Message in a Bottle

Explanation:
Cueball experiences a moment of non sequitur while walking along a beach, when he finds a message inside a bottle saying "unsubscribe".
If you're part of an Internet mailing list, it's a common experience to come across random posts by users who may not be very tech-savvy, saying "unsubscribe". This is their attempt to unsubscribe from the list, accidentally broadcast to every other person on that list instead of just to the mailing list admin (who is either a person or an automated program that manages the list). Another common modern experience is that "unsubscribe" links don't always work (perhaps intentionally, for spam e-mails). In desperation, someone has tried to send their "unsubscribe" request in a bottle, hoping in vain that it will have its intended effect. Instead, Cueball receives it. A darker interpretation of the message could indicate the sender is unhappy with the world or life in general and wishes to leave it.
A " message in a bottle " is either a fun activity or an S.O.S. from someone stranded at sea, where one places a note in a bottle and throws it into the ocean. It then gets carried on ocean currents, possibly around the world to be picked up by some unknown other person at a point in the future.
The title text extends the joke to another common technological faux pas. It further mixes the metaphor of a message in a bottle with an e-mail list. It states that when he hit "reply all" (this is an option in most email client programs, but obviously not an option when one receives a message in a bottle), it sent a message in a bottle to everyone to whom the original message was sent - in this case clogging the ocean with bottles.
This mistake is often made when a person intends to send an email to just one recipient of a message that's been broadcast to a whole list of people, but they accidentally hit "reply all" instead of just "reply". In some cases, if the mailing list is sufficiently large, amplification effects can completely overwhelm mail servers (by analogy, "clogging the ocean"). For example, an employee may send a simple message like "does anyone speak Russian?" to the whole company address book. Several people are likely to reply using the "reply all" button by mistake, causing the whole company to receive the reply. Then, automatic "out of office" notifications and people complaining about the flood of emails will further worsen the situation.
This strip was probably inspired by the recent news of the world's oldest message in a bottle having been found last year, after over 108 years of being at sea, thus setting a new Guinness World Record.
[Cueball walks along a beach with six seagulls flying behind him over the sea. There is a small surf, and in the far distance, two mountains.]
[Cueball stops and looks down at a bottle lying in the sand just outside the surf. A letter can be seen inside, and there seems to be a stopper at the top.]
[A frameless panel shows Cueball (beach and sea not drawn) as he pulls out the letter from the bottle that he has now picked up.]
[Cueball holds the bottle behind him in one hand and the letter up in front him with the other hand. The text on the letter is written above him in curvy letters, looking like those often used to depict the writing of a dying or seriously injured man:] Unsubscribe


Full-Width Justification

Explanation:
The comic refers to an irritating problem in laying out text to fit from margin to margin, the problem of justification , where you want multiple-line text to line up on the left side (common), the right side (less common), or both sides, which is commonly called full justification. This strip is dealing with how to make text fit such that it lines up on both sides while still looking good. Sometimes, as with a shorter word between two long words like "relationship between deindustrialization ," there's no universal good way to make the typography work. It is a difficult problem to make text look good and be easily legible especially in a narrow space, with the biggest issue being how to handle words that are too long to fit nicely.
The comic shows several solutions to this problem, some realistic and others less so, but each partly or wholly unsatisfying.
" Giving up " essentially means not attempting full justification for a particular line, which means it will not fit with the rest of the layout.
" Letter spacing " involves an conspicuously large amount of whitespace between letters, suggesting a reading where each letter is a word until the reader recognizes what is intended. This method is in somewhat common use in newspaper and magazine layout, where it is generally known by the name "tracking" (distance between all letters) and "kerning" (distance between particular pairs of letters that fit together easily). However, letter spacing is unavailable for justification purposes in some languages (such as German), in which it is used for emphasis, as italics are in English.
" Hyphenation " is confusing because it requires suspended recognition of the full word, confusing the eye into seeing, in the given case, the non-words "deindus" and "trialization". This creates difficulty in both pronouncing and parsing the word. Moreover, the decision of when and where to hyphenate is non-trivial, particularly for automated text layout; for example, breaking a word and leaving only two "orphaned" letters on the following line is generally considered an illegal hyphenation. Nevertheless, hyphenation is a very common means of handling extreme cases. The hyphenation option is most compact, yielding the extra word "ecological".
" Stretching " appears visually unnatural and unfamiliar, and may present technical difficulties in rendering.
Adding " filler " words is generally undesirable: in the worst case, the meaning may be unintentionally altered, or the tone might be rendered too informal, as in the given example, and even in the best case, the text becomes less concise and potentially more difficult to read. Automation is also difficult. However, filler words added by a human, especially the original author of the text, are the least visually conspicuous, and may be the most practical solution in some scenarios.
Finally, adding a decorative image like " snakes " (but not necessarily snakes in particular) to fill the extra space is a justification practice of significant historical interest (it was particularly common for illuminated manuscripts in the medieval era and remained prominent until the invention of the printing press) but little modern relevance. There may be a particular absurdity to using a snake as it can be read as a word, such as "the relationship between snake deindustrialization" as would be done similar to a rebus .
In modern text layout programs, some combination of the above strategies may be used to achieve the most visually consistent effect. For example, in one case, hyphenation might be the best option to split a very long word, while another line might be too long by only one or two letters, in which case the program could apply a very slight degree of extra letter spacing, too small for the average reader to notice.
The title text suggests that in order to facilitate the "snakes" method of "solving" the problem, the Unicode Consortium , the organization in charge of the common text standard Unicode , should add "snake-building characters" (similar in concept to the existing Box Drawing block), to allow variable-length snake images to be used as filling. Currently, there are at least six snake characters in Unicode, not including at least ten more Egyptian hieroglyphs that represent specific snakes, some in specific combination with other hieroglyphs: [1]
One of the hieroglyphs ( U+13192 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH I009A ) is described in source documents as HORNED VIPER CRAWLING OUT OF ENCLOSURE, so it is literally a snake-building character.
"Non-breaking" in the title text refers to a similar process as zero-width joiners and no-break HTML and CSS; the whole snake would shift down if it were too wide to fit on a given line. This suggestion would likely be rejected; the Unicode consortium is very specific about which characters are added [ citation needed ] , and always require a good reason [ citation needed ] before adding a character or set of characters to the standard. Strange decisions by the consortium have previously been referenced in 1253: Exoplanet Names , 1513: Code Quality , and 1525: Emojic 8 Ball .
Within an hour or two of this comic being published, a thread on the subject started on the Unicode Consortium’s official Unicode Mailing List. As of two days later, it’s still running.
Strategies for full-width justification
[Below the caption is a column with six boxes, each showing a different "strategy" for justification which is annotated beside it. Here the annotation is written at the top and the text below. The top and bottom of the text is cut of in the middle, but as it can be "read" this is written anyway. Only for hyphenation does an extra word appear at the end. In the last with snakes, a snake is drawn to cover the entire spaaace from the end of between to the right border.]
Giving up their famous paper on the relationship between
deindustrialization
and the growth of Letter spacing their famous paper on the relationship b e t w e e n deindustrialization
and the growth of Hyphenation their famous paper on the relationship between deindus- trialization and the growth of ecological Stretching their famous paper on the relationship between deindustrialization
and the growth of Filler their famous paper on the relationship between crap like
deindustrialization
and the growth of Snakes their famous paper on the relationship between 🐍 [a snake filling the gap] deindustrialization and the growth of
...their famous paper on the relationship between [crap like]/[ 🐍  ] deindustrialization and the growth of [ecological]...


Contrails

Explanation:
Contrails (short for "condensation trails") are trails of vapor produced by aircraft exhaust, trailing the airplane. They are formed from water condensing on jet fuel exhaust particles, some impurities of which provide bases for ice crystals to accumulate on. Some can dissipate in minutes, but others can last for hours or even longer, depending on the temperature, relative humidity and wind conditions at that particular altitude. Long-lasting contrails is a sign of high relative humidity and may sometimes predict the formation of clouds and rain. The chemtrail conspiracy theory claims that contrails lasting unusually long are actually chemical or biological agents sprayed into the air for more nefarious purposes, although there is no evidence for the same.
Here, White Hat notices that there are a lot of contrails in the air. Cueball (falsely) corrects him, saying that in American English , contrails are called chemtrails, which is incorrect.
This is a comic in the My Hobby series. Some of these comics involve Cueball giving misleading information about pedantic terms, such as 1405: Meteor . Another of these comics, 966: Jet Fuel , even mentions chemtrails, saying that they are made of mind-control agents carried on board the planes that make them. Later they were again mentioned in 1803: Location Reviews .
The title text includes a similar situation, implying that astronomy and astrology are synonymous, with astrology being the term used in British English. However, this is incorrect. Astronomy is the scientific study of things in outer space, like stars, planets, and galaxies, whereas astrology is a system that infers a person's personality and characteristics from those same things in outer space. Though both involve studying celestial objects, astrology is considered a pseudoscience rather than empirical science.
The joke is that British English and American English use different terms to refer to the same object, and one can often learn new words for a simple thing. This, however is not the case in this comic; contrail and chemtrail do not refer to the same thing, the latter being only a conspiracy theory.
This newfound hobby is developing to another hobby about spreading misinformation that was released less than two month after this: 1697: Intervocalic Fortition .
[Cueball and a White Hat are walking. White Hat is looking up to the sky while Cueball, walking in front holds out one arm towards him.] White Hat: Lots of contrails today. Cueball: Oh, you must be from the UK. In American English it's "Chemtrail".
[Caption below the panel:] My hobby: Spreading linguistic misinformation


