before doing this one.--Dgbrt (talk) 21:53, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Or perhaps he was drawing some thick, inky lines and realized that they looked like cracks, and he then extended the synecdoche. 108.162.219.58 18:21, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
- How to pronounce synecdoche — Kazvorpal (talk) 17:26, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
This website contains a reference to the pugglewump IRC channel. 108.162.219.58 23:30, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
"404 not found"...
- taken down :( An user who has no account yet (talk) 00:21, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Anyone else see a resemblance to the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? In particular the one figure crouching on the left over a falling woman looks like Indy and Elsa. ~~ 172.68.58.59 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
...? Can't the title text be more easily interpreted as #pugglewump being a hashtag for celebration and Tashari being the name of a friend? I'm proficent in Internet English and this vibes ok...? 172.64.238.131 14:30, 25 September 2024 (UTC
- pugglewump was an IRC channel on our network - b1o ran the server that xkcd connected on, I (codewolf) ran another server on this network (hav0c ran another). Tashari was another person that frequently connected to that server and was a friend of Randall. There were no drugs involved here. This was probably done soon after Randall's laptop with his original comics was stolen (somewhat speculation). 172.68.55.11 (talk) 03:18, 11 December 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
