Batman

Explanation:
This comic is a reference to the comic book and movie character Batman , who is actually wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne, as we see on the left being referenced as "Master Wayne" by his butler Alfred. Batman, in contrast to Superman and other comic book heroes, has no superpowers. The name "Batman" suggests that he is a man who is part-bat, or has bat-like powers, but his only actual connection to bats is that he wears a bat-themed costume -- hence the description, "a man dressed like a bat." Thus, when Batman's connection to bats is made explicit, he loses a lot of his mystique.
The stick figure representations of Batman and his nemesis, the Joker, are shown from three different movie scenes of the Dark Knight Trilogy, the most recent Batman films at the time of this comic. The middle scene comes from Batman Begins , whilst the two flanking scenes are from its sequel The Dark Knight . In each scene the name "Batman" is substituted with the accurate but embarrassing description "a man dressed like a bat." In this way, Randall is pointing out that Batman commands a lot of respect and fear considering that all he is is a man in a costume.
Then in the title text, Randall expresses his fear that Christopher Nolan (the director/producer/writer of the latest Batman trilogy) was going to kill Batman off in the then-upcoming movie Dark Knight Rises . Of course, Randall substitutes for "Batman" as in the comic. This causes a grammatical ambiguity which Randall points out where the "dressed like a bat" could apply to the "man" or to Nolan. A similar ambiguity explicitly discussed in the title text of 1087: Cirith Ungol .
There have been several comics using substitutions , but this may have been the first.
[One panel, depicting three wavy circles. The one in the center is slightly larger, and the ones on either side are higher up. Their edges are touching.]
[The left circle has Bruce Wayne in the foreground, with Alfred in the background.] Alfred: Know your limits, Master Wayne. Bruce: A man dressed like a bat has no limits.
[The center circle has a close-up on Batman in his cowl.] Off-screen: What the hell are you? Batman: I'm a man dressed like a bat.
[In the right circle is The Joker.] Off-screen: What do you propose? Joker: It"s simple — we kill a man dressed like a bat.
[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Whenever anyone says "Batman," I mentally replace it with "a man dressed like a bat."


SOPA

Explanation:
SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, the Protect IP Act , were a pair of controversial bills being considered by the United States government in late 2011 and early 2012. The bills contained the ability for the US government to deny American internet users access to certain sites at a judge's request. These would be activated if the government could prove to a court that a site was primarily used to harbor illegally distributed copyrighted goods, such as video games, music, and TV shows.
Many people considered this to be censorship and were concerned that this could instead be used by larger corporations to squelch smaller competing sites who may not have the resources to challenge a "take-down notice" in court, should judges continually agree with the larger corporation.
As the bills gained infamy online, many popular websites and web comics participated in a mass protest on January 18, 2012, to announce their displeasure with the bill in an attempt to convince the House of Representatives to reverse their judgement, which had at the time been considered likely to pass if drafted.
This was xkcd's participation in the protest. Randall discusses below the black panel that if he was having better copyright protection with these new acts then he would never have gotten this popular since his fans would not have been allowed to distribute the comic gaining him new followers.
In typical xkcd fashion, this comic contains several layers of depth that may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer. In this instance, the apparently solid-black region contains a hidden image revealed with simple brightness+contrast manipulation (or simply loading the image into Microsoft Paint and using the fill tool), with Black Hat saying "A message from sysadmins everywhere: Seriously, don't screw with DNS. If you break this internet, we are not making you a new one." This stems from the fact that sites could be ordered taken down by allowing manipulation of the DNS itself, effectively making a site completely disappear from the web. This court-enforced DNS manipulation was considered by many technical professionals to damage the underlying structure of the internet, as well as potentially criminalizing recent work to improve its security.

The title text referred to a common theme across protesting sites: a blackout of the internet . Sites such as Google changed to a black background, while Wikipedia prevented access by linking their sites to a black page with white text explaining their participation. On the day of the protest, xkcd was similarly "blacked out," with all comics redirecting to this one. The humor is that Randall has jokingly misinterpreted this "blackout" to mean that he should instead protest by "getting totally blacked out " – i.e. by drinking so much alcohol that he gets drunk , passes out , and wakes up the next day having no memory of his actions or experiences during his drunkenness; despite Randall's good intentions, this would probably not help the protest against SOPA/PIPA.
After the protest, the bills were postponed from being drafted on January 20, 2012.
[A completely black panel with white text. all non-capital letter, in square brackets:] [don't censor the web.]
[Hidden in the background, and only visible under certain conditions, is an inverted Black Hat (i.e. white), with the text from above still visible written across his forehead. Above him is the first line of text, and then he speaks the next line:] A message from sysadmins everywhere: Black Hat: Seriously, don't screw with DNS.  If you break this internet, we are not making you a new one.
[Below the black panel is a visible message from Randall written normally black on white in xkcd style.] I make my living drawing xkcd, which wouldn't have been possible if people hadn't been able to freely share my comics with each other all over the internet. As a copyright holder and small business owner, I oppose SOPA and PIPA. [Randall Munroe's signature, with a little drawing of Cueball on one of the tails. Below that a last message.] Randall Munroe See the links below to learn more.
Learn more: EFF : One-page guide to SOPA ( archived ) reddit : A technical overview of the SOPA and PIPA bills ( archived ) DYN : How these bills would break DNS ( archived ) EFF : Free speech on the web ( archived )

Act : Contact information for US elected officials ( archived )


Sloppier Than Fiction

Explanation:
This comic is basically Cueball stuck in a conversation with Goatee Guy, presumably at a bar or party as Goatee Guy is carrying a drink. From Cueball's reaction it's clear he thinks Goatee Guy is a terrible person, a judgment that Goatee's story seems to verify. In it, he complains about being dumped by his ex-girlfriend for an act that he describes as "not technically cheating." Whatever he did, his description makes it clear that it was close enough to cheating to make any technical distinctions meaningless, and that he is selfishly looking for loopholes to justify his bad behavior. He also describes his ex as "crazy," even though her reaction to his bad behavior seems perfectly reasonable.
The point of his story is that his friend Bret says Goatee's ex resembles a "crazy ex" of his own, and it turns out they are talking about the same girl. This coincidence strikes Goatee as so unlikely that audiences would find it implausible in a fictional setting. This is a variation on the adage "truth is stranger than fiction", which means that sometimes real life can lead to some unexpected ups and downs that would not even make sense in a fictional representation in a book or a movie.
Cueball, however, counters that if Goatee's life was a movie, audiences would reject it for different reasons: "poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character." By this he is referring to Goatee's boorish behavior in his story, the equally boorish manner of speaking, and his incorrect belief that his story is all that noteworthy or implausible in the first place (it's a mild coincidence at best, and hardly "stranger than fiction").
In the title text, Roger Ebert was a famous American movie critic , who could be quite caustic when reviewing a movie he disliked. "Directionless" and "unwatchable," along with Cueball's initial complaints of "poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character," are common criticisms of bad movies, but have entirely different and much more personally cutting connotations when applied to a human being.
[A douchebag with a goatee and a bad haircut talks to Cueball while holding a drink.] Goatee Guy: Even though it technically wasn't cheating, she dumped me anyway! So I tell Bret, and he's like "She sounds just like my crazy ex." And I was like, "dude, what was her name?" and it was the same girl. Goatee Guy: I swear, if they made my life into a movie, no one would believe it. Cueball: Yeah, though mostly because of the poorly-written dialogue and unlikeable main character.


Sustainable

Explanation:
This is a simple scatterplot showing how often the word "sustainable" has been used in English texts in the US each year. As can be seen, the y-axis is given a logarithmic scale, meaning that the apparently linear trend is actually exponential. Randall humorously attempts to extend the graph to the point the frequency exceeds 100% about a century from now, which is obviously impossible (hence the quip that the word's usage is itself "unsustainable").
The use of the word "sustainable" has been increasing as people become more aware of the steadily increasing use of nonrenewable resources and need to ensure that the Earth's resources do not become totally exhausted, through sustainable development. Sustainable development refers to the practice of using resources that simultaneously aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present time, but also for generations to come.
As Randall somewhat depressingly mentions in the title text, the ~100 years that it will supposedly take for the word "sustainable" to become unsustainable is actually a lot longer than most of our nonrenewable resources will last on the Earth. The idea that all of the Earth's coal, oil, natural gas, etc. that has built up over the past millions of years may be completely gone within the century is unsettling.
More realistically, the actual use of "sustainable" is likely to be logistic rather than exponential growth. A logistic curve describes a trend that at first behaves exponentially, but then tapers off and reaches a cap. This is demonstrated by the Google ngrams graph of word usage for "sustainable" . Logistic growth is commonly used to model data that naturally increases exponentially but has a limiting factor, which in this case is the meaningfulness of text consisting entirely or mostly of a single word.
This comic was used in the 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker as it discusses the concept of sustainable energy.
Extrapolation of data has also appeared in the following comics 605: Extrapolating , 1204: Detail and 1281: Minifigs . And yes, "sustainable" has appeared in every paragraph so far.
[A large two-axis scatterplot graph with a caption below. The y-axis displays percentages on a logarithmic scale from 0.000001% to 1,000%, and is labeled "Frequency of use of the word "sustainable" in US English text, as a percentage of all words, by year. Source: Google NGrams." The x-axis displays years from 1950 to 2140, and is labeled "Year". Plotted data points show a high linear correlation (effectively exponential due to being a log scale), ranging from approximately 0.000005% in 1960 to approximately 0.003% in 2012. A linear trend line is drawn through the data points, and is extrapolated to the end of the graph. Four points on this trend line are marked and labled:]
(2012, ~0.003%): Present Day (2036, ~0.03%): 2036: "Sustainable" occurs an average of once per page (2061, ~0.5%): 2061: "Sustainable" occurs an average of once per sentence (2109, 100%): 2109: All sentences are just the word "sustainable" over and over.
[The trend line continues past the year 2109, exceeding 100% and breaking up into question marks.]
[Caption below the panel:] The word "sustainable" is unsustainable.