Recent Searches

Explanation:
People often find answers to computer problems by searching on Google , which attempts to guess your intended search term based on your location, language and the characters you've already typed, placing its suggestions in a drop-down box beneath the input area. If the search box is clicked on but nothing is typed, the drop-down box by default shows a list of your most recent searches.
Here we see a list of search queries, each of which suggests the author is perversely misusing or overextending some computer technology. The overall impression is of someone technically sophisticated enough to shoot themselves in the foot, and who does not learn any larger lessons despite doing so repeatedly. The title text is another possible entry in this list.
The caption implies that from Randall's perspective, every computer he uses seems to be broken; he doesn't seem to realise this is because he's the one using them, not because the computers actually start off broken. (For similar themes see also these comics: 349: Success , 1084: Server Problem , 1316: Inexplicable and 1586: Keyboard Problems ).
( Dear people from the future , if Google directed you here because it is the most popular result for a problem you are experiencing, this is not the page you were looking for).
Google translate syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting can be used when editing source code to make the code more readable and easier to understand. It is not generally used for natural languages, but sentence diagrams of brief passages are used in language education. Google Translate is used to translate text from one natural language to another. It uses JavaScript mouseover() to highlight words as an aid in matching phrases in the source with their translations, but does not apply different highlighting dependent on syntax. Alternatively, this could imply that Randall is attempting to translate code from one programming language to another using Google Translate. Success would be unlikely, since the service is not intended for this [ citation needed ] , and syntactically valid output might further break the computer executing it. Two other possible interpretations of this phrase are that Randall wants to translate the phrase "syntax highlighting" to another language, or that he wants to perform syntax highlighting on the source code for Google Translate. Autodetect mixed bash zsh Bash and Zsh are two command line interfaces for Unix-like OSes. The way to execute commands is almost identical, making detecting a script that contains a mixed syntax nearly impossible. This was later referenced in 2510: Modern Tools . CPU temperature sensor limits The CPU's temperature sensors exist to tell you when your CPU is becoming dangerously overheated (normally because of a faulty fan or overclocking). Someone who searches for information about the limits of those sensors is presumably expecting to misuse their CPU.  Probably also a reference to 1172: Workflow . GIF to XLS .GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is a file extension used to store images and sequences of images to be displayed as an animation. .XLS is the file extension for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The joke is that the two file types are used for different purposes - it's quite normal for someone to want to convert between .GIF, .JPG, .PNG, .BMP files, as these are all image files; or between .XLS, .CSV, and .ODS files, as these all record tabulated information. However, for some reason Randall wants to convert an image file to a spreadsheet. (This is actually possible, because a digital image is essentially an array of colour and brightness values; it just wouldn't be particularly useful for most people. Here is a webpage with an online converter.) Matt Parker has done a stand up routine about converting these two file types. An alternate way to convert an image file, such as a .GIF file, into a text-based file like an .XLS file, is through optical character recognition (OCR). This is only effective if the image is a copy (i.e. a scan or reasonably clear photograph) of a document containing letters and words, and neither .GIF nor .XLS are file formats anyone would usually use in that case. Clock speed jumper sample rate A jumper is an intentional short circuit used for selecting options for an electronic circuit. They are usually used where it is not feasible to use programming (such as outputting a byte or word through a port) to alter the selection, such as before the processor even begins executing. A common example would be, on some motherboards, jumpers can be used to alter the clock speeds of various motherboard functions (such as the CPU or the front side bus). These jumpers should ordinarily be modified when the computer is off. However, this search is asking how often the motherboard checks the status of the clock speed jumpers, implying that they intend to change these jumpers while the computer is powered on, and often enough that the sample rate matters (change cpu speed several times a second, by moving jumpers on the motherboard.). That is, of course, a little silly. Clean reinstall keybinding This refers to keybinding, the practice of mapping (binding) a certain key to a certain function (e.g., pressing PRTSC will take a screenshot). Most keyboards do not output characters directly, but only codes for which keys have been pressed (or released).  Keybindings translate the pressing of the "A" key on your keyboard into the letter "A" being sent to a program which is reading keyboard input. A "clean reinstall" of keybindings is something that would almost never be necessary - it means Randall has modified his default keybindings to such an extent that his leopard has become unusable (similar to 1284: Improved Keyboard ), necessitating a "clean reinstall" of the bindings. Alternatively, he might be doing clean reinstalls so often that he wants a keybinding to execute them with minimal loss of time. Cron job to update crontab Cron is a utility on most Unix-like OSes that allows you to schedule commands or scripts to be run periodically. These scheduled jobs are read from a crontab file. A job that updates the crontab (therefore creating new jobs, removing old ones or editing existing ones) is paramount to a job scheduler , and trying to use cron for such functionality could result in highly unstable functionality (although a crontab could be sensibly regenerated periodically by a set of machines from a master crontab file annotated with per-host directives). This is similar to self-modifying code . fsck Chrome extension This is a search for an interface to the Unix f ile s ystem che ck er fsck via third-party software added to Chrome. fsck is a program for checking your filesystem for corruption. Repairing a filesystem this way would be inadvisable. [ citation needed ] This might indicate confusion about the meaning of the term "online filesystem repair", in which "online" means "while the filesystem is in use" rather than "over the Internet". Alternatively, Randall might want to repair an installation of the operating system Chromium, in a manner less drastic than the factory reset preferred by Google. Recursive font An idiosyncratic mix of recursion and the font style cursive , referring especially to text handwritten in a flowing manner. PostScript (the language in which some fonts are written) is capable of recursion and PostScript Type 3 fonts are able to use the full language. This could create effects like fonts with complicated fractal borders and fill patterns - but the increase in processing time would contribute to seeming brokenness of the computer (or printer) rendering the font. A true recursive font would be a form of fractals ( example ). Regex matching valid EBNF EBNF refers to Extended Backus–Naur Form , which is used to define formal languages . EBNF specifies recursive patterns that are impossible for a regular expression (regex) to determine whether it is valid or not. There is some irony in using regex to test the validity of something which defines the validity of things like regex. Hardlinks Turing complete In some file systems, for example ext4 and NTFS , a single file may be referenced in multiple places in the file system. These filenames are termed "hard links" because the operating system automatically resolves them to the actual file. "Soft" or "symbolic" links are resolved indirectly via a pathname, which may reside anywhere.  A file is considered deleted when the last hard link to it is unlinked; a soft link exists independently of its target.  In fact, the target need not exist, in which case this is often called a dangling symbolic link. Turing completeness is the computational complexity required to simulate any computable function (given an infinite amount of memory). Recently there have been cases where unexpected mechanisms from card games to text parsers were proved to be Turing complete. Hardlinks being Turing complete would imply that creating and deleting hardlinks alone is enough to satisfy the requirements of Turing completeness. Opposite of safe mode Safe mode is a diagnostic mode in many operating systems and applications which allows the user to troubleshoot problems by disabling unnecessary functionality. The "opposite of safe mode" implies a "dangerous mode" where the purpose is to allow uselessly dangerous actions (in actuality this supposed dangerous mode is the default mode). A common example is the sudo command in Unix-like OSes, which grants the user system-level permissions. It's also possible that Randall sees Safe Mode so often that he sees regular mode as an unusual and unique state and needs help navigating back to it. Predictive touchpad Predictive text is a feature of many smartphone keyboards that predicts the most likely word the user wishes to type, and then gives the user the option to place the full word in the sentence immediately without having to finish typing it. A touchpad is a computer pointing device, similar to a computer mouse . The idea of a "predictive touchpad" seems absurd because, as opposed to typed words, there are not a limited number of swipe combinations that are possible on a touchpad. A "predictive touchpad" implies that a computer could predict where the user was going to move the mouse or click, which in this case would seem to defeat the purpose of a user input device. [ citation needed ] . Interestingly, a version of Linux had a predictive cursor option, where the cursor jumped to the nearest button (like window close) when it moved near to but didn't quite reach that button. Google docs from bootloader A bootloader is a very small program that is usually the very first thing to execute when a computer boots up. It is used mainly for loading the operating system into memory.  Such a program by itself would not be capable of directly running something as complex as Google Docs . Hardware acceleration red channel only Hardware acceleration means that certain calculations are not performed by the computer's CPU but by a "specialized" processor, e.g. a GPU which is part of the graphics adapter. This speeds up output, especially if complex 3D calculations are required, and reduces CPU load. To use this function only on a single color channel seems pretty useless, but one may want to troubleshoot a program that displays only red when hardware acceleration is enabled. While graphics cards are most commonly used with three or four channels (red, green, blue, and sometimes alpha), they do support two-channel or single-channel images. An 8-bit single-channel image would use the format ' R8 ', which is indeed 'red channel only'. This type of image could be used to store monochrome images or non-image data. autoexec code posted by verified twitter users. ( Title text ) The term "autoexec" refers to code that runs automatically, usually during boot, and derives from one of three boot-time files for MS-DOS : AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS and COMMAND.COM.  AUTOEXEC.BAT would typically contain commands for customizing the command prompt, loading additional drivers, and/or automatically launching a program. Automatically executing code from the Internet is generally a terrible idea, because it could be written by someone with malicious intent and harm your computer. The joke here is that the code would only be executed if written by someone who has been "verified" on Twitter. Twitter's verification service only serves to show that a user is who they claim to be, not whether or not their code can be trusted, so this would provide little protection. Usually, Twitter verification is used by celebrities so they can be distinguished from people claiming to be them. The line implies that Randall is only interested in running code posted by celebrities. Most code downloaded from authentic sources (such as Microsoft and official Linux distributions) is verified by a cryptographic signature from a true trusted source, authenticating the origin of the software. These may include software updates that run automatically in the background.  The joke here is that the term "verified" means very different things between Twitter users and software distribution.
[Coloured and styled as the real logo:] GOOGLE
[Google Search bar, with a drop down box with faded text, implying recent searches.] Google translate syntax highlighting Autodetect mixed bash zsh CPU temperature sensor limits GIF to XLS Clock speed jumper sample rate Clean reinstall keybinding Cron job to update crontab fsck Chrome extension Recursive font Regex matching valid EBNF Hardlinks Turing complete Opposite of safe mode Predictive touchpad Google docs from bootloader Hardware acceleration red channel only
[Caption below the frame:] I have no idea why my computers are always broken.


