Main Page
Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 3265 xkcd comics, and only 44 (1.4%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!
Latest comic
| Nostalgia Content |
 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. |
Explanation
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
- [Cueball is standing, with his arms out, in front of a Prototaxite (incorrectly referred to in this comic as a "Parataxite") 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 milkcaps that can be seen show a skull with a snake through its eyeball, a figure 8 & a star (3 more milkcaps 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".
View comic discussionNew here?
Last 7 days (Top 10) |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to create an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for xkcd comics, characters, What If? articles, and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd comic, it should be here.
- If you're new to wiki editing, see the explain xkcd:Editor FAQ for a specific guidance to this wiki and the more general help on how to edit wiki pages. There's also a handy wikicode cheatsheet.
- Discussion about the wiki itself happens at the Community portal.
- You can browse the comics from the list of all comics or by navigating the category tree at Category:Comics.
- The incomplete explanations are listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!
Rules
Don't be a jerk!
There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.
If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.
Please only submit material directly related to xkcd and, of course, only submit material that can legally be posted and freely edited. Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.
If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.