Suckville

Explanation:
Megan and Cueball are playing a card game (probably Dominion ) and Megan whips a common insult, a play on the word "suck" that adds a typical city name suffix to the end of it. Other variations are: "Losertown", "Lameville", etc.
The phrase is originally based on the ubiquitous signage you see along American roads that say "Welcome to Town X — Population Y".
Then, since Cueball one-ups Megan by indicating there is a city by that name, she can only resign herself to the fact that her smack talk did not work. Since Cueball knows where Suckville can be found in the census data, it's likely that he has received this insult in the past (maybe even from Megan) and searched through the census data to prepare a comeback for this time.
The title text informs the reader that Suckville is classified as part of the Detroit area despite not being located there. Detroit, of course, is the quintessential example of a city so run down, it might as well really be named "Suckville", or include a district of that name. In fact, the city only recently (2013) declared itself bankrupt.
(Fun fact: looking in the US Census Suckville is "corrected" to Saukville, Wisconsin , which is indeed not particularly close to Detroit, Michigan . However the population of Saukville in the 2010 census is given as 4451 for the village, and 1755 for the surrounding town municipality.)
[Megan is kneeling on the floor, playing a card game.] Megan: Hah! Megan: Welcome to Suckville–population: You . [In a frame-less panel, Cueball is sitting on the floor opposite her, also playing the game.] Cueball: Why are you using 2000 census data? Cueball: That's an old figure. [Megan turns around from the game to look at her laptop, which is sitting on the floor behind her.] Megan: I couldn't find Suckville in the 2010 census. Cueball: Huh? It's right there in SF-1 table P1. Megan: Oh. So it is. [Megan turns back to Cueball, who is looking at his cards.] Megan: Well, then. Megan: Welcome to Suckville–population: 83. Cueball: Much better.


Sigh

Explanation:
Cueball is mispronouncing the name of the British TV show, also available in the US, Downton Abbey . Mispronouncing the title as DownTOWN Abbey causes Megan to sigh because it is such a common and stupid mistake to fans of the show. Mispronouncing the title changes the meaning from being about the eponymous Yorkshire Country Estate (pronounced doun -tuhn ab -ee /ˌdaʊntən ˈæbi/) to being about a monastery in the midst of a large city (incorrectly pronounced doun-toun ab -ee /ˈdaʊnˌtaʊn ˈæbi/). In the UK the CBD, the Central Business District (the big middly bit), is simply called the "city centre".
LMFAO is a ubiquitous group in the US on radio, TV and even strange commercials with rodents riding in cars with their song, Party Rock Anthem . However, this comic is a reference to another one of their songs, "Sexy And I Know It." The relevant lyrics are:
sigh … girl look at that body sigh … girl look at that body sigh … girl look at that body ah-ah, I work out!
The title text is referring to the multiple uses of that lyric throughout the song, creating a steady rhythm.
[Cueball is standing behind Megan, who's sitting and watching TV.] Cueball: Hey, is that Downtown Abbey ? What town is it in the downtown of, anyway? Megan: *siiiiiiigh* Cueball: — girl look at that body.
[Caption below the panel:] We should thank LMFAO for giving us such a great way to respond to exasperated sighs.


Etymology-Man

Explanation:
This became the first comic in a two comic series about the Etymology-Man . The second following two comics later in 1012: Wrong Superhero .
This comic is a take on the traditional appearance of a super hero when a disaster strikes. In this case, Etymology-Man arrives, who apparently has the power of Etymology — the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. As Etymology-Man is explaining the history of the words " tsunami " and "tidal wave", the water starts rising around them. As the waters continue to rise, he continues to only explain the words, rather than attempting to save them as a superhero should. The comic is a dig at academics who prefer to talk about issues when taking action is more appropriate.
Also, the title text is a play on how useless Aquaman is (perceived to be) compared to other superheroes, as his powers — breathing underwater, speed swimming, and communicating with sea life — are very difficult for writers to make relevant. Indeed, in the case of a flood, Aquaman and his aquatic allies would be able to assist with evacuations.
The irony of the situation comes from the fact that Etymology-Man also has the power of flight and could in fact save Cueball and Ponytail if he was not so busy talking about the origin of the word "tidal wave".
Inexplicable is the fact that Cueball and Ponytail both know exactly who this "superhero" is, and ergo presumably realize that what he is telling them is useless, but they don't even attempt to get to safety. There are few possible explanations for this: perhaps they are simply accepting their fate instead of trying to escape, or even that learning cool word facts takes precendence over saving their own lives, or they have been distracted by Etymology-Man's lecture and were caught by surprise by the fast tidal wave.
[Cueball and Ponytail are facing each other, with wavy lines around them to indicate they are experiencing the shaking of an earthquake.] Cueball: Earthquake! Ponytail: We should get to a higher ground - There could be a tidal wave.
[A frame-less panel with Cueball and Ponytail, with Cueball taking a pedantic pose and raising a finger.] Cueball: You mean a tsunami. "Tidal wave" means a wave caused by tides.
[A crash is heard, followed by Etymology-Man flying in while wearing a cape.] Etymology-man: You know, that doesn't add up. Cueball and Ponytail: Etymology-man!
[Etymology-man takes a pedantic pose.] Etymology-man: What does "tidal wave" mean? There are waves caused by tides, but they're "tidal bores", and they're not cataclysmic. It can refer to the daily tide cycle, but that's obviously not what people mean when they say "a tidal wave hit". It's been obvious for centuries that these waves come from quakes. So why "tidal"?
[Panel zooms in on Etymology-man.] Etymology-man: Remember that until 2004, there weren't any clear photos or videos of tsunamis. Some modern writers even described them rearing up and breaking like surfing waves [sic] Of course, in 2004 and 2011, it was made clear to everyone that a tsunami is more like a rapid, turbulent, inrushing tide - exactly what historical accounts describe.
[Water begins to rush in. Etymology-man keeps his pedantic pose.] Etymology-man: Maybe those writing about Lisbon in 1755 used "tidal wave" not out of scientific confusion, but because it described the wave's form — a description lost in our rush to expunge "tidal wave" from English.
[The water is now waist-deep. Etymology-man continues to drone on, but the others start to panic.] Etymology-man: "Tsunami" is now the standard, and I'm not trying to change that. But let's be a tad less giddy about correcting "tidal wave" - especially when "tsunami" just means "harbor wave", which is hardly...


Baby Names

Explanation:
This comic is a list of comically terrible baby names invented by Randall. It may relate to his other comics about why he shouldn't be allowed to have access to babies.
This is a list of the names with a short description:
A further analysis of baby names is presented by Randall in the Blag post " The Baby Name Wizard ".
Renesmee (from the title text) is the name of Renesmee Cullen , who is the baby born in the book and movie Breaking Dawn to parents Edward and Bella. Edward and Bella get "Renesmee" from an amalgamation of the names of Bella's mother, Renée, and Edward's adoptive mother, Esme. Randall 's point is that all those names are terrible, but (arguably) not nearly as terrible as the name Renesmee.
[Cueball sits at a desk, thinking with his hand on his chin, his other hand holding a pen over a piece of paper. Megan stands behind him, looking over his shoulder, also with her hand on her chin.]
[Above the drawing is the list they are writing by hand.]
Names for daughter
Ponzi Eeemily Fire Fire Chipotla Astamouthe Eggsperm [sound of record scratch] Parsley Hot'n'Juicy Ann Ovari Friendly Sean (pronounced "seen") Joyst


Wrong Superhero

Explanation:
This is the second of the two comics in the series about the Etymology-Man . The first came two comics before with 1010: Etymology-Man .
The superhero, Etymology-Man, returns. And just like in his first appearance, Etymology-Man is explaining the origination of words instead of actually helping. Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.
In this comic, a group of scientists is in a lab, fighting off a giant mantis and some smaller, but still larger than normal praying mantises. One Cueball is firing a gun and Ponytail is brandishing a baseball bat, while the giant mantis grabs one Cueball by the leg, dangling him upside down. Behind the table, another Cueball is listening to Etymology Man speak. The joke here is that the scientists called the wrong hero for help. They want Entomology-Man because they are fighting a giant praying mantis and an army of smaller praying mantises (which are nonetheless much larger than a typical praying mantis - compared to the size of the people in this comic the smaller mantises appear to be 8-12 inches long). Entomology is the study of insects. Instead of calling Entomology-Man, who could probably help with fighting off the mantises, they have accidentally called Etymology-Man, due to the similarities in their names. Etymology-Man can only explain the origin of words, making him useless in this current situation.
In the title text, we find out the scientists accidentally call another superhero focused on the story of Adam and Eve in the Biblical book of Genesis. This is probably Etiology -Man (the study of causation and attribution), but might be Ontology -Man (the study of being and existence), Ethology -Man (the study of human character, with a focus on its formation and evolution), or (as a pun) Adam-ology-Man.  Or perhaps Anthropology -Man or Anthropogeny -Man.
[A giant praying mantis attacks a team of scientists, along with its legion of smaller-but-still-unusually-large mantises. Two of the scientists fight back, with a gun and a baseball bat respectively, while a third is in the mantis' clutches, held aloft by his foot, his goggles falling off his face. Bullets whiz by the giant mantis' head and a fourth scientist hides behind a desk, on which rests a microscope and an Erlenmeyer flask. A man in a cape approaches the hiding scientist.] Etymology-man: Ah, no—you wanted ENTO mology-Man, spelled with an "N". See, it's from the Greek entomon , meaning "insect," which is itself the neuter form of entomos , meaning "segmented" or... BLAM BLAM BLAM


Wake Up Sheeple

Explanation:
Cueball is going through the traditional street-protester refrain about the government having control over our lives and shouts " wake up , sheeple!" through a megaphone. Sheeple is a portmanteau of sheep and people used as a derisive term to describe people who thoughtlessly wander through their daily lives going exactly where they are "herded" by the powers that be.
However, in this comic, the Sheeple are humanoid sheep-men who have slumbered beneath the Earth for ten thousand years, and whom Cueball has inadvertently awoken with his repeated mantra (much as in 555: Two Mirrors ). The Sheeple appear to be some kind of eldritch abomination who will destroy the human race, and judging from Megan's reaction and the off-panel voices, Cueball seems to be the only one previously unaware of their existence.
The title text says the humans will be led "like lambs to the slaughter" which is a phrase that appears many times in older texts, the Bible as an example. The phrase means that someone or something would be led to its destruction without it thinking to escape from the disaster. The Sheeple are likely to take it amiss, because it indicates the uncaring frequency with which humans kill juvenile sheep.
See more Sheeple-related comics at Category:Sheeple .
[Cueball yells into a megaphone.] Cueball: Your government has turned against you! Corporations control your every thought! Cueball: Open your eyes!
[Zoomed in to Head-on view of Cueball.] Cueball: Wake up, sheeple! Wake up, sheeple! Cueball: WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!
[In a frame-less panel, Cueball takes the megaphone away from his mouth.] RUMBLE
[A half-sheep half-man creature rises through the cracking earth, holding aloft a gnarled staff.] B-A-A-A-A-A...
[Close-up on the sheep-man's eye.] Sheep-Man: TEN THOUSAND YEARS WE SLUMBERED... NOW WE RIIIIIIIISE BAAAAAA
[A clearly upset Megan goes up to Cueball, hands held out in front of her plaintively.] Megan: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! Cueball: What? But I didn't— Out-of-frame #1: He awoke the Sheeple! Out-of-frame #2: Heaven forgive us! Out-of-frame #3: All is lost!