Substitutions 3

Explanation:
This is the third comic in the Substitution series where Randall has suggested substitutions that will make reading the news more fun. This time it will be even more fun! But there have been several comics using substitutions both before and after these ones.
The series as of 2016:
The title text in original form would be "Scientists explore ancient city", which most would consider a fairly bland headline. Two days before this comic came out, there was news that a potential ancient Mayan city had been found by a 15 year old boy through satellite imagery, which may be what Randall was referencing. The Mayan city has now been proven inexistent. Imagining Channing Tatum and his "friends", and pretending that the city is haunted, provides a much more dramatic setting mirroring many episodes (and later films) of Scooby Doo featuring a gang of friends (Mysteries, Inc.).
[Caption above the panel:] Even More Substitutions That make reading the news more fun
[A table of words/sentences on the left that change in to those on the left. Between each set of words there is an arrow pointing from right.]
Gaffe ➜ Magic spell Ancient ➜ Haunted Star-Studded ➜ Blood-soaked Remains to be seen ➜ Will never be known Silver bullet ➜ Way to kill werewolves Subway system ➜ Tunnels I found Surprising ➜ Surprising (but not to me) War of words ➜ Interplanetary war Tension ➜ Sexual tension Cautiously optimistic ➜ Delusional Doctor Who ➜ The Big Bang Theory Win votes ➜ Find Pokémon Behind the headlines ➜ Beyond the grave Email \ Facebook Post ➜ Poem Tweet / Facebook CEO ➜ This guy Latest ➜ Final Disrupt ➜ Destroy Meeting ➜ Ménage à trois Scientists ➜ Channing Tatum and his friends You won't believe ➜ I'm really sad about


Black Hole

Explanation:
Cueball is curious as to why Black Hat has a miniature black hole on his table; Black Hat responds that it "really brings the room together", making a pun on both the black hole aesthetically completing the look of the room as well as it literally "bringing the room together" through its gravitational pull. Evidently the black hole is massive enough to bring the room together optically into visible Einstein rings by gravitational lensing .
The title text makes a cultural reference to a well-known song lyric from the 2003 song " Milkshake " by Kelis , where the singer brags of her milkshake being so popular that it "brings all the boys to the yard" (what "milkshake" is a metaphor for has never been specified). But in this case, since gravity does not discriminate between which things it pulls, it brings "the boys, and everything else" to Black Hat's yard - and unlike with the milkshake, not by choice. If it wasn't for the house walls (which somehow resist collapsing into the black hole), they wouldn't remain in the yard but would come into the room with the black hole, and then into the black hole itself.
As depicted, the black hole is inconsistent with several aspects of physics:
[Cueball is standing near a coffee table as Black Hat approaches. They are presumably in Black Hat's living room. The coffee table has a miniature black hole on top of it, resting on a small pedestal.] Cueball: Why do you have a miniature black hole on your coffee table? Black Hat: It really brings the room together.


Laser Products

Explanation:
This comic takes three laser-based technologies - laser eye surgery, laserjet printers, and laser hair removal - and conflates them, with humorous results. These are illustrated through reviews by users of the resulting combinations. For the original combinations, the reviews are highly positive. For the new combinations, most are negative, because most of these new "technologies" are ill-conceived and possibly harmful.
Laser eye surgery gets a positive review, since it has successfully corrected the reviewer's vision, so that they no longer require glasses. There are a range of laser eye surgeries to correct near- and far-sightedness, as well as various other conditions. LASIK , one of the more common laser eye surgeries, works by using lasers to cut open the cornea and ablate a small amount of the lens.
Laser eye removal would be very painful, and thus the review is negative, stating that the reviewer had read the description incorrectly, likely believing it to be one of the real combinations on the chart. The screams of pain expressed in the review have the humorous implication that the review is being typed directly after the ill-advised procedure, though this may just be an after-the-fact expression of the reviewer's feelings. If they produced the review without aid, this would probably have been made more difficult as a result of the surgery. At least in animal surgery, however,  laser eye removal does exist .
Laser eye printer refers to printing on (or possibly of ) an eyeball, which only prompts a disgusted "Eww" response. Both probably can find their applications, either in adding images onto ones eyes or creating artificial eyes for implantation, but would probably be quite disgusting to operate for many people.
Laser jet surgery could be performing maintenance on a jet with lasers, which would be potentially dangerous and error-prone [ citation needed ] . Alternatively, it could mean laser surgery done on a human from a jet aircraft, using a laser mounted to it. The human being operated on could be aboard that aircraft, on another aircraft, or on land: in any case, it does not sound like a safe approach. Another interpretation is that it could refer to surgery using a jet made of lasers, which is even worse, as it would probably cause the entire body to be disintegrated. [ citation needed ] Yet another interpretation is that the procedure would implant parts of a jet into one's body. The statement's ambiguity may contribute the reviewer's concern, or the reviewer could be nervous over the fact that it would be a very difficult and delicate procedure and trying it could easily go horribly wrong.
Laser jet removal appears to be the destruction of jets with lasers, which apparently works, but angered the Federal Aviation Administration, and probably resulted in legal consequences for the reviewer. This could be a reference to the real FAA concern of the many incidents of people using laser pointers against aircraft. "Laser Jet Removal" actually exists as a military weapon system, though it's primarily meant to be used against jet missiles , rather than jet planes.
LaserJet printer is a popular line of Hewlett Packard laser printers . Laser printing is a technology which uses a laser to electrically charge a drum so that it collects ink in the form of the image to be printed, before transferring it to paper. The printer seems to work well for the reviewer, as it has been given a positive review.
Laser hair surgery turns out to be a fancy name for cutting hair with a laser -- an overengineered, and potentially dangerous, technique for achieving the same results that you could with clippers and scissors. It is rated neutrally, since it did the job, but the reviewer found the name confusing and they disliked the smell of burning hair.
Laser hair removal is the process of destroying hair follicles with bursts of laser light to prevent the growth of unwanted hair. This appears to have been effective for the reviewer.
Laser hair printer appears to be a bizarre printer that uses hair in place of paper, or perhaps as the construction material for a 3D printer . Unsurprisingly [ citation needed ] , this just creates disgusting messes of hair and keeps jamming the printer, resulting in a negative review. The title text extends this joke, giving some common printer error messages amended for the hair printer. A paper jam is when paper gets stuck in the workings of the printer, usually because it was creased, or more than one sheet fed in at once; in the hair printer this becomes a hair jam. An inkjet printer requires replaceable ink cartridges, and when the ink is used up this will usually result in an ink cartridge running low error; the hair printer appears to require cartridges of hair conditioner . As an additional twist, it uses color-safe conditioner, a product intended to prevent the washing out of dye from the users hair; here, it presumably protects the colour of the printed image or item. Legal and Letter are paper sizes used in North America; apparently, the same terms are used for standard supplies of hair for the hair printer.
Laser eye removal has been mentioned before, see the lower right part of the 1619: Watson Medical Algorithm chart.
[Heading above the table:] Online Reviews of Laser Products
[A three by three table with one word to the far left, from which three lines split out and goes to three words just left of each of the three rows. Above each column is three other words. Below in the table are nine reviews with star rating on a five star scale. The actual rating is indicated with black stars and also use half filled stars in the rating system. The ratings are written in the table in square brackets.]
...surgery ...removal ...printer Laser eye... [4 1/2 stars] "I don't need glasses anymore!" [1/2 star] "Aaaaaaa! Misread the description! Aaaaaaaaaaaa!!" [1 star] "Eww." jet... [1 1/2 stars] "Too nervous to try it." [2 1/2 stars] "Effective, but the FAA got really mad." [4 stars] "Prints great!" hair... [2 1/2 stars] "Confusing term for haircut. Burning smell." [4 stars] "Great results!" [1/2 star] "Disgusting, won't turn off, jams constantly."


