888: Heaven

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Heaven
If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.
Title text: If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.

Explanation

This comic shows the popular video game Tetris, in which you use different shaped pieces to fill in lines to score points. Filling multiple lines by adding a single piece results in bonus points. Normally all pieces are made up of four small squares. This has also been the case for all the pieces at the bottom of the game; however, some parts of some blocks have been erased when a line has been deleted because it was full.

Heaven, in Tetris, is when you get the perfect piece that fills out all the other pieces on the board. The falling piece here is really odd, but it fits the 18 bare spaces exactly to make it possible to remove 6 lines in a row—compared to the four that is normally possible using the tall brown piece. On top of the heavenly feeling of getting a piece that fits—the top score is also about to be smashed, as the player was at the moment only one point til reaching it!

The next piece, shown to the right, which shall come after the special one, is much taller than the normally possible straight brown piece—a normal one can be seen at the bottom right of the game. This next piece seems to be ten tall, which when rotated fits the cleared bottom of the well perfectly.

The title text compares this experience with sex, complete with an orgasm and the feelings you get right after sex. After "the brief feeling of satisfaction" from the orgasm you are bored, ennui means a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest, but at the end you want more.

A fan has made a modified version of the classic Tetris game, where at a certain frequency, a heavenly perfectly-fitting block comes along. The game can be found here(Flash game, no longer works).

Also see comic 724: Hell, which presents an opposing situation in which the game is designed to be impossible to play.

Choosing to post a comic called Heaven as number 888 is not a coincidence—as in Christian numerology, the number 888 represents Jesus and in Chinese numerology it represents triple fortune.

Transcript

[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game. A large oddly shaped piece is falling towards the board. The piece fits into the gaps exactly to complete six rows at once. The next piece is simply a very long brick. All the pieces at the bottom are made from possible tetris pieces.]
Next
Top
0002187
Score
0002186
Level
5
[Below the panel:]
Heaven


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Discussion

I also think that the comic number '888' is a reference to the chinese belief that eight is a lucky number, and '888' even more 61.22.6.176 01:56, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

In Chinese 8 (in some dialects) sounds like "being rich". 173.245.48.96 06:16, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Also I think the next piece after that is a longer than usual L block which basically fills the whole line 108.162.250.7 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The player is also about to smash the previous high score. 108.162.222.35 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Yes, he's only 1 POINT DOWN!!!!! SilverMagpie (talk) 22:20, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
I have added all the above to the explain along with the idea that the long next block represents the cigarette people used to smoke after sex (in old films at least). Guess this is no so much in any longer... Kynde (talk) 10:34, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
Should be trivia; doesn't explain the comic itself. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:44, 29 August 2014 (UTC)