Car Problems

Explanation:
Megan's car appears to have combusted at some point while she left it unattended. Suspecting her friends and acquaintances Cueball , Black Hat and Danish of perhaps having something to do with it, she gathers them in front of a couch and draws attention to the fact that something is just a little bit wrong with the two juxtaposed images she shows them. When she asks What is wrong with this picture , they all three take this question literally and start critiquing the picture quality, and not the subject, feigning complete ignorance about the car being on fire. When Megan exasperatedly tells them what is wrong with the picture —that her car is on fire!— they continue to act evasive by telling her that she should buy a better camera. But at least here they acknowledges that the car is on fire, as they suggest she uses the insurance money (from the car) to buy this better camera.
The title text and the dialogue suggest that Megan's friends aren't being evasive to avoid telling her the truth, they are just doing exactly what they were told. They patiently and correctly describe what is wrong with the picture. If Megan had wanted to know what was wrong with her car, then she should have asked that directly. Her friends are just being friendly when they offer to help her create the scene [again] so that she can shoot the picture correctly. And the "again" proves that they did set the car on fire, and they are not trying to deny this. But for sure they are messing with her, both by setting her car on fire, deliberately understanding her question in another way than she intended, and then even suggesting that they will set her new car on fire as well.
As for the particular details of the digital photography terms mentioned:
While this comic focuses on misunderstandings by people viewing pictures this could be also a reference to the battery fire in a stored, damaged Chevrolet Volt automobile. During a side-impact safety test, which the car passed with a five star rating at Popular Mechanics , its high voltage battery pack was damaged. Part of the test procedure includes rolling the vehicle over after the impact to check for leaking fluids; during the rollover check, the vehicle electronics were flooded with coolant. The damaged vehicle was then put into storage where its high voltage battery remained energized; three weeks later the battery spontaneously caught fire, potentially due to corrosion, and destroyed the car. GM subsequently made design changes to address the causes of the fire.
Megan's car also caught fire in 1693: Oxidation , but this time she knew for sure who did it, so no direct relation to this comic, except the poor luck Megan has with her cars.
[Megan stands in front of a projection on a screen and points with a stick to the picture shown of a blue car with yellow head lights standing on a gray road with green grass behind. She has an audience consisting of Cueball standing in front of Black Hat who is sitting and leaning back in a chair and Danish standing behind him.] Megan: Attention, please. Megan: This is a photo of my car as of two weeks ago.
[Zoom in on Megan only, still in front of the screen, but pointing on a new projection of the same car engulfed in red and yellow flames, with lots of black smoke above the flames.] Megan: And this is my car as I found it this morning. Megan: Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?
[Zoom in on her audience who all ponders, Cueball with a hand on his chin, Black Hat sitting up straight and Danish scratching the back of her head.]
[Zoom out to all four in a frame-less panel, seen from the side so the screen with the color picture is seen almost from the side. It is possible to see that there is colors on the screen but not what the picture looks like. All three respond to Megan, who is standing with her pointer down; Cueball now has his hands down, Black Hat still sits straight, and Danish now has a hand to her chin.] Cueball: The white balance, for one. Danish: Focus is a bit too close. Black Hat: The chromatic aberration suggests you bought your camera because it had "The most megapixels".
[Zoom in on Megan only, who violently swishes her pointing stick up towards the screen behind her (off panel). The other three are outside the panel to the right, and two of them makes comments. It is not possible to say which of the three speaks.] Megan: The car is on fire! Off panel voice 1: Maybe you should use the insurance money to get a better camera. Off panel voice 2: Yeah.


Kerning

Explanation:
In typography, kerning refers to the spacing between consecutive letters in printed material or the process of adjusting said spacing. Bad kerning is thus text that has so much space between letters of one word that it appears to be two words, or by including so little space between letters that they run together. A common kerning issue is an "r" and an "n" together looking like an "m". (This latter case has resulted in the slang term " keming " for this type of kerning.) Extreme behavior of bad kerning can lead to humorous or inappropriate text.
Proper kerning is more difficult than it sounds. If one were to imagine each letter as existing inside a rectangle, "A" and "V", for example, happen to be negatives of one another space-wise, and as a result if an "A" was simply set alongside a "V" (or vice versa) where the rectangles do not overlap, the spacing would end up looking unusually large. Thus, "AV" and "VA" sequences have to be specially programmed to overlap slightly.
Kerning has been an issue in typography since the early era of printing presses and movable type but has taken on new challenges with digital printing. Typical non-designers using basic word processing software don't pay much attention to kerning. A good graphic designer, however, can compensate for bad kerning by individually adjusting the spacing between problem letters. People who specialize in graphic design or layout (and, thus, who are exposed to digital text on a regular basis) can become hyper-sensitive to bad kerning, seeing it in signs or other printed materials prepared by people without such sensitivity to bad kerning.
In the comic, the kerning in the sign is badly done: the spacing between C and I (in "City"), between C and E (in "Offices"), and even slightly between F and I (also in "Offices") is inconsistent. The space between the C and E is almost as wide as the space between the words. One character is clearly frustrated while the other character doesn't notice the problem at all.
The comic explains that once a person learns what good kerning is, they will get irritated by shoddy kerning in the future. And since it is very irritating to be annoyed every time this happens, Randall suggest that you teach this to someone you really hate. Unfortunately, the comic itself has also taught us to be annoyed. Th a nks, R an da ll.
Kerning was mentioned in the title text of 590: Papyrus , a comic about the font Papyrus. This is a comic in the " My Hobby " series, and the suggestion of teaching someone about kerning to annoy them sounds like it could become a new hobby for Randall.
Incidentally, Google Search features an Easter egg regarding this very topic: searching for the word " kerning " causes every instance of that word to be badly overspaced. On the other hand, searching for " keming " will cause every instance to be even more badly underspaced.
The title text is written by Randall explaining that as he was writing this comic about kerning, he was very self-conscious of his own handwriting. The act of thinking about kerning (and likely, the act of drawing an example of such bad kerning) made him aware of it in his own writing, and in fact, he kerns the caption oddly, with, for example, the T in "them" hanging over the top of the H, but this is a common quirk of his. He probably hates the person who made him aware of this, although it gave him this idea for a comic (that if he is correct, will make a lot of people hate him now).  This aspect suggests a parallel with 972: November , which also suggests the idea of annoying a person by calling their attention to something which usually does not merit it.
[There is a poorly-kerned sign on the side of a building. Two Cueball-like guys are standing in front of it. The first guy has his hands in fists up in front of him and a black cloud over his head.] C I T Y O F F I C E S First guy: Argh! Second guy: What? [Caption below the frame:] If you really hate someone, teach them to recognize bad kerning.


Valentine Dilemma

Explanation:
Both Megan and Cueball are agonizing over what to get each other for Valentine's Day. Both of them seem to consider the holiday unnecessary and artificial, but worry that failure to celebrate it might upset their romantic partner. Because they're considering this separately, neither seems to realize that the other has a similar response. This results in both panicking and doing weird things.
At the heart of the way they are acting is the prisoner's dilemma . This is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game theory , which shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest to do so. Wikipedia has a great example of prisoner's dilemma, which illustrates it very well:
Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:
If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison (and vice versa) If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve one year in prison (on the lesser charge).
In this way, both Cueball and Megan are kept separate, each not knowing what the other is going to do for Valentine's Day, in what the comic title terms the Valentine Dilemma. Both do weird things for Valentine's Day, which ends up being the perfect result to the Valentine Dilemma, as both end up with the same level of weirdness and don't go for the grand gesture.
The title text combines the two dilemma scenarios in an absurd juxtaposition, with the reader ("you") choosing from the Valentine's Day gift-no gift dilemma and the other person choosing to betray the reader in an armed-robbery case (which might be why they are testifying against you in the first place).
The Prisoner's Dilemma has been referenced before, in 696: Strip Games .
[Cueball standing with hand on chin.] Cueball: Flowers seem so... trite. Something homemade? Easy to look halfhearted.
[A frame-less panel of Megan sitting at a computer, also with hand on chin.] Megan: Valentine's day is a corporate construct. Megan: But hard to opt out of. Megan: I don't want to be a corporate tool or an inconsiderate jerk.
[Cueball pacing.] Cueball: How do I fight cliché? I could get her a gift on a different day. Cueball: But what am I proving?
[Megan leaning back with stapler in hand.] Megan: It's such a contrived ritual. But maybe rituals are necessary social glue.
[Zoomed in on Cueball panicking.] Cueball: Forty presents. No, none! No, give her five items and then steal two from her. Cueball: OK, breathe. Keep it together.
[Zoomed in on Megan sweating, still holding the stapler.] Megan: And what if he gets me something and I don't reciprocate? Megan: Prisoners dilemma! Megan: AAAAAAAAAA!!
[Cueball and Megan talking. Cueball is holding a basket and a jar of hammers. Megan's hand is stapled to her face.] Cueball: I got you Easter candy and a jar of hammers. Megan: I panicked and stapled my hand to my face. Cueball: We overthought this. Megan: Yes.