Bun

Explanation:
In this comic, Ponytail is teaching a class about an animal referred to as a "bun". The word "bun" is short for bunny , which is in turn an informal term used for a rabbit . The comic depicts a childish response to seeing a cute animal, but coming from an adult. The humor in the comic comes from a tone of absurdity in a classroom situation where lectures are expected to be serious.
The lecture opens with the statement that smaller buns are superior in rank, which is plainly false. [ citation needed ] Instead, the teacher clearly thinks that smaller bunnies are just cuter. She mentions that "king buns" may be seen around this time of year, which refers to rabbit kittens being born in the spring. Kittens would be smaller and cuter than any other rabbits because of their age. There is no mention of a "queen bun", but the gender of the kitten can be difficult to determine without a close examination. A prime example of a king bun can be seen here .
Megan , who attends this biology class, expected to learn about rabbits and hares which are both lagomorphs , a mammalian order that also includes the pikas . Megan thus clearly has the correct understanding of what a "bun" is. Ponytail then claims that the word bun is the scientific term, and states that rabbit, hare, and lagomorph are informal ways to describe these animals, again being completely wrong as in reality bun is the most contracted and informal name for a rabbit.
Two students are then legitimately doubting that they're in the correct class and decide to check online (either the crude theories that Ponytail expressed, or their course schedule). A third student however appears to believe the lecturer uncritically, reminding the fellow students that they're looking upon the image of a king (i.e. a cute bunny).
The title text refers to photographing a rabbit and, for example, posting it on social media - something which would typically be done today if someone sees a cute rabbit in the wild. If the poster had failed to photograph the rabbit before it ran away, they may typically post a message saying something like "I saw a really cute bunny today!" with an emoji depiction of a rabbit (probably 🐇 or 🐰 ). This is especially common in the area where Randall lives, as the urban rabbit population in the Cambridge/Somerville area has exploded, putting a large human population with relatively little previous experience with rabbit-sightings suddenly in the position of encountering them very frequently. [ citation needed ] Emoji have become a recurrent theme on xkcd.
Ponytail tells that buns have a hierarchy in which the smaller the bun, the higher its ranking is - a rank-size distribution. A "king bun" can be seen as an instance of the king effect, the phenomenon where the top one or two members of a ranked set show up as outliers. An interesting linguistic note is that in several languages (including Czech and Polish), the word for rabbit literally means "little king".
[Ponytail is a teacher and she holds a pointer to a picture of a rabbit on a board behind her.] Ponytail: Good morning class! Today, we will be learning about the bun.
[Two rabbits are shown, one slightly smaller, and a greater than symbol indicates that the smaller one is "greater than" the larger one. Ponytail is talking off panel to the left.] Ponytail (off panel): Buns have a hierarchy. Ponytail (off panel): A bun's rank is determined by its size. Smaller buns are higher-ranking.
[Two normal sized rabbits are sitting left and right of a very small rabbit. The smaller rabbit appears to give off a radiant light indicated with gray and white alternating rays going through the image. It is indicated that it shines on the larger rabbits as they are gray on the side turned away from the smaller rabbit and white on the front turned towards it. Ponytail narrates above the frame of this half sized panel:] Ponytail (narrating): Most buns you see are relatively low-ranking. Ponytail (narrating): But this time of year, a lucky few may catch a glimpse of a king bun .
[A student represented by Megan is sitting at a desk with a few books on it, pencil in hand.] Megan: OK, hang on. Megan: We're talking about rabbits and hares, right? Lagomorphs?
[Ponytail is holding her finger up on her left hand, and is holding her pointer at her side with the other. Students reply to her off panel to the right.] Ponytail: Informally, yes. But in this course, we use the scientific term, "bun". Student #1 (off-panel): Are we sure this is the right room for introductory mammalogy? Student #2 (off-panel): I'll check online. Student #3 (off-panel): Shh! Show respect! We look upon the image of a king!


Digital Data

Explanation:
Digital information has the potential to be copied such that the copy is 100% identical to the original. While physical media themselves (such as books, or hard drives) and information stored by analog means may degrade as the universe continues, digital information as expressed by specific values, such as combinations of binary zeros and ones, does not decay over time and can be copied indefinitely with no changes.
However, in this comic, Randall points out that while digital information itself doesn't need to degrade, things that are on the Internet are often degraded through copying when the copy is not a 1:1 copy or changes are deliberately introduced. In addition, as technology advances, the method to save or call the information changes and the medium to view it changes, occasionally causing misinterpreted information. (This is also demonstrated with the title text.) As the frames continue, they gain the appearance of images which have been screenshotted repeatedly, with a resulting loss of quality due to compression of the original resolution and JPEG artifacting . (The JPEG format is intended for representing photorealistic grayscale or color images; when misused for line drawings, such as comic strips, any compression artifacts become particularly noticeable, as the background is normally of completely uniform color.) In the last frame, this is taken to an extreme, as the frame appears to have been very sloppily screenshotted off of at least two different smartphones (not the same device that uses the bottom frame in the third panel as the top border in panel four), and the final image is covered both with a watermark from an unregistered screenshot program, as well as references to at least two different web sites: 9GAG (bottom right image) and Tumblr in the web address bottom left. 9GAG is an online platform and social media website where users upload and share content of their own, or of other networks. It is often accused of rehosting other sites' funny content without attribution and adding their own watermark to the image or video.
As an easter egg, the high-resolution (pixel-doubled) version of the comic is merely the comic resized to 50% and then to 400%, making it an image of poorer quality rather than a higher resolution image as for other comics, demonstrating how repeated image scaling can also introduce artifacts into images.
The title text is seemingly addressed to a reader in the future who will only be able to access xkcd through a digital archive . Digital information might not degrade with time, but it can't be properly displayed without knowledge of the encoding. As new encodings and file formats get developed and old ones abandoned, the webpage format of the comic might not be available in the future, when users would need special archives to view content from today's world. The title text contains seemingly garbage characters , which typically result from data being interpreted according to a character encoding different from the one used to encode it. In this case, the characters are the result of encoding the string “If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re using still knows about the mouseover text”! using UTF-8 (which represents non- ASCII Unicode characters as multibyte sequences) and then interpreting the resulting bytes as the still commonly used Windows-1252 encoding (which uses only one byte per character, but utilizes the non-ASCII codepoints for a limited selection of extra letters and symbols such as "â" or "€"). This shows that degradation of digital data through conversions isn't restricted to images. Furthermore, as screen navigation moves away from the mouse toward touch, voice recognition, and modes still to be implemented, mouseover text will itself become archaic.
[Cueball and a White Hat are walking, Cueball holds both hands in front of him palms up.] Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.
[They walk on in the next panel which shows jpeg compression artifacts, as if the image had been converted from png format to a lossy jpeg format.] Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.
[They continue walking in the third panel which is now clearly pixelated, the white is slightly discolored, and it contains part of the interface of some program, probably supposed to be a screen shot from a smartphone. At the bottom there are three blue buttons and one gray. the first is a blue "<" indicating back in a browser. Then a grayed out ">" that is not active. And then three more standard buttons in blue to the right of those two. The interface matches that of an iPhone running Safari in iOS 9 (or other versions with the same Safari UI (probably iOS 7-9))] Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.
[Still walking, now Cueball holds out both arms to the sides, and finally White Hat replies. This panel is heavily pixelated and discolored and has a distorted aspect ratio. It contains a clear watermark of 9GAG (although difficult to read all letters in the end of the first word), even more 'frame' elements, and text above the image at the bottom (where the last letter is obscured by the frame of the image). There is also an internet address at the bottom left, but it is not readable except for the .tumblr.com ending. In this panel it is clear that it is a screen shot from a smart phone. The frame around the image obscure the very top of Cueball's text and the half of the last letter in White Hat's reply.] Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it. White Hat: Amazing
Watermark: Screenshotpro 2 Watermark: ~Unregistered~
Top border: Verizon LTE 4:45 PM Bottom text [slightly cut off]: 9GAG Internet address at the bottom [nearly unintelligible]: [ama].tumblr.com