Backward in Time

Explanation:
Cueball / Randall creates this formula which helps him wait for long stretches of time which goes increasingly faster into the past as more time goes by, which gives him the effect of looking like the time goes by quickly.  Which assists in the waiting process.
As far as the actual math is concerned, the formula is an exponential function (i.e. the variable appears in the exponent). The effect that the function grows faster and faster as p grows, is due to T(p) being exponential. More precisely, when you repeatedly add some constant to the exponent, you will repeatedly multiply some (other) constant with the value of the function. Compare how "slow" a value grows by adding even high values (1, 1001, 2001, 3001, 4001, 5001…) and how fast it grows by multiplying even low values (1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000…)
Now, the function has to be adjusted so that, as Randall put it, "the time spent in each part of the past is loosely proportional to how well I know it." The most important adjustment is putting p to the power of three. That lowers the amount added to the exponent for low values (0.1³=0.001, 0.2³=0.008, i.e. only 7/1000 have been added for 10% workflow) and increases the amount for high values (0.8³=0.512, 0.9³=0.729, i.e. more than 1/5 has been added for 10% workflow). That means the recent past will pass even slower and the historic past even faster than it already does by choosing an exponential function.
The remaining adjustments are technical. The coefficient in front of p³ adjusts the constant by which the result will be multiplied while adding some constant to p, while it also roughly ensures that p=1 yields the lifetime of the universe. The 3 added to the product in the exponent further adjusts the actual values of the power without touching the slope (the multiplicative constant). In the parentheses, e³ is subtracted to put the time to 0 when p=0. Otherwise the function would start approx. 20 yrs and 1 month ago. For bigger p, this offset does not matter much. Imagine subtracting 20 yrs from the lifetime of the universe!
Finally, the result is subtracted from the current date for aesthetical reasons. The formula could tell you "20 yrs ago", or it could read "February 1992". Randall decided the latter would be better.
There is actually a mathematical error in this comic; the inverse function in grey writing off at the bottom right of the main formula involves a square root, when the actual inverse of Randall's main function would involve a cube root.  In addition, this function does not contain the current date, meaning that T, in the inverse, refers to how long ago a point in time was, rather than the point in time itself.  When the T in the inverse is 20, it means that the date referenced by T is 20 years ago.
The punchline "Swoosh!" is about how fast the last few percents of Cueball's download happen in "such a rush". For most humans waiting for a download to complete tends to become really boring and progress would instead seem to get slower and slower.
(Also, the workout website, Fitocracy has been mentioned previously in xkcd.)
Note that as of the time that this page was last cached, the comic was uploaded at 14.278499285807% progress.
When I have a boring task to get through — a three-hour lecture, a giant file download, or a long term point goal in fitocracy — I use this formula to convert the percentage completed (p) into a date:
T=(Current Date) - (e^(20.3444*p^3+3) - e^3) years
When the task is 0% done, it gives today's date, and as I make progress, I move further and further back in time
(inverse given in lighter colors) Inverse: p = sqrt((ln(T+e^3)-3)/20.3444)
[Line Graph explaining the correlation between completion percentages and temporal deltas. 0% = now (Date of comic is 2012-02-14T00:00-0500, approx. 1329195600 UNIX) 10% = September 2011 20% = 2008 30% = 1997 40% = 1958 50% = 1776 60% = 405 AD 70% = 22,000 years ago 80% = 671,000 years ago 90% = 55 million years ago 100% = 13.8 billion years ago ]
It moves slowly through the first few years, then steadily accelerates. I tuned the formula so the time spent in each part of the past is loosely proportional to how well I know it. This means I hit familiar landmarks with each bit of progress, giving me a satisfying sense of movement.
[The following are panels detailing completion percentages, correlated time periods, and notable events from this time period.]
7.308% December 18, 2011 Around this time: Kim Jong-Il dies. US leaves Iraq.
31.12% February 1995 Around this time: Windows 95 debuts. OJ found not guilty.
47.91% 1844 Around this time: Rubber vulcanized, bicycle invented, wrench patented.
70.33% 24,000 years ago Around this time: Caves painted, ceramic art made. Neanderthals extinct.
90.42% 68 million years ago Around this time: First flowering plants.  Chicxulub impact kills off most dinosaurs.
100% 13.76 billion years ago Around this time: Universe begins. First stars ignite.
Download complete.
[Cueball watches a download progress on a laptop in amazement and happiness.  Megan stands nearby and looks at Cueball with a bemused posture.] Cueball: Swoosh! Watching all that time blur past is such a rush! Megan: So...you've tried to make an extreme sport out of... waiting . Cueball: Swoosh!


Good Cop, Dadaist Cop

Explanation:
This comic is a play on the well known Good Cop/Bad Cop (where one interrogator is nice and friendly and the other is mean and intimidating) police interrogation strategy and the artistic movement Dadaism .
Dadaism is an artistic movement which by its definition is irrational. The movement embraces the free flow of unreasoned thought and prizes nonsense and rejection of established norms. As such, the entire concept of "Good Cop, Dadaist Cop" could be considered a dadaist concept in itself.
"Good Cop/Bad Cop" is a psychological tactic that may be employed during joint questioning or interrogation. The interrogators isolate the suspect, then one of the interrogators acts aggressively and threatens the suspect (the "bad cop") and the other acts friendly and helpful in comparison, offering the suspect reassurance and protection from the bad cop if they co-operate (the "good cop").  If successful, it deceives the suspect into believing they must choose to trust one of the interrogators and the suspect chooses to co-operate with the good cop, or merely complies out of fear of the bad cop.
The comic starts with the "Good Cop", the male police officer, and the "Dadaist Cop", Ponytail , working out their plan to interrogate the suspect, Hairy . After the Good Cop makes a few statements, intended to build trust with Hairy, and leaves to get coffee, Ponytail enters the interrogation and starts asking Hairy absurd questions. Hairy quickly becomes agitated, and questions what is wrong with Ponytail. Ponytail responds "What's wrong with ART?", which could suggest she believes the interrogation is artwork and should not be questioned. On the other hand, actual responses would break the Dadaism pattern.
Good Cop/Bad Cop hinges on the suspect's fear and distrust of the intentions of the bad cop; thankfully for the police, Ponytail's "Dadaist Cop" seems to be a successful Bad Cop too, judging by the suspect's fear of her irrational, unpredictable, and potential crazy behavior (not to mention loud and aggressive mannerisms).
The title text builds on the joke as by asking a suspect to give the whereabouts of the money in a dadaist manner, which would be completely useless in finding it.  Such a statement could be used as a confession though.
[Two police officers, a bald male and a Ponytail, both wearing peaked caps with white emblems, are standing in front of a window in a wall, with an electric socket in the bottom right corner. They look through the window into an interrogation chamber holding the handcuffed suspect Hairy, who is sitting on a chair. A lamp with the bulb beneath the shade hangs over Hairy. The lamp is lit as shown by lines indicating the lamp shines light.] Male officer: All right, let's try Good Cop, Dadaist Cop.
[The male police officer is seated in front of Hairy on another chair holding a hand with palm up in front of him. Hairy has his cuffed hands in his lap and his hair is in disarray.] Male officer: Look, you're a good guy. We can work this out. Hey, lemme get us some coffee.
[In a slim frame-less panel the male officer leaves and Ponytail enters carrying a rolled up paper in her hand.]
[Ponytail walks in holding the folded out paper out in one hand while pointing at it with the other hand. It is a document of indeterminate contents, but there are both text and figures on it. She threatens Hairy who pulls his leg up under him and hold his cuffed hand up in front of him leaning back away from her while three drops of sweat fly of the top of his head.] Ponytail: See this? It's Mark Zuckerberg's mortgage. Ponytail: So why is it written in Church Latin?
[Ponytail physically rattles Hairy's head holding it in both hands, lines around his heads and below her elbow show the movement. Hairy has his hands straight in front of him.] Ponytail: WHY ARE MY BONES SO SMALL? Hairy: What's WRONG with you?! Ponytail: What's wrong with ART?


First Post

Explanation:
Many news websites allow users to post comments on an article. The intention is that users can debate the stance(s) or implication(s) made by the article. On most sites, comments are displayed in chronological order. This puts the oldest comments at the top and newest at the bottom.
There are many pitfalls to allowing comments, but this comic refers to one in particular: most users are too busy to read more than just the top few comments. Therefore, if you were able to control the content of those comments, your opinions would be the ones that the majority of users read. If you pay people to do nothing but read the site, you ensure that they will be the first ones to see the article and that their comments (that you pay them to write) will be at the top of the page. In this scenario, the comments being posted appear to convey a particular political belief. The advantage of this is, according to Randall , that it would be much cheaper to employ a college student to perform that task than pay a website for an advertisement. Also, the fact that it is a comment posted by another reader would make it seem as though the opinion was coming from the general population and not a politician or company, as an advertisement would imply. And $20/hour was (and as of this writing still is) significantly higher than the minimum wage , so you'd have no trouble finding willing participants among college students (who are often broke).
This comic is a continuation of 937: TornadoGuard which stated "the problem with star ratings". Apparently, every possible comment ordering policy has its own problems.
The title text refers to systems like Reddit's conversation threading which allow users to vote comments up or down and to sort them by the resulting "karma score" (total up-votes minus total down-votes). The same problem persists to some extent: after a few comments are posted and some votes are cast, the handful of comments having received the highest scores among the first dozen of so will receive far better chances at being seen and voted on than comments posted later, and will solidify their places in a positive feedback loop. In this way, a few persistent voices can still dominate the discussion, contrary to the claim in the title text, thus creating irony.
The comic's title refers to a once-common form of online posturing where the first user to see the article will comment "First post" or even just "First". The intent is that everyone else see that they were there first and, therefore, must be somehow better than you. This is referred to in both 269: TCMP and 1258: First .
Since this comic's publication several news sites have elected to remove all comments, in part to prevent a few voices dominating the conversation .
[Single panel showing a bar graph with two gray vertical bars, a dollar amount above each bar, the vertical axis on the left side with tick marks every $250,000, and the horizontal axis at the bottom with a descriptive label below each bar under the axis.  The first bar is much taller than the second.]
[First bar:] Amount: $1,500,000 Label: Cost to buy an ad on every story on a major news site every day until the election
[Second bar:] Amount: $200,000 Label: Cost to pay five college students $20/hour to camp the site 24/7 and post the first few comments the moment a story goes up, giving you the last word in every article and creating an impression of peer consensus
[Caption below the panel:] The problem with posting comments in the order they're submitted


Orion Nebula

Explanation:
The Orion nebula is a diffuse nebula situated south of the three stars that compose Orion's Belt in the Orion constellation . In terms of the comic, it is the middle "star" in the sword/dong of Orion. Dong is an American slang word for penis. The star appears fuzzy to sharp-eyed observers, and the nebulosity is obvious through binoculars or a small telescope.
When the speaker says "We are no strangers to controversy" he is probably referring to Pluto 's demotion from planet to a dwarf planet / plutoid . It could also be a reference to Rick Astley's song "Never gonna give you up", the original line is "We're no strangers to love".
The title text is a quip about how small and off-kilter the hips are in Orion the constellation compared to the rest of its body.
[Cueball stands behind a lectern decorated with the initials of the International Astronomical Union. There is a banner above him that also says 'International Astronomical Union,' decorated with small stars.] Cueball: Welcome to IAU Symposium #279.
[Side view of Cueball standing on a podium behind the lectern] Cueball: We are no strangers to controversy, and we will not shy away from the tough issues. Cueball: Which brings us to the subject at hand:
[A projection of the Orion constellation appears behind Cueball with a white arrow superimposed on the image pointing at the area between Orion's legs. Symposium attendees are off-screen to the bottom and right of the panel.] Cueball: It's time to talk about the fact that Orion clearly has a dong. Attendee #1 (off-screen): It's hard to miss. Attendee #2 (off-screen): We could keep telling people it's a sword. Attendee #3 (off-screen): C'mon, no one's buying that anymore.


Business Plan

Explanation:
This one has the art and feel of very early xkcd comics, even when those stick figures did not appear by that time.
Beret Guy has developed (or spontaneously implemented) a "business plan" whereby he lures seagulls to an area of a beach utilizing breadcrumbs. Once the gulls converge on the area, he sets up a sign reading "GULLS FOR SALE" with a jar for money. Though Beret Guy probably expects to profit, the confused reactions of other people in the last panel indicate nobody is buying, and the limited number of gulls, four, is low enough that their sale might not even finance the breadcrumbs. In real life, there is no market for seagulls, nor will there ever be in the foreseeable future. [ citation needed ]
The title text is a reference to the phrase " Elevator pitch ", which is also similar to "investor pitch". The point of an elevator pitch is to have a synopsis of your idea that you are capable of delivering on a moment's notice in the time it takes to ride the elevator, about 30 seconds. This way, when you get that once-in-a-career opportunity to pitch your plan to the one person who can make it happen because you just happened to catch the same elevator, you are ready. The reason the elevator pitch is so simplistic is because the same sort of person that would think selling seagulls is a viable business model is likely the same sort of person to make a childish elevator pitch. This also pokes fun at the idea of people sweating over their pitch with such seriousness, when Beret Guy's pitch is literally a childish exclamation. Wheeee!
[6 small panels extend across the width of the comic...]
[Beret Guy stands on a shoreline and takes in the environment in silent contemplation.]
[In a frame-less panel, Beret Guy heads off with an idea fresh in his head.]
[Beret Guy saunters back with a jar, some bread, and a signboard.]
[Beret Guy tears the bread off into pieces.]
[Beret Guy sets up the signboard, with its contents yet to be revealed.]
[Beret Guy heads off and waits for the plan to unfold.]
[A large full-width panel below the first 6 small panels shows the same beach, this time with Megan and Cueball standing in front of and reading the sign. Cueball scratches his head. The bread has attracted quite a few gulls. There is a label on the jar.] Jar label: $ Sign: Gulls for sale


So It Has Come To This

Explanation:
The line "it has come to this" is usually seen on the verge of the climactic confrontation between the villain and their arch rival, or when one character has to unleash their utmost ability etc. Despite its dramatic tone, however, the statement is a content-free tautology, true in all possible scenarios in which time progresses in a forward direction. Accordingly, Cueball is saying it when Megan tells him that they have run out of cat food, a relatively trivial problem that could be solved with a quick trip to the grocery store.
The title text is a follow-up on the comic dialogue. When Megan replies in confusion, "Come to what?" Cueball then uses another instantly-dramatic phrase that keeps his words ambiguous, only leaving her in the dark. The phrase, "You. Me. This moment." is used when brevity is key, and no information should be leaked to anybody listening. Those conversing then continue the important discussion elsewhere, allowing them to speak more openly.
[Megan holds up an open and empty bag with the white silhouette of a cat's face on it. Cueball looks down at the bag.] Megan: We ran out of cat food. Cueball: So Cueball: It has come to this.
[Caption below the panel:] Protip: If you're not sure what to say, try "So it has come to this" – it creates instant dramatic tension and is a valid observation in literally any situation.
Other comics which advocate using catch-all phrases as standard responses for any comment:
The phrase "So it has come to this" is also said in: 225: Open Source .


Late-Night PBS

Explanation:
This comic examines the way the world seems different for adults today compared with how we remember it as a child, due to complex subtext or naïvety, to a humorous extreme, and with a specific reference to television programs for children.
PBS is a US public television network known for highbrow and educational programming, and shows a high proportion of BBC programming. The show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was a light-hearted educational game show that ran from 1991 to 1995. In the show players followed geography-based clues to find out where a master criminal, Carmen Sandiego, was going, and catch her. After catching (or failing to catch) Carmen Sandiego, a character called The Chief would congratulate or encourage the players. Rockapella was an a cappella band featured on the show that gave clues, punctuated the show with humor, and closed the show.
Megan recounts her surprise as to the nature of programming on late night PBS to Cueball . She claims to have fallen asleep after watching Downton Abbey and woken up to see that Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego is still making new episodes, but is significantly darker than she remembers it. The host has aged poorly (the show would have been off the air for 20 years) and developed a drinking problem; the locations the child contestants visit are traumatizing; and the children are clearly freaked out. In the end they find Carmen Sandiego hiding behind a Dutch bookcase, an allusion to The Diary of Anne Frank , thus implying that instead of aiding legitimate law enforcement in finding thieves they have been aiding the Nazis in their search for Jews (and others) to murder. The Chief admonishes the children for their actions and Rockapella glares at the children disapprovingly until the children break down in tears.
After Megan concludes her story, Cueball remarks that he did not remember the show being that dark. In response Megan replies that as kids, they may not have been able to understand the darker subtext of the show. It is true that some programs intended for children often have subtle themes for adults who may be watching the show with their children that the children do not usually remember or pick up on. The joke is that although young viewers may not be able to pick up on everything, they would certainly have noticed if the show was as dark as Megan described. [ citation needed ]
The title text describes the next program, an episode of The Joy of Painting , in which a depressingly weary painter paints unhappy trees. This contrasts with the usual mood of the show where Bob Ross was upbeat and the components of his paintings were described as "happy little" objects. Megan then postulates that either people are breaking into the television station to produce horrible programming, or she is experiencing hallucinations due to her sleep aid Ambien . This gives hallucination as an alternate explanation for the main comic.
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was originally an educational video game released in 1985. Carmen Sandiego was a mysterious character that the player tracked around the globe, attempting to find clues as to where she was heading to next. The game helped players learn geography and facts about the world while having fun. The video game inspired the TV show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? .
The show was split into three rounds. In the first round, there were three child contestants, called “gumshoes” on the show, who scored points for every question they answered correctly. The top two scoring gumshoes moved onto the next round, where they had to play a game based on the card game Concentration , in which they had to find the thief, warrant, and loot in the correct order. Whichever gumshoe did so captured the thief, saved the loot, and moved onto the next round, where they had a chance to catch Carmen Sandiego herself. Success was not always guaranteed in this round, as contestants had to plant flags correct on seven different countries in a continent within a very short time. If successful, they captured Carmen and won the grand prize (a trip to a place of their choosing in the continental US). If not, Carmen would escape and the contestant would win a lesser prize (such as a computer).
The role of The Chief was played by Lynne Thigpen . She explained the mission to the contestants, and gave some clues to the thief's last whereabouts. When the mission was over The Chief would appear and congratulate them if successful or console them if Carmen got away.
The host of the TV show was an actor named Greg Lee . His role was to ask the contestants questions, provide clues, and tell them which flags to plant on the map in the final round, as well as engage with The Chief and Rockapella to keep the show moving.
Rockapella was an a cappella group (a group that sings without any instruments), which sang the theme song to Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego. Rockapella also acted as a "house band", singing songs while the contestants transitioned between events, providing clues, and playing pranks on the host along with other gags. At the end of each show, the host and the episode's winning contestant would shout "Do it, Rockapella!" at which point the band would sing the show's theme song.
The locations the contestants visit in the episode depicted in this comic seem to require traveling backwards in time (1993 for the Battle of Mogadishu, 1975-1979 for the Cambodian killing fields, and 1944 for the arrest of Anne Frank). Episodes of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego did not deal with this, but its successor, Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? , did.
[Megan with disheveled hair is rubbing sleep out of her eyes and talking to Cueball.] Megan: Have you ever watched PBS late at night? Megan: I fell asleep after Downton and woke up at like 3 AM.
[The next panel is split in two. The upper portion, which is not in a frame, continues Megan's dialogue, while the lower part, in a frame, shows a drunk game-show host (indicated with two small bobbles and a third exploding next to his head). He has stubble and only little hair on his head. He is holding a bottle in one hand and the other hand is up over a TV monitor showing a black field filled with crosses, presumably graves, going out to the far off horizon. In front of him are three kids, who are contestants in the game. They stand behind three lecterns to the left. The first kid is a boy with thin black hair, who has turned away from the monitor. The middle kid is a girl with blonde hair in a ponytail who looks at the host, and the last kid looks like Cueball and he looks down at his lectern.] Megan (off-panel): Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was back on, except the host hadn't aged well and he'd clearly been drinking. Megan (off-panel): Every question took them to some horrible place like Mogadishu or the Cambodian killing fields.
[In a room with tiles on the floor, a bookshelf full of books has been moved away from the wall revealing that is was a door to be opened with a hidden room behind it. Megan continues to speak, her text is above the shelf but inside the frame this time.] Megan (off-panel): The kids were freaked out, but they kept playing. Eventually they were told they'd found Carmen Sandiego hiding behind a bookshelf in a Dutch apartment.
[Megan has stopped rubbing her eyes but still talks to Cueball.] Megan: The Chief appeared and asked "Are you proud of what you've become?" Megan: Then Rockapella walked out and just glared at the kids until they started crying. Cueball: I, uh, don't remember the old show being that dark. Megan: Maybe we were too young to pick up on it.