Rainbow

Explanation:
In this comic, the patriarch Noah from the Abrahamic religions , represented by Cueball , talks to God after the biblical flood . He asks what the coloured band across the sky is, and God tells him it is a rainbow . According to the Book of Genesis, God placed a rainbow in the sky, giving it significance for the first time, as a promise to humanity that he would never again make a flood to cleanse the world of sin ( Genesis 9:2–17 ).  A rainbow is an optical phenomenon caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky, one of many light phenomena caused by sunlight and precipitation.
Then Noah notices a double rainbow outside the original promise rainbow . Secondary rainbows are caused by double reflection of sunlight inside the raindrops. When asked about this God seems to falter, but recovers and claims he made it to show that he will never again set the Earth on fire, an event which apparently happened long ago and for which God apologizes. This may refer to the early Earth being a liquid ball of molten rock (the Hadean period ), or later global fire catastrophes caused by asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions. That God promises to never again burn the earth goes against the idea of Armageddon where everything will be destroyed in fire etc.
Noah begins to notice some other optical phenomena as he next spots a bow near the sun. God promptly claims 'that' bow is a promise to never again make raccoons immortal as it destroyed the Earth's ecosystem . Although today these animals can be a pest, see 1565: Back Seat , they are luckily not immortal. [ citation needed ] Randall is likely referring to an unkillable form of immortality rather than biological immortality , as, while that would likely cause some issues, the raccoons could still fall prey to predation and disease. Should raccoons have been rendered unkillable by predation or disease as well as by aging , then the combination of an average gestational period of 65 days, a litter size of 2-5 individuals, and an omnivorous appetite makes for a creature that could easily dominate any and all ecological niches.
If Noah can see it with his naked eyes it is most likely that the "third bow" is a halo . Halos can appear in the direction of the Sun (as is the case with the bow here, and opposed to the two rainbows mentioned above) or the Moon. A typical person is most likely to notice the circular 22° halo , which is a halo forming a circle with a radius of approximately 22° around the Sun, or occasionally the Moon.
It could also be that Noah has spotted a tertiary rainbow or even a higher order rainbow which are very faint rainbows circling the sun. These bows are discussed in the what If? released the same day. But they are very faint rainbows circling the sun and usually obscured by its glare, and only recently have they been photographed. Knowing Randall the joke could be inspired by this not well known fact (there are at least 5 observable orders of rainbow), and each could potentially represent a promise from God regarding a disaster.
Noah continues by noticing two sun dogs (or parahelia) which often co-occur with the 22° halo. These consist of a pair of bright spots either side on the Sun, intersected by the halo, thus making it most obvious that the third bow was indeed a halo, not a hard to see rainbow.
God gets tired of this and tries to stop Noah by saying that he has said sorry, and asks him to drop the subject. That is probably sensible because there are 25 different atmospheric optical phenomena listed on Wikipedia alone. Following the logic of the comic and the evasive answer of God, it could mean that there are some more skeletons in the closet.
The title text is a continuation where God tells Noah that in the future humanity will invent a game called SimCity . This is a strategy computer game in which the player creates and manages an environment wherein sims autonomously build a city (or in later versions a country, or a planet). The sims are simple AI processes that "build" residential, commercial and industrial structures within the game space, according to the topography and zoning choices made by the player, then use them to create more wealth to expand their city. The sims have to contend with traffic jams, social problems, and ecological impacts of their own activity, and occasional natural disasters ranging from earthquakes to Godzilla.
The player has God-like control of the world, including a disaster button , for when the player doesn't want to wait for a disaster to happen by chance. God suggests that it is too tempting to push the disaster button once a civilization has been built up, if just to see what happens. This can also be interpreted as a reference to the Simulation Hypothesis , which states that there's a high likelihood of us living in a simulated universe, with a fallible "God" who's simulating our Universe purely for his own entertainment/educational purposes.
Overall the comic pokes fun at the idea of explaining natural phenomena as messages from a deity.
[Cueball looks up on a rainbow band going through the top right corner of the panel. A black blob in the bottom of the panel right of Cueball with white text inside shows the reply from God to the questions. The blobs continue through the rest of the comic.] Cueball: Wow, God- What's that band of color? God: A rainbow . God: It is a sign of my promise that I will never again flood the Earth.
[A frameless panel.] Cueball: Oh, good! Hey, what about that second bow above the first one? God: Oh, uh, sign of my promise not to set the earth on fire. God: Sorry for doing that a while back.
[Cueball points left.] Cueball: What about that third faint bow near the sun? God: My promise to never again destroy Earth's ecosystem by making raccoons immortal.
[Cueball points even higher up towards left.] Cueball: And the little rainbow clouds on either side of- God: Look, I said I'm sorry. Can we just drop it?


Patch

Explanation:
Adobe Photoshop is a commonly used application for image manipulation. One of its features is the Patch tool, which allows the user to overwrite parts of the image, replacing them with a copy of another area of the same image. It is often used for “patching up” photographs by overwriting scratches or other visible damage to the photo. Another of Photoshop’s features is “content-aware fill”, which could also be described as “content-aware inpainting”. It works similarly to the Patch tool, but automatically generates a replacement texture from the area surrounding the deleted part instead of copying a user-specified area exactly.
GNU patch is a program that replaces only parts of code with an updated version, without requiring the user to download the entire source code. Here, it appears the author was told to “patch” the code but used Photoshop to do this instead of GNU patch, with devastating results. Although the title text suggests that if you did this enough times the code would eventually compile, this would never happen. In fact, Photoshop could only edit an image of the text and not the text itself. However, it could work if optical character recognition (OCR) were integrated into the workflow as well.
The comic blurs the difference between text (in which letters and symbols represent discrete values, such as 65 being the number for the letter A in the ASCII encoding standard, and it's relatively easy for a program compiler to interpret combinations of these values as keywords and other programming constructs) and graphics (where the letters and symbols in the comic are actually represented by a pattern of colored dots), playing with the idea that the patch metaphor can be used on both (although with different meanings). There are common and straightforward processes for converting text information to images, such as printing, which can convert text to a graphics format very faithfully. The reverse, however, requires the use of optical character recognition (OCR), which attempts to figure out which letter or symbol certain patterns of dots "look like". OCR could be effective in converting some of the image in the comic back to usable text; however, it would fail on some of those patterns that have been mangled and don't look like any existing characters or symbols. A compiler can only operate on text data, so converting the graphic back into text would be a requirement to even begin to attempt to compile it, a step omitted in the title text.
The code appears to be written in Python , a programming language often referred to in xkcd, such as in 353: Python . A few of the function names that can be recognized are "isPrime" and "quicksort", both elementary programming algorithms. It was also apparently originally edited using a Python-aware programming text editor, which is able to use different colors for different programming elements. For example, it appears to use red for keywords, blue for variables, and black for other elements; however, because of the mangling from the use of the wrong patching program, that doesn't appear to be consistent. Since the patching replaced graphical elements rather than whole characters, there are examples of symbols that are combinations of two different characters, and when the original two characters were rendered in different colors the resulting non-character could be in two colors, or the resulting "word" might be rendered in multiple colors.
The comic brings to attention the high rate of Adobe Photoshop piracy. GNU Patch is available for free, even for Windows , and Mac OS X. So the comic implies that Adobe Photoshop, a subscription to which costs $20/month, is more available than GNU patch. According to this poll , 58% of Photoshop copies were pirated.
The title text also explains that the patch used the content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code. In most programming languages, whitespace is necessary to separate words, so this would combine words that shouldn’t be combined and create invalid code. Since the code in the image is Python, the code will be messed up even more, because Python uses whitespace as a part of its programming syntax. For example, statements are separated by newlines instead of by semicolons (;), and indentation is used instead of brackets to determine the scope of each section of code.
The original code was likely as follows:
isPrime and quicksort are standard python implementations of simple algorithms (although you would not generally write a sorting algorithm in python as there are built-in algorithms available).  isPrimeRegex uses the re module to detect if a number is prime by seeing if a string containing that many 1s can be matched to 2 or more copies of some string containing at least 2 1s.
The comic two comics back 1683: Digital Data , also related to turning digital data into bad copies. Less than a month before quicksort was mentioned in 1667: Algorithms , and a month before that another "easy" solution to a programming problem was released in 1654: Universal Install Script .
Using a Photoshop tool for a task it is not intended for was also used in 1784: Bad Map Projection: Liquid Resize , where Photoshop's content-aware resizing tool was a very questionable choice to use for a Map Projection.
[The panel displays part of a code, in five different colors (red, purple, light blue, blue, and green) as well as normal black text, which due to image editing is difficult to read. The first and last lines are partly obscured by the frame of the panel. Here below is an attempt to transcribe the code, using the sign "¤" for anything not easily transcribed. Feel free to add other signs instead of these that look more like the one in the image (and also improve the attempted transcription if possible).]
[Caption below the panel:] Protip: If you don't have access to the GNU patch tool, you can use the Photoshop one.


Feel Old

Explanation:
This is yet another comic following xkcd 's recurring theme of using cultural or pop-cultural event dates to reference how much time has passed between two events, often with the stated intention of making someone realize how old they are. (See Comics to make one feel old as well as this xkcd blag post . However, this is the first comic where the title is actually directly related to feeling old!). In each case, the joke is derived from the shock that many adults feel upon realizing that events that feel relatively recent actually took place many years or even decades ago.
This becomes especially relevant when it is noted how old someone born during that time would be. Perhaps this is because for many people, there are fewer significant events and changes in their lives after they reach adulthood where there are no grade numbers and annual class changes to mark the continued passage of years. Hearing many years have passed framed in the context of the age of a child allows you to realize how long the period really is as you recall how much had occurred in your own life and how much you had grown by the time you were that age.
In this case, Megan makes Cueball feel old by noting to him that the 2016 U.S. presidential election will be the first U.S. presidential election in which there will be eligible voters who are too young to remember the September 11 terrorist attacks , in which hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon  and a field in Pennsylvania in 2001. These attacks (commonly referred to as "9/11") were, in many ways, a defining event for an entire generation of Americans. This statement is made on the basis that the eligible voting age in the United States (the minimum age you must be to be eligible to vote in an election) is 18 years old, which is set by the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution .
Eligible voters in this election will have been born on or before November 8, 1998. The youngest voters will therefore have been nearly three years old (two years, ten months, and three days) on September 11, 2001. Megan is presuming that children under three years old (or at least some or many of them) were either too young to retain any memories from that age, or at least were too young to appreciate the significance of the attacks such that they would be retained memories 15 years later.
The previous U.S. presidential election took place November 6, 2012 and eligible voters would have been just shy of seven years old on September 11, 2001. Megan similarly presumes (or at least is generalizing) that voters who were seven on 9/11 were old enough to retain that memory through adulthood.
Particularly for those who were of voting age on September 11, 2001, it might seem startling that by election day, 15 years will have passed since 9/11. This might be particularly so given how significantly 9/11 shaped American society in the years following the attacks. 9/11 was a significant political point in the elections following the attacks as well as in non-electoral politics (such as discussions over homeland security, military actions, etc.) It is also unusual in that there was only one new Presidency (Obama replacing Bush in 2009) in a fifteen year period; historically, an average of nearly three new Presidencies begin in every fifteen years (the 44th Presidency is scheduled to end January 20, 2017, nearly 228 years after the first one began in 1789). To realize that there are people who have reached adulthood and weren't even old enough to be aware of 9/11 when it happened is a stark reminder of the passage of time since the event. The following election on November 3, 2020 , was the first in which there were eligible voters who were born after 9/11.
The 9/11 attack was already used in 647: Scary to make people feel old already back in 2009. At that time kids born after the event was old enough to discuss the event with adults which was what was scary for Rob in that comic.
When Megan asks Cueball if he wants to "feel old", he replies resignedly, suggesting that he recognizes (possibly based on the previous strips) that she's about to make him feel his age, but claims that he's ready. However, after she makes her statement, he admits that he wasn't ready. While he's technically aware of his age, that kind of perspective still catches him by surprise, and likely causes significant emotional discomfort. His additional discomfort may also be as a result of the serious and significant events of 9/11 Megan references in comparison to previous strips where lighter things like film release dates are cited (see the most relevant of those comics here: 891: Movie Ages ).
In the title text, Cueball asks Megan how long she can "keep this up" (i.e. how long she will continue to mention things to make him feel old). However, instead of addressing how long she can keep coming up with uncomfortable facts, she references a new fact that (intentionally or not) that likely has a similar effect of making Cueball feel old: That they're only likely to live another forty to fifty years (suggesting that they're both in their mid- to late- thirties). This may also be a reference to 493: Actuarial , where actuarial tables were used to estimate when (famous) people will die.
"How long are you going to keep this up?" Is also a question that is likely asked to Randall often. Perhaps, through this comment, he is confirming that he will continue making these comics until death or for as long as he possibly can.
[Megan and Cueball are walking.] Megan: Wanna feel old? Cueball: Does anyone? But OK, go ahead, I'm ready. Megan: This is the first presidential election in which there are voters too young to remember 9/11. Cueball: ...I wasn't ready.