Error Code

Explanation:
Complex computer programs often incorporate a numbering system for errors that are anticipated might occur. This way, the code can be referenced to tech support so that there is some feedback from the program as to what is wrong (akin to a car dashboard with multiple lights telling you if you have a battery problem or an engine problem or a cooling problem, etc.) Most people have seen at least one error code in their life. Perhaps the most famous error code is seen in web browsers, 404 (not found). Another common code is 403 (forbidden).
The guy at the computer gets the error "-41", but cannot tell even what program it comes from. So, the other guy decides to look up the code in a book apparently called Error Codes . The book then indicates to go to a lake instead of how to resolve the computer problem. Which seems like a great solution because it would be very relaxing! The panel with the image of the lake is fairly rare as far as xkcd comics go, in that it is approaching a more realistic style.
The beep codes referenced in the title text refers to the error codes produced by motherboards. Because the motherboard is sort of the "heart" of the computer, the designers apparently did not want to rely on any form of error display that might be compromised by the error itself (i.e. a visual display). Instead, motherboards typically have a code consisting of beeps from the system "PC" speaker which is expected to work without error in most situations, as it's wired directly to the motherboard. In a sort of morse-code -type system, certain lengths and numbers of beeps refer to different errors like memory problems, video card problems, etc. The one quick beep that occurs on boot sequences is the POST (Power On Self-Test) beep, which detects vital parts of the system, like motherboard, memory, monitor, etc. The beep indicates that everything necessary to boot is present. Anyone who has built a few computers is probably familiar with less happy beep sequences.
[A guy sits at a computer, while a friend takes a book off a shelf behind him.] Computer guy: "Error -41"? That's helpful. It doesn't even say which program it's from! Friend: -41? I'll look it up...
[In a frame-less panel, the friend looks at the book.] Friend: It says -41 is: "Sit by a lake."
[The two walk.]
[The two sit down.]
[A large, in-color painting of a lake with pond lilies.]
[The two are still sitting.] Computer guy: I don't know where you got that book, but I like it. Friend: Hasn't been wrong yet.
It is possible Randall wanted comic number 1024 to be about computers because 1024 is a significant number in computer systems: it is exactly 2 10 , and as such is sometimes used instead of 1000 as the power constant for file sizes for the sake of easier binary arithmetic. This was referenced in 1000: 1000 Comics .
A book suggesting a more or less unrelated solution which is accepted anyway is also pulled from a shelf in 330 .


Tumblr

Explanation:
Tumblr is a microblogging service, which has become a home for lots of animated gifs and other internet memes , as well as other assorted novelties.
The phrase that Cueball used to use when he heard a random phrase was "would be a good name for a band." With the advent of Tumblr, his go-to response has shifted because of the proliferation of Tumblr blogs with strange names such as "pissvortex", "hardpee", "iguanamouth", and "internetslug".
In the title text he muses on the fact that Dot Tumblr Dot Com would be an awful band name. There could be several reasons for this, but he mentions that it would be hard to direct fans to the band's website. As an example, someone who hears "www.thedottumblrdotcom.com" might instead write it out as "www.the.tumblr.com.com" since '.' is often pronounced as "dot." [ citation needed ] If the band's website was hosted on Tumblr, then their website would be "dottumblrdotcom.tumblr.com", but could be heard as ".tumblr.com.tumblr.com".
[Megan and Cueball are talking.] Megan: You know those weird noises from my attic? Megan: Turns out some raccoons got in and were operating this, like, raccoon sex dungeon. Cueball: ...dot tumblr dot com.
[Caption below the panel:] For me, "...Dot tumblr dot com" has been gradually replacing "...would be a good name for a band."
Raccoons also feature in a disgusting situation in 1565: Back Seat .


Compare and Contrast

Explanation:
A reference to the most well-known sonnet in the English-speaking world: William Shakespeare's " Sonnet 18 ", the first line of which is: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". In this comic Randall sets about this in a typically goal-oriented chart, as opposed to the rather more romantic poetry of the Bard.
"Thee" is a form of the archaic second-person singular pronoun "thou". In Shakespeare's day, English had more second-person pronouns in common use, thou/thee (informal/singular), and you (formal/plural). This is similar to second-person pronouns in many modern European languages, such as French. Wikipedia has a nice chart for all of English's personal pronouns, current and archaic.
For both the chart and the original sonnet, whether or not the work is autobiographical is unknown.  Also unknown is the identity of the person whom each work refers to.  It is believed that Sonnet 18 is addressed to a young man .
The lines are:
The title text is a reference to Ron Paul , a 2012 Republican candidate for President who was on top in the Republican Primary against a few other challengers for the nomination. Ron Paul was frequently represented on the internet using similar language to the title text (with Paul offering an alternative to typical Republican and Democratic candidates). Paul was seen by many as an alternative because of his Libertarian views.
[A checklist comparing "thee" to "a summer's day" for a number of properties, displayed as separate rows in a table with 3 columns. The properties are shown in the first column with no header label, and the second and third columns have a header label of "Thee" and "A Summer's Day" with a checkmark in one or both columns for each row.]
[Row 1] Property: Fair, Temperate Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 2] Property: Hot, Sticky Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 3] Property: Short Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Not Checked
[Row 4] Property: Harbinger of Hurricane Season Thee: Not Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 5] Property: Required for a Good Beach Party Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 6] Property: Major Cause of Heat Stroke in the Elderly Thee: Not Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 7] Property: Linked to Higher Rates of Juvenile Delinquency Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 8] Property: Sometimes Too Stifling Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked
[Row 9] Property: Arrested for Releasing Snakes in Library Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Not Checked
[Row 10] Property: Difficult to Focus on Work While I'm In Thee: Checked A Summer's Day: Checked


Pickup Artist

Explanation:
Hairy and Cueball are sitting at a table with drinks. Hairy tells Cueball that he's learned some pickup artist tricks. Cueball is appalled, declaring that pickup artists are "dehumanizing creeps". Hairy argues that he's simply learning new tactics such as " negging " (undercutting the target's self-esteem so that she'll feel vulnerable and crave approval), evidently oblivious to the fact that he's proving Cueball's point. Rejecting Cueball's advice to simply talk to women "like a fucking human being", Hairy sets off to try out the technique.
Meanwhile, Black Hat and Danish are sitting at another table. Black Hat leaves to roll a bowling ball through the restroom stalls to smash the feet of anyone there using them. In North America, public restrooms usually have a 1-foot (30 cm) gap between the floor and the bottom of the stall dividers. As people sit down to use a stall most of the time, their feet would be vulnerable to being hit in sequence. Perhaps Black Hat is going for a 'strike'. Hairy approaches Danish, while Cueball looks on and says "oh no" — seemingly recognizing Danish and anticipating the disaster Hairy is walking into, or perhaps simply not wanting Hairy to use his tricks on anyone.
Hairy makes an attempt at "negging" by suggesting that Danish's fruit plate reflects a need to lose weight. Danish, naturally being a master at psychological manipulation, immediately realizes his game, and crushes him utterly by taking another shot in the psychological dark — telling him that he's trapped in an endless cycle of failure because he's ultimately a mediocre person and will never do anything of value with his life. Demoralized, Hairy declares that he needs to go home and think about his life; Danish tells him, "It won't help.” (This may be a reference to the "deathsticks" scene in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones .) Of course, once Black Hat discovers his shenanigans, Hairy might not have much more life to rethink.
The title text refers to Michael Jordan , a very popular and accomplished basketball player who played for the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards . His name is often used as a noun to denote that someone is the best in their field, which is later used in 1120: Blurring the Line .
The pick up subject and Hairy returned in 1178: Pickup Artists , where he tries to improve his skills (which he must have felt he needed after this experience), by hanging out with other pickup artists, thus the plural version of the comic title. This comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (only plural form of artist the difference).
[Hairy and Cueball sitting at a table.] Hairy: I've been learning tricks from pickup artist forums. Cueball: Pickup artists are dehumanizing creeps who see relationships as adversarial and women as sex toys.
[Close-up of Hairy's head, with a faint outline of Black hat and Danish sitting at a table in the background.] Hairy: No, it's just a bunch of tips! Like negging : you belittle chicks to undermine their self-confidence so they'll be more vulnerable and seek your approval.
[Close-up of Cueball's head.] Cueball: Just talk to them like a fucking human being. Hairy: Nah, that's a sucker's game. Hairy: Ok— wish me luck!
[Small frame across top of panel reads Meanwhile... and Danish is sitting at a table with Black hat standing next to the table holding a bowling ball under his arm.] Black Hat: I'm going to the bathroom to roll a bowling ball down under the line of stalls. Danish: Cool.
[Close up of Cueball's head, with Hairy approaching Danish's table in the background.] Cueball: Oh no.
[Hairy and Danish at a table. Hairy is standing up and leaning on the table.] Hairy: You look like you're on a diet. That's great! Hairy: How's the fruit plate?
[Close-up of Danish's head.] Danish: Ooh- are we negging? Danish: Let me try!
[Close-up of Danish's head, with her hand raised.] Danish: You look like you're going to spend your life having one epiphany after another, always thinking you've finally figured out what's holding you back, and how you can finally be productive and creative and turn your life around. Danish: But nothing will ever change. That cycle of mediocrity isn't due to some obstacle. It's who you are . Danish: The thing standing in the way of your dreams Danish: is that the person having them is you .
[Hairy and Danish at a table. Hairy is standing up.] Danish: Ok, your turn! Ooh, try insulting my hair! Hairy: I think I need to go home and think about my life. Danish: It won't help.