World War III+

Explanation:
This comic takes a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein , and expands upon it to absurd levels. The original quote is: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." The basic premise of this quote is that World War III would be so devastating to the world that all humanity's progress would be wiped out and we would return to the technological level of the Stone Age.
The original quote is meant to be taken with a poetic license, with "sticks and stones" taken as a metaphor. Any literal interpretation reveals the quote to be faulty - a world war implies battles occurring through the world, on multiple continents, as part of a single war. Such a war can only occur in the presence of advanced communication networks, and advanced political/diplomatic structures; both of which would also imply weaponry far more sophisticated than sticks and stones. This comic pokes further fun at the literal interpretation of the quote, by appending to it other "literal statements" of a similarly ridiculous nature.
This comic expands the original quote letting Einstein suggest what other weapons future World Wars will be fought with:
In the title text Randall feigns annoyance about how the media only use the first part of the quote, thus taking it out of context. He implies that this is actually a full quote by Einstein and that all other occurrences using only the "original" version of this quote are misrepresenting it. In this particular case it is a much stronger quote than the long version from the comic, but it is often the case that quotes taken out of context seem to have an entirely different meaning than originally intended.
Incidentally, if you investigate the original context of the actual quotation, it turns out that Einstein may not have even said it in this exact form, and may in any case have got the idea from someone else. See the dicussion at Wikiquote .
[A quote with white text on black background:]
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don't know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!" — Albert Einstein


Map Age Guide

Explanation:
The comic consists of a flowchart depicting various ways to tell what era a map is from based on present country borders and land forms. (Except in the Not a Political Map Branch (from "Can you see the familiar continents?" downwards), the comic applies to a political map.) While many of the options are very serious, a few bizarre options reference fictional maps ( Discworld , Narnia , and Tolkien's Middle-earth ), or consider that seagulls, staplers, tubas, or breadboxes could be mistaken for a map. Randall also mentions US President Jimmy Carter being attacked by a giant swimming rabbit , an event previously referenced as one we must never forget in 204: America .
The flowchart, although probably effective in eventually identifying the production year of certain maps, is designed in a rather inefficient way, as some early distinctions are already on a very detailed level before some really important distinctions (fictional or non-political map) are made. This, of course, adds to the humorous tone of the comic. It is also hampered by several smaller or larger error (see trivia ), the biggest being a whole section on I-25 that gives years in the range 1948–1952, before I-25 was built, and coming from a question that fixed the year range to 1960–1961.
Additionally, (possible) future maps including a "Radioactive Exclusion Zone" in the place of Colorado are mentioned. It predicts that some kind of nuclear incident will occur in Colorado (possibly at Rulison or Rio Blanco nuclear testing sites) in 2022. It also predicts that the area will be infested by radioactive spiders one year later.
The title text continues the path where the user has confused a seagull for a map by inquiring if the (presumed) seagull might be a banshee based on the effect of its screams.
[A very complicated flow chart, which can only be read in detail using the larger image now shown at the top of this page. This transcript uses the large version, which is more legible.]
[At the top of the chart there is a large caption, with a smaller caption below:] Guide to figuring out the age of an undated world map (Assuming it's complete, labeled in English, and detailed enough)
[Below the starting bracket in the small caption is a start box. It has rounded corners and it is gray with white text. From this box there is a gray line to a box consisting of a black frame with rounded corners. In these kind of boxes there are questions regarding the map in black text. Below this box there are three gray boxes like the start box, superimposed over the bottom frame. In these boxes are the possible answers to the question in the frame above. From each of these options there is a gray line going to similar black framed boxes with other questions either below, or to either side. There can either be two, three or four gray boxes, two the most common. Only at the very bottom of the central branch where it turns out it was a home made map, are there two frames with only one gray question box each. This trend continues over this entire large image. When reaching the end of a branch in the flow chart, there is no line away from one, more or all of the gray boxes for a black frame. When this happens a year range or a guess at what the map shows, or what it is (if it turns out to not be a map) is written below the gray box in gray text. Of the text in the gray boxes are Yes/No, but not always. There are 74 boxes with black frames with 158 gray boxes and 78 endpoints with text below the gray box and one end point without text below (the one with the home made map).]
Start Istanbul or Constantinople? Constantinople Do any of these exist ? Independent Canada US Territory of Alaska Tokyo No The Holy Roman Empire? Yes 1805 or earlier (before this point, the modern idea of a complete political map of the world gets hard to apply.) No The United States? No How sure are you that this map is in English? Yes Texas is... Part of Mexico Florida is part of... Spain Paraguay? No 1806–10 Yes 1811–17 The US Venezuela and/or Ecuador? No 1818–29 Yes 1830–33 Independent 1834–45 Part of the US Does Russia border the Sea of Japan? No The US's southern border looks... Weird 1846–53 Normal 1854–56 Yes 1858–67 Yes South Africa? No Rhodesia? No Is Bolivia landlocked? No "Buda" and "Pest" or "Budapest"? Buda and Pest 1868–72 Budapest 1873–83 Yes 1884–95 Yes Is Norway part of Sweden? Yes 1896–1905 No 1906–09 Yes Austria-Hungary? Yes Albania? No 1910–12 Yes 1913–18 No Leningrad? No 1919–23 Yes 1924–29 Neither Does the Ottoman Empire exist? Yes #canada-alaska-tokyo No The Soviet Union? Yes Saudi Arabia? Yes Is most of West Africa a giant french blob? Yes Pakistan? No How many Germanys are there? One Persia or Iran? Persia 1930–34 Iran 1935–40 One, but it's huge 1941–45 Two 1946–47 Yes Cambodia? No Eritrea is part of... Italy Canada is... Missing a piece 1948 Fine The town on I-25 between Albuquerque and El Paso is... Hot Springs 1948-49 Truth or Consequences 1950–52 Ethiopia 1952–53 Yes The United Arab Republic? No 1954–57 Yes 1958–60 No How many Vietnams are there? Two Bangladesh? No Is the area south of Lake Victoria... British 1960 Tanganyika 1961–64 Tanzania 1965–71 Yes 1972–75 One Jimmy Carter is... Being attacked by a giant swimming rabbit April 20, 1979 Fine The Sinai is part of what country? Israel 1976–79 Mostly Israel 1980 Mostly Egypt 1981 Egypt What's the capital of Micronesia? Kolonia Republic of the Upper Volta or Burkina Faso? Upper Volta 1982–84 Burkina Faso 1985–88 Palikir (number of Yemens) + (number of Germanys) = ? Four 1989-early 1990 Three mid-1990 Two late 1990–1991 No 1922–1932 No North Korea? Yes Zaire? or: "Hong Kong (UK)" Yes 1992–96 No Serbia/Montenegro are... One country East Timor? No 1997–2001 Yes 2002–06 Two countries How many Sudans are there? One 2007–11 Two Is Crimea disputed? Yes "Colorado" or "Danger—Radioactive Exclusion Zone—Avoid"? Colorado 2014–21 Danger Does the warning mention the spiders? No 2022 Yes 2023 or later No 2012–13 No Saint Trimble's Island No Is Jan Mayen part of the Kingdom of Norway? Not yet #canada-alaska-tokyo What? Can you see the familiar continents? Yes This sounds like a physical map or satellite photo. Yes, that's it Is Lake Chad missing? No How far east do the American Prairies reach? Indiana before 1830 The Mississippi 1830s-80s Nebraska Is there a big lake in the middle of Southern California? (created by mistake) No 1860s-1900s Yes 1910s What prairies? Is there a big lake in the middle of Ghana? (created on purpose) No 1920s-50s Yes 1960s-70s Yes Is the Aral Sea missing? No 1970s-90s Yes 2000s+ No Rivers "Sirion" or "Anduin"? Yes Mordor? No Beleriand? Yes First Age No Early Second Age Yes Númenor? Yes Late Second Age No The forest east of the Misty Mountains is... Greenwood Early Third Age Mirkwood Late Third Age The Wood of Greenleaves Fourth Age No Cair Paravel? Yes Calormen? No Lotta Islands? No Beruna Ford The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Bridge Prince Caspian Yes Dawn Treader Yes Weird recursive heaven? No One of the random later books Yes The Last Battle No Mossflower? Yes Redwall No Is the world on the back of a turtle? Yes Discworld No Are you sure this is a map? Yes Did you make it yourself? Yes It's very nice. Thank you! No Is it trying to bite you? No Is it larger than a breadbox? Yes tuba No stapler About the same breadbox Yes If you let it go, what does it do? Hisses and runs away cat Screeches and flaps around the room breaking things seagull Yes #pakistan Yes No, I made that one up. Istanbul Does the Soviet Union exist? Yes #west-africa-french-blob No #zaire
Title text: Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.