Communication

Explanation:
This comic is divided into two parts, the first two rows of panels and then the third one.
The first part demonstrates a failed attempt at communication:
The holes in the sidewalk are fairly deep, about one person deep; unaware and careless people don't notice them when they come upon them, which makes them symbolic of any problem or danger one can encounter in life, and could avoid if properly warned or careful.
The second part demonstrates a much more successful attempt at communication:
The title text references the requirement that "communication" is a two-sided process, and just because you think you have made your point clear this does not mean that you have "communicated" the information to them: if they failed to understand, then it may as well mean that you failed to communicate, and not necessarily that they are bad at listening. And if you always encounter this situation, then it is you who are confused about how communication works. See also 1984: Misinterpretation .
[White Hat looks down at a large gap in the walkway; a thought bubble with a warning symbol and an image of the gap appears above his head.]
[White Hat walks to the right, away from the gap, and encounters Hairy, to which he speaks (in iconographic speech bubble form) while pointing toward the gap, attempting to inform him about the gap. A thought bubble appears above Hairy's head with an image of White Hat pointing.]
[White Hat continues, waving his arms, still talking about the gap. Hairy's thought bubble continues to contain images of White Hat, now gesturing frantically.]
[Hairy shrugs in a nonplussed manner, and White Hat leaves off the right side of the frame. Both have thought bubbles displaying the other's reaction.]
[White Hat continues to the right and comes across Megan. He tells her about the reaction of Hairy (still all in iconographic form); she simultaneously tries to tell him about a gap and gestures off to the right of the frame.]
[White Hat and Megan both leave the frame. Megan exits left thinking of White Hat's reactions; White Hat exits to the right while thinking about both Hairy and Megan's reactions.]
[Megan (still thinking about White Hat) encounters Hairy (who is also still thinking about White Hat).]
[Megan and Hairy talk about White Hat.]
[Megan and Hairy (now without his hair) continue talking about White Hat as they exit the frame to the left.]
[A commotion is heard from the left.] Explosion to the left: !!! ** !!
[Megan and Hairy (still without his hair) have fallen into the gap in the walkway. A commotion is then also heard from the right.] Explosion to the right: !!! ** *
[White Hat has fallen into another gap.]
[Beret Guy looks down at a large gap in the walkway; a thought bubble with a warning symbol and an image of the gap appears above his head.]
[Beret Guy runs off the frame to the right.]
[Beret Guy meets Cueball and reaches out to him. He tells him (still in iconographic form) that Cueball should take Beret Guy's hand. Cueball has a thought bubble of Beret Guy with his arm stretched out.]
[Beret Guy takes Cueball's hand and leads him along to the left. Cueball's thought bubble has two question marks around Beret Guy.] Cueball: ? ?
[Beret Guy leads Cueball to the gap and points it out to him.]
[Beret Guy and Cueball walk away from the gap to the right, now both thinking about the gap with a warning symbol above it.]
Randall made a mistake in this comic: Hairy seems to "lose" his hair in the last two frames where he is together with Megan (#9 and #11), but it's still the same person. The Cueball that appears in the last four frames represents another person. This is clearly evidenced by Randall's transcript of the comic .


Drawing Stars

Explanation:
Randall attempts to draw a five-pointed star ; the easiest way to do this free-hand is by drawing a pentagram , the simplest regular star figure in geometry. Once you've seen it done, you can usually draw a pentagram in one continuous motion.
Simply put, Randall gets self-conscious and messes up.
The title text explains the fact that a five-pointed star has all angles at 36 degrees which sums to 180, like a common triangle . So Randall converts to Judaism with its six pointed star symbol, which he hopes is easier to draw because it is composed of two equilateral triangles . This also suggests that he is converting from neopaganism [ actual citation needed ] just to have a religious star he can draw well.
HOW TO DRAW A STAR: [A slightly curved line is drawn, starting with a point near the top center of the panel, and going downward and to the left at approximately a 23-degree angle, with an arrow at the end.]
[Another slightly curved line goes up and to the right, creating a 34-degree angle with the first line.] So far so good...
[A third line goes up and to the left, creating a 58-degree angle with the last line. The drawing now sort of resembles a tent being blown over in the wind.] Steady as she goes...
[The fourth line goes down and to the right, creating an approximately 47-degree angle with the last line, and our star is beginning to look a bit askew.] ...uh oh.
Shitshitshit
[The fifth line comes up at a 48-degree angle, completely missing the first point by a mile, and our star has failed spectacularly.] ABORT! ABORT!


Keyed

Explanation:
This comic is a take on one of the typical revenge tactics in dating and in life, which is one person "keying" the car of another. To "key" a car is to drag a key across the side of the car, sometimes multiple times, ruining the paint job. Instead, our friend Beret Guy painted a really detailed key on the side of Ponytail 's car in his version of "keying" a car. She broke up with him the day before, as she explains to Cueball , but Beret Guy is so strange that she now can't tell if it was revenge or even if he remembers that she broke up with him.
The title text is a reference to the song Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood ; a revenge song in which Carrie Underwood imagines her boyfriend cheating and takes revenge on his prized truck. This explains why Beret Guy might also paint a key on Carrie Underwood's car specifically, but it just confuses the situation since it brings into doubt the theory of him "keying" her car out of revenge (there is no known reason or reference to a reason for Beret Guy to want revenge on Carrie Underwood in the xkcd continuity).  The second part of the title text in which Beret Guy sent Ponytail a scone (Beret Guy really likes baked goods, so he would assume other people do too) further confuses the situation, causing Ponytail to completely give up on dating.
Beret Guy and scones are also referenced in 452: Mission and in the title text of 677: Asshole . His love for bakeries was first mentioned in 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport .
The song details Carrie Underwood imagining  her boyfriend hanging out and flirting with a "bleach-blonde" girl, shooting pool, buying her a drink, dancing, and hoping to "get lucky" with her while she is vandalizing his customized four-wheel drive vehicle by scratching its side with a key, carving her name into its leather seats, smashing the headlights with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and slashing all four tires in retaliation. She hopes that this will make him "think before he cheats" again.
[Ponytail and Cueball are walking along.] Ponytail: I broke up with him yesterday. Cueball: That weird guy with the beret? Cueball: Did he take it okay?
Ponytail: He seemed upset. He went out to my car— Cueball: Uh oh Ponytail: —and spent the whole night painting a really detailed key on the side. Cueball: ...Wait, what? [Image of Beret Guy painting a giant key on the side of a car.]
Ponytail: Then he woke me up to ask what I thought of it. Ponytail: He looked really proud. [Beret Guy holding a paintbrush.]
Cueball: I ... is he playing revenge mind games? Ponytail: I genuinely can't tell if he remembers that we broke up.


s/keyboard/leopard/

Explanation:
Randall's browser looks like Google Chrome , and he has installed at least four extensions on it, which explains the little symbols to the right of the address bar. Extensions are small programs that install into your Internet browser and change the Web pages as you view them. Some make pages easier to read, some remove ads (the third extension is AdBlock ) and so on.
For the joke in this comic, an extension accidentally replaces the word " keyboard " with " leopard " in a regex (or regular expression ). In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means to "match" (specify and recognize) patterns in text, such as particular characters or words. The command to substitute/replace a string is "s", e.g. "s/old/new/g" replaces any occurrence of "old" with "new". The title therefore contains the command to change "keyboard" into "leopard".
It's not clear what the extension Randall installed was actually supposed to do, but most extensions that revolve around text replacement are humorous in nature (such as Cloud to Butt , which replaces all instances of " the cloud " with "my butt").
The title text references the common IT phrase "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair" or PEBKAC , which means that the problem is caused by the user, not by any failure of the computer. However, due to the substitution, it is now "Problem Exists Between Leopard And Chair".
There has been several comics using substitutions , both before and after this one.
[There are two browser windows open on a computer screen.] [The first browser window, taking up most of the screen, but partly blocked by the other window at the bottom, has a Wikipedia article open. The title of the page can be seen on the active tab.] Computer leopard - Wikip... [Next to the address bar are four add-ons and the toolbar icon. One of the add-ons is a letter:] R [To the left on the page are standard menus, with lots of unreadable text, except these words:] Help Go Search [The page is not at the top of the article, so the text begins mid sentence, the very top of the letters just cut of in the first visible sentence.] which range from pocket-sized leopards to large desktop leopards, the leopard remains the most common user input device. In addition to text entry, specialized leopards are used for computer gaming. While many computer interfaces rely on mice or touchscreens, UNIX-style command-line interfaces require users to interact with a leopard. [Below is the contents list - the text in the brackets can barely be read. And only the very top of the 2.3 line can be seen, and is thus only a qualified guess at what it was supposed to say, although it fits with the real wiki article.] Contents [hide] 1. History 2. Leopard types 2.1 Standard 2.2 Laptop-sized 2.3 Thumb-sized [To the right there is a picture of a keyboard. The picture text written below:] IBM Model M Leopard
[The second browser window overlapping the first, at the level of the 2.3 menu point in the content menu, is a message board. The title of the page can be seen on the active tab:] Discuss - Leopard issu... [Next to the address bar are four add-ons and the toolbar icon. One of the add-ons is a letter:] R [In the window there is a list of topics next to icons of those starting the topic. The top post is just inside the frame, the icon cut of at the very top.] [Face of Cueball-like guy on white background:] Weird, my leopard just switched to Chinese. 3 days ago [Super close-up of the head of a person with dark hair on black background:] I work with one leopard on my desk and another in the leopard tray. 3 days ago [Full picture of a Cueball-like guy, with white background in the bottom half and dark in the upper half (which would conceal any hair on the persons head):] Ever cleaned a leopard? They're filthy . 2 days ago [Head of a cat on black background:] The iPhone virtual leopard is the fastest IMO. 19 hours ago [Head of a girl with long blond hair on white background:] I rarely email from my phone—I'm so slow when I'm not on a leopard. 11 hours ago [Head of Cueball-like guy. A line seems to be going our from his head, but it could just be one of the lines used to fill in the background:] My leopard died when I spilled tea on it :( 2 hours ago
[Below the main panel of the comic is the following caption:] The Internet got 100 times better when, thanks to an extension with a typo'd regex, my browser started replacing the word "keyboard" with "leopard".


Networking

Explanation:
Networking, in business, is the act of expanding your group of contacts in order to help your career down the line. Here, in this comic, Beret Guy meets Chief Technology Officer (CTO, an executive-level position overseeing the development of new technologies) Connr Clark (perhaps a typo for "Connor" or perhaps a reference to common "Web 2.0" names like the businesses Flickr , Tumblr , etc.). Beret Guy is as strange as he usually is: he introduces himself as a "business professional" rather than as someone with any kind of specific job, and then goes on to mention that he photocopied a burrito, which he presumably believes is the sort of thing business professionals do. He also has a business card; usually, this would contain contact information, but his only says "This is my business card". He calls his briefcase, or suitcase, a "handlebox", and it is full of a quarter of a million dollars in cash. (The source of this money is not discussed in this comic, but in 1493: Meeting , Ponytail says it "keeps appearing, but we have no idea how or why.")  Then Beret Guy proceeds to eat Connr's business card. Business cards are again mentioned in the title text of 2277: Business Greetings , also about one of Beret Guy's businesses. All of these things are not common behavior. [ citation needed ]
"Networking" is often an over-hyped, empty affair. There are many networking meetings of every description going on every day everywhere, and most people trade cards and continue to not make money. So that's the joke – Beret Guy does the networking schtick , badly, and yet is somehow making huge amounts of money at it.
The comic is also likely a joke on the idea that many people are excited about becoming a "business professional" who carries a briefcase, hands out business cards, and makes tons of money, without having an adequate plan for how to make those things happen, or possibly even knowing what their actual job would be. Beret Guy never says what he does, simply introducing himself as a "business professional," and explains his piles of cash with "I am a business grown-up who makes business profits!" In this world —and in people's dreams— when you "grow up" and start a business, money magically appears. Obviously, that's not how it works. [ citation needed ]
The "Eusocial" in "Eusocial Media Ventures" is a reference to eusociality , the highest level of social cooperation found in the animal kingdom.  Eusocial animals (termites being a common example) cooperate together to raise their young, have different generations living in the same colony, and have specialized individuals for reproductive and non-reproductive tasks.
The title text is a pun on three common business buzzwords: agile, lean, and long-tail. An agile business is one that can change course quickly based on customer demands and the business environment. A lean business is one with minimal inventory or assets; nothing is idle or warehoused, so everything is in active use or on the move. Long-tail describes the strategy of offering a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. Netflix is a popular example of long-tail because they have (almost) every movie imaginable, including rare titles that only a few people would be interested in.
And of course, the pun here is one animal that is agile and lean with a long tail is a polecat .
Furthermore, although "agile" and "lean" do mean a quick, nimble, and efficient business, they also refer to specific practices, as in agile software development , lean manufacturing and lean Six Sigma . Many people think these terms have devolved to overused jargon. While agile development is supposed to be a highly-structured method to get programmers to produce more working code quickly, when someone from the marketing department says " agile " it often means " We don't know what we're supposed to be producing, so we'll just chuck some stuff together, and keep those bits that the customer says he likes. We'll then do it all over again until we've got something that he'll pay for. " " Lean " is supposed to mean that a business keeps its costs as low as possible, employing one person to do marketing and PR, not really having a Human Resources department, etc. But, in practice, it often becomes " Keep as little stock as possible so that we don't have a lot of money tied up in it, and don't need a big warehouse; make stuff just before it is supposed to ship so that we don't have to store it either; make frequent prayers and virgin sacrifices to whatever gods we can find to ensure that nothing slips up anywhere along the line that our lawyers can't get us out of. "
Obviously, Beret Guy's business plan, 1021: Business Plan , worked. See also 1117: My Sky .
[A man approaches Beret Guy at a party and they extend arms to shake hands. Beret Guy is holding a metal briefcase. Ponytail is a waitress in the background, carrying a tray with a wine glass on it.] Connr: I'm Connr Clark, CTO at Eusocial Media Ventures. Beret Guy: I'm a business professional! Earlier I photocopied a burrito!
[Connr hands Beret Guy a business card. Beret Guy takes it and hands Connr another business card. Beret Guy has put his suitcase on the floor.] Connr: You should check us out! Here's my card. Beret Guy: Here's mine! Beret Guy: Networking!
[Connr takes a closer look at the card, and Beret Guy holds up his case.] Connr: ...this just says "This is my business card!" Beret Guy: Do you like it? I have more in my handlebox.
[Beret Guy puts his case on a table and opens it to reveal it is full of cash. Connr looks on in shock.] Connr: Uh, that's ok, I think I'll— Beret Guy: Here, have ten of them! Connr: —holy shit that thing is full of cash!
[Connr raises his arms in excitement. Beret Guy turns to face him and chews on Connr's business card.] Connr: Where did you get that? Beret Guy: I am a business grown-up who makes business profits! Connr: That's like a quarter of a million dollars! Beret Guy: Yay! Business is fun! Beret Guy: Do you have more of your cards? They're delicious!


Formal Logic

Explanation:
This comic is a riff on bumper stickers that say "honk if you love ____". Here, the subject is formal logic , but the word "if" is replaced with a formal logic term " iff ," which means "if and only if".
The term "If and only if" sets two separate requirements, both of which must be met. In this case, you must love formal logic in order to be allowed to honk, and you must honk if you love formal logic. (Conversely, someone who does not love formal logic is prohibited from honking, and someone who loves formal logic cannot refuse to honk.) The title text further elaborates on this, saying in essence: "Don't honk at me just because you're impatient that I stopped for a pedestrian."
The joke is the contained self-reference: you have to love formal logic to take the sticker seriously and honk for exclusively that reason. The title text reveals the sticker is actually there to stop people from honking at him altogether, because Randall understandably hates it when he yields for pedestrians only to get honked at by some impatient driver behind him; the ONLY reason you're allowed to honk is to declare your love for formal logic.  So by extension, if someone DOES honk while he is stopped for a pedestrian, he can simply enjoy the idea that the other driver loves formal logic rather than being impatient, transforming what might otherwise be an irritant into pleasure.
[The rear end of a car (with an unreadable license plate), with a bumper sticker above the tailpipe to the right:] Honk iff you love formal logic


Share Buttons

Explanation:
This comic is a commentary on what sort of articles work best on different social networking services . From left to right the share buttons are: Facebook , Twitter , Reddit , and Google+ .
The title text humorously combines appealing subjects for all four networks:
[A series of article titles with four share buttons underneath each: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google+]
Breaking Into Stand-up Comedy FB: 3, Twitter: 1,781, Reddit: 2, G+: 0
How the Christian Right Threatens Wikipedia FB: 1, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 2,241, G+: 3
Boycott Facebook Today! FB: 248k, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 74
DIY: Installing a Custom ROM on a Realdoll FB: 0, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 2


Cadbury Eggs

Explanation:
Cadbury Eggs are a chocolate egg-shaped candy with a filling. They are supposed to replicate a real egg with a hard exterior and soft interior. However, unlike real eggs, the exterior is edible. [ citation needed ]
In this comic, Cueball is trying to say that sodas have way too much sugar to even be appealing as beverages, because they contain as much sugar as 2 or 3 Cadbury Eggs, and one Cadbury Egg alone makes him feel gross. (A 12 oz can equals 355 mL, while a 20 oz bottle is about 590 mL.)
However, Megan interprets this in precisely the opposite way to what Cueball intended. Instead of comparing soda to Cadbury Eggs, she compares Cadbury Eggs to soda. If a few Cadbury Eggs have the same amount of sugar as soda, Megan can eat as many as she wants year-round in place of soda, with no additional guilt. Cadbury Eggs are usually consumed around Easter — which is anywhere between March 22nd and May 7th, depending on whether one is consulting the Catholic or Orthodox calendar.
The title text mentions the closure of the manufacture in New Zealand in 2009 and the change of the filling from runny to thick as a consequence. The joke here is the comparison to real eggs, which can be cooked scrambled , the new thick filling is not liquid enough to be cooked in a pan, as was the old runny filling.
[Two Cadbury eggs, one in the foil, the other out of the foil and broken open to reveal the gooey center.] A Cadbury egg has about 20g of sugar. (25g outside the US.) "One Cadbury Egg" is a nice unit of sugar content.
[A can of soda with an equals sign and two eggs; a bottle of soda with an equals sign and three eggs.] One 12oz. can of soda has about two Cadbury eggs worth of sugar. One 20oz. bottle has three.
[Two unwrapped Cadbury eggs, with an arrow indicating they should be placed in a glass of water.] One Cadbury egg is enough to make me feel kinda gross. Now when I see Coke or Snapple or Nestea or whatever, I imagine drinking a couple of dissolved Cadbury eggs.
[Megan puts her hand to her chin in thought, Cueball has his arms out in exclamation.] Megan: Wow. Huh. So the takeaway is... I can eat Cadbury eggs by the handful all season and feel no worse about it than I do about soda? Cueball: That's not really— Megan: This is awesome! Cueball: *sigh*