My Friend Catherine

Explanation:
This is another comic using substitutions to create the joke by replacing words or phrases, in this case "My cat", with a different word or phrase, in this case "My friend Catherine" (hence the title). The choice of the name is probably because "Cat" is a common nickname for "Catherine".
By doing so in a list of people discussing things their cat did , it makes it seem like they are discussing things their female human friend did.  What is cute (sitting on keyboards), impressive (doing backflips to eat bugs), or at least normal behavior for a cat (vomiting hairballs) would often be weird, disgusting or disturbing if an adult human were to do it, which is what makes the substitution humorous.
The comic depicts a feed on a page for people discussing their cat, similar to Twitter or Facebook, which would be the only kind of place where the substitution is really funny. Apart from known characters like two looking like Cueball , Megan and Ponytail , there is also a person with black hair, not looking particularly like any standard characters, and then a person with a knit cap , which could be the same knit cap wearing user that was also used in 1506: xkcloud (see the pictures of the users ).
[Captions above the frame:] New favorite substitution: My Cat→My Friend Catherine
[A news feed with comments by six different people discussing their cat, but after the above substitution. Next to each post is a user image, and above the clear text of the substituted comment is a unreadable line of wiggles probably with information about the post time stamp.]
[A head shot of a person seen straight on with black hair:] My friend Catherine just did a backflip and then ate a bug!
[A full view of Cueball:] I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't wake me up by chewing on my hair.
[A head shot of Megan with unreadable text below the image:] Oh no, my friend Catherine has learned to open the refrigerator.
[A head shot seen from the front of Knit Cap:] My friend Catherine just walked in, threw up on the rug, and walked out.
[A head shot of Ponytail:] My friend Catherine is looking out the window making weird noises at the birds.
[Cueball seen from the torso and up:] I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't make eye contact with me while pooping.


Time-Tracking Software

Explanation:
In this comic, Randall uses time-tracking software , which is intended to increase productivity by identifying how you are spending time, that reveals that he is doing frivolous and pointless things that take up large amounts of his time. He makes remixes, edits Star Wars footage, reads strange (albeit entertaining) Wikipedia articles (see 214: The Problem with Wikipedia ), and even spends a large amount of time adjusting this software, all without getting anything useful done. Thus, he is embarrassed at this revelation. This time waste is a common subject on xkcd, as shown for instance in the comic mentioned above.
The visual appearance of lightsabers in the Star Wars movies of the original trilogy has been digitally changed twice during the re-releases for the 2004 DVD and 2011 Blu-ray releases. There are several Star Wars fans that feel the need to alter the movies (mainly to revert the changes made in the re-release), but so far nobody felt the need to replace lightsabers with metal swords.
" Jack & Diane " is a rock song written in 1982 by John Mellencamp . " Suckin' on a chili dog outside the tastee freeze " is the first line of the second verse of the song (see the lyrics here ). A remix made using just this line would probably sound a bit repetitive (listen for instance to this re-mix of "Don't You Want Me" , that almost only uses the first line of the song).
Two Wikipedia lists are mentioned in the comic and title text; List of helicopter prison escapes and List of sexually active popes . Given that the Pope is supposed to be celibate (at least after 1139), the mere fact that more than ten popes have been involved in sexual activity, even after 1139, is both amusing and intriguing. There are more than forty entries in the helicopter escape list for real-life attempts (plus 16 in fiction); not all of them succeeded, but several did!
On June 7th, the Wikipedia Facebook page posted a link to the List of helicopter prison escapes article. A user commented asking if the article was posted on Facebook due to the xkcd comic, and Wikipedia replied by pasting an image of the xkcd comic, which seems to indicate that the Wikipedia representative running the Facebook page was aware of this xkcd comic and posted the list in reference to the comic.
In the title text, Randall mentions his disappointment with the lack of a Wikipedia list stemming from the intersection of the two; that is, a helicopter prison escape involving a sexually active pope. With the last (known) sexually active pope being Pope Leo XII in the 1820s, and helicopter predecessors only taking flight in 1907, and mass production of helicopters not occurring until the 1950s, such an event has probably never happened. [ citation needed ]
This xkcd comic was published on June 6th. On that day, the Wikipedia article "List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes" was created and subsequently deleted.
The Wikipedia list of sexually active popes has been mentioned before in the what if? Into the Blue on infinitely powerful lasers, and after noting that such a thing cannot exist, the list is offered as a replacement for entertainment.
The comic 1692: Man Page was released later that week and also mentioned the pope.
[This comic shows a pie chart with 5 slices, each with a label and a line pointing to these five different sized slices. There is a caption above the chart:] Your activity report
[The labels on each slice is given in clockwise order starting top left. The percentages are estimated from the image and are noted in the square brackets before the transcript:]
[38%]: Going through the Star Wars movies and digitally replacing all the lightsabers with regular metal swords [16%]: Reading every entry in the Wikipedia article List of helicopter prison escapes [23%]: Installing and configuring time-tracking software [02%]: Actual productive work [21%]: Making a remix of that Jack and Diane song where every line is just "Suckin' on a chili dog outside the tastee-freez" over and over
[Below the frame there is a caption:] Time-tracking software shines an uncomfortably harsh light on my daily life.


Optimization

Explanation:
In computing, program optimization is the practice of making a computer program work as quickly as possible, typically by designing it to perform the fewest calculations. " Premature optimization " is the practice of trying to optimize parts of a program before such optimization has been shown to be needed. Optimization can prove to have been a waste of time if parts of the program are later changed or discarded, or if the optimized code is only a small part of the workload. Making a routine 10 times faster doesn't help much if that routine is only consuming 1% of the running time to begin with and it may result in more complicated and buggier code.
This comic is a flowchart making fun of the difference between prematurely optimizing and doing things right in the first place: it tells you that if you are using it to decide whether you are optimizing prematurely, then you're optimizing prematurely. The humorous conclusion is that if there is any doubt whether an optimization is premature , then it is premature !
Another layer of humor is provided by the minimalism and directness of the flowchart, which suggests that it has itself been (prematurely?) optimized.
The title text's root of all evil refers to Donald Knuth 's paper "Structured Programming with Goto statements" (1974) [1] in which he wrote:
The title text takes the joke a step further by proposing optimizing a brand new project by introducing a procedure to determine whether a possible optimization is premature - which is obviously a premature optimization. It pokes fun at time-wasting behavior by obsessively perfectionist coders who develop tools to analyze aspects of their software, such as performance. In some fields, such as compilers or database design, such tools can be useful and productive (the 3% mentioned by Knuth?), but the usage suggested here is more appropriately covered by instinct, common sense, and observation of the behavior of the completed program.
The title text may also be poking fun at the comic, since the comic itself may be the "system" used to determine premature optimization.
Flowcharts are often used in xkcd including the (mostly) non-farcical 1688: Map Age Guide one week prior to this comic. Inefficiency (another xkcd theme) was featured in the comic prior to this one .
[A flow chart is shown with three boxes connected with two arrows. The first box is rectangular:] Are you prematurely optimizing or just taking time to do things right?
[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:] Are you consulting a flowchart to answer this question?
[A labeled arrow continues down.] Yes
[The arrow connects to the final rectangular box.] You are prematurely optimizing


Man Page

Explanation:
This comic shows a Unix manual page, i.e. a man page (hence the title), for a fictional program called " blerp ". Unix man pages are meant to provide a brief reference on the usage of a command, not extended explanations with tutorials as may be found in many hardcopy product manuals. Unfortunately, some Unix commands tend to be very bloated and include lots of optional behavior that is often irrelevant to the original intent of the command and can be done much more easily using shell features like piping and redirection, and thus the manpage grows to explain all of the features. This example exaggerates the obscurity and terseness found in many man pages, making fun of the typical style of the genre.
It follows the prescribed format for a man page, with the following sections:
For comic effect, most of this particular man page is not meaningful, and sometimes doesn't obey the expected syntax.
The Synopsis section is supposed to be in a regex -like language called Wirth Syntax Notation , with structures like
But the two Synopsis lines given do not have valid Wirth syntax; they randomly mix objects and syntactic characters, and the brackets and braces are not properly nested or paired.
The Description section provides an unhelpful summary that could apply to almost any Unix command. Processing input files (or output of other commands in a pipeline) is a generic function for Unix shell tools, as is specifying their behaviour with command line arguments, environment variables and flags. The text leaves to the reader's imagination what the program actually does , and what behavior the various options modify, which gives maximum scope for humorous possibilities.
The options are in conventional alphabetical order, except that lower case is placed before upper case, and an em-dash is inserted between b and c.
Command-line options , also known as flags, are typed after the program's name to change how the program runs. For example, a user of blerp might type:
blerp -a -d -t -p "AVIGNON"
According to the man page, this would run blerp in attack mode, piping its output to DEBUG.EXE, with tumble dry, and the true Pope set to "AVIGNON". In most cases, any number of flags can be used in any order, and flags can be followed by argument (such as "AVIGNON" in this example).
For a walkthrough of all possible flags see the table of flags below.
Below the flags there is a see also list with other ludicrous program names (blirb, blarb and blorp ), each followed by a number in parentheses. This is a common way to refer to a command in Unix environments, where the number denotes the documentation section the program is found in. This serves to disambiguate man pages with the same name, in this instance those for the blerp command (section 1, "General commands") and the blerp() C library function (section 3, "C library functions").
It is unknown which section the man page in this comic resides in. It looks like it could be in section 1, "General commands", which would make it self-referential. Section numbers only go up to 8, so blarb(51) is not a valid section number. The last blorp(501)(c)(3) is not a valid section number either, it is however a slightly covert reference to 501(c)(3) which is an organization that is tax-exempt .
Then follows a bug report site. www.inaturalist.org is a site working to extend biological research, and the exact address given, http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47744-Hemiptera , points to the same page as http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Hemiptera . Hemiptera is the order classifying true bugs , making it a good place to report any biological bugs discovered while running a program (Like the bees found without using -b.) Insects got into some early computers, causing them to malfunction, and hence computer malfunctions are often called "bugs".
Finally there is a " copyright " line which references several variously open-source content licenses, which is a recurring theme on xkcd (see 225: Open Source ). For instance, GPL references GNU General Public License and the (2) and (3+) refers to GPL 2 and GPL 3 or higher . CC refers to creative commons where BY is the type of license , 5.0 refers to the attribution and RV 41.0 refers to revision 41.0. However there were no higher attribution than 4.0 at the time of this comic's release. xkcd is released under CC BY-NC 2.5 as can be seen at the bottom of the xkcd homepage. A few comics have been released under the CC-BY-SA license or 3.0 . BSD refers to BSD licenses , another recurring theme in xkcd. "Like Gecko" is a reference to a web browser user-agent string; modern user-agent strings include a lot of text designed to allow browsers to masquerade as different browsers/renderers, and "(like Gecko)" is the standard text for a browser that wants to be treated as if it were Gecko while admitting, if you look closely, that it isn't really Gecko. This copyright line, which includes a lot of mashed-together text that might appear to match any of several different licenses, resembles a user agent string.
"Or best offer" is usually seen on a notice of a private sale, where it proclaims the intent to be flexible on asking price in the hope of expediting the sale, with a suggestion that the seller will sell to the highest bidder even if the offer is nowhere near the asking price. In the context of the comic, it suggest that the rights for the program are available for purchase by anyone who makes the "best" offer. Since the other licenses listed would allow free usage without incurring any royalty charge, it would be pointless to buy the rights to this program. It is possible to revoke the other licenses though. Perhaps the program's creator is suggesting the rights could be given to someone making him a different sort of offer, perhaps romantic or sexual?
In the title text there is a list with even more info, again with silly names like blarbl and birb . Again there are section numbers. While writing about birb, and without bothering to close the brackets around (3), the writer breaks off to laugh at the reader, telling them that he is kidding and suggesting that they just Google it like a normal person . The implication is that anyone trying to pick through a man page to find out what a program does is going the long way round, when it's much simpler to get Google to tell you.
Man pages were part of the subject of 293: RTFM , 912: Manual Override and 1343: Manuals and were mentioned in 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport and 456: Cautionary .
[A terminal screen; the background is black and the text is white.]
Actual UNIX manpages exist on some systems which are written in a similar, nonsensical style to these.
Manual pages distributed for the <n>fun sections describe similarly humorous "commands" with unusual options.
On some systems, these manual pages are available in funny-manpages or asr-manpages packages.


Oxidation

Explanation:
In this comic Ponytail has set Megan 's car on fire, possibly by crashing it.
Oxidation refers to a whole class of chemical reactions. Any chemical reaction that involves the loss of electrons is called "oxidation" (since a lot of these involve oxygen). One oxidation reaction is rusting , the reaction of iron atoms in the steel of the car with oxygen and moisture to produce iron oxide hydrate. Rusting is extremely difficult to prevent, and all cars are rusting slowly. Oxidation was also mentioned in the title text of 1426: Reduce Your Payments , where the main joke was about the opposite reaction i.e. reduction.
Another oxidation reaction is combustion , an exothermic reaction, such as the violently rapid reaction of flammable parts of the car with oxygen to produce a whole load of nasty gases and particulates, as well as a lot of heat. Vehicle fires can burn very quickly and destroy a vehicle within minutes.
From the most detached viewpoint, these are both oxidation reactions (although they occur in different places: rusting normally happens to the car chassis while fires are usually isolated to the engine) and Ponytail argues that as all cars oxidize, the fire that she has caused has only accelerated the inevitable destruction of the vehicle.
This idea was already explored in the what if? Burning Pollen , where the second image shows a burning car and the text above mentions the difference between rusting and burning cars: Lots of materials oxidize when exposed to air. Bananas go bad, copper turns green, iron rusts. Fire is another kind of oxidation reaction. In other words, our cars are always oxidizing; we just try to keep it from happening suddenly. The title text of the image even mentions the fact that it is different parts that burns than those that rust: Although the parts that oxidize during a car fire and the parts that rust aren’t usually the same.
The comic by extension mocks arguments that ignore or trivialize quantitative differences. Such arguments are commonly employed to attack climate change: the Earth has been warming since the glacial period ten thousand years ago, it's just happening faster since the introduction of large quantities of greenhouse gases.
In the title text the small arthropods (invertebrates that have jointed bodies and exoskeletons) are referencing microscopic mites – tiny creatures that can live on the human body without normally causing any harm (you probably have eyelash mites , for instance).
Presumably as a form of revenge, Megan has caused Ponytail to become covered in much larger arthropods - most probably spiders , judging by Randall's fixation with them , but it could be any combination of these often feared animals: spiders, scorpions , insects , crabs , centipedes , millipedes etc. As contrasted with the harmless mites mentioned above, other parasitic arthropods (such as the Crab louse , an insect known in slang as "crabs") are notorious as a sexually transmitted infection , and Megan could have been referring to these as those Ponytail already had as a further means of degrading her after the car fire incidence.
Megan's car also caught fire in 1014: Car Problems , but there she did not at first know for sure who did it. Not a direct relation, but Megan seems to be unlucky with her cars.
This comic was referenced in the title text of 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline
[Ponytail is holding a finger up in front of Megan while gray smoke and heat waves pours in to the frame from off-panel left.] Ponytail: In my defense, your car has been oxidizing since you got it. Ponytail: It's just happening a lot faster now.


Phishing License

Explanation:
Phishing is a scam where a criminal sends emails or other messages (often large numbers of them) pretending to be from a trusted institution in order to obtain passwords, credit card numbers, or other personal details of victims. The term is a neologism, playing on the term "fishing", because the process is likened to dangling bait and waiting for someone to bite. Phishing is illegal under both traditional fraud laws and modern cybercrime laws.
A fishing license is a government-issued permit allowing the catching of fish in controlled waters.
Cueball saw the sign offering phishing licenses, and was immediately arrested by the receptionist Ponytail upon applying for one. There is no need for a license for a crime like fraud, so it is dubious an authority would issue them, hence why Cueball should have been more suspicious of the offer. The joke is that the process of offering "phishing licenses" is analogous to the process of phishing itself: they pretend to be a legitimate business and display a sign with a false offer, hoping someone will be fooled into interacting with them. While the ideal phishing attempt is indistinguishable from the real thing, that's generally impossible to attain and there are always some ways to identify it as a scam. But still some people fall into the trap, partly because they don't know what to be on the alert for, and partly because the attempt is often directed at so many people at once that statistically there will be some that will fall for it. Still as Cueball himself states, he should have known it was a scam.
The title text reveals that Cueball's arrest was itself a scam, not an actual police sting , adding even more "phishing" to the phishing for potential phishers. He has been put in jail, but is allowed to walk out after paying a bail of $10,000, only to find that when he gets back out on the street, it is not the street on which the county jail has its address. So Ponytail is actually not trying to capture people who would be interested in scamming people, she is trying to scam those people instead; although this is illegal, it may be rather clever as such people might not be likely to go to the police. Another joke in the title text is that a way to recognize phishing attempts is to look at the address of the website (or in his false prison sentence, the street address instead of the web address).
[A sign has an arrow below the text that points toward a sales window in a wall (with glass in front and small semicircular opening at the bottom for transferring money and goods). On each side of the window there are two pieces of paper with illegible text, and there is also one below the window that seems to have some kind of stamp or seal, still illegible). In front of the window Cueball is addressing Ponytail who sits behind the window.] Sign: Phishing license apply here Cueball: Hi, I’d like to apply for a— Ponytail: You’re under arrest. Cueball: …OK, I should’ve seen that coming.