A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

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Let's get dinner after we promptly destroy all the X-7 we've manufactured.

The few dozen doors that have little Christmas trees on them are a nice touch.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

We should have you at the gate in just under two hours--two and a half if we get pulled over.

We can do this.

Sadly, it probably won't even have enough gas to make it to the first border crossing.

Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.

My first try at drawing a real face in years

It's possible the bread and shell can be split into a top and bottom flavor, and some models additionally suggest Strange Bread and Charm Shells.

I never got around to seeing that movie about the battle (of Midway).

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

I've been trying for a couple years now but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'.

But seriously, there's loads of intelligent life. It's just not screaming constantly in all directions on the handful of frequencies we search.

There's some flexibility depending on your standards for measuring runtime and the various special editions. If you still want to have a party, I'm sure you can find some combination that works.

I've lived in the present for my whole life and I'm not about to move now.

If used with software that could keep up, a scroll wheel mapped to send a stream of 'undo' and 'redo' events could be kind of cool.

2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.

Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.

By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.

I'd traverse it myself, but it's singly linked, so I'm worried that I won't be able to find my way back to 2021.

This discovery was key to his demonstration of regular/goofy symmetry violation, which won him gold in the theory portion of the X Games.

'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'

If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.

Wikipedia path: Virus -> Immune system -> Innate immune system -> Parasites -> List of parasites of humans -> Naegleria fowleri -> Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis -> Deciding I DEFINITELY shouldn't connect an aquarium pump to my sinuses

We could go to the theater across town and see if it's opened THERE yet, but we don't want to lose our place in line.

I love their cover of 1,200 Balloons, Dalmatians, and Miles.

Take me down to the paradise municipality / where the grass is mauve and the girls aren't fromthisreality.

To really expand your mind try some noncartesian porn. Edwin Abbot Abbott has nothing on 'Girls on Girls in Tightly Closed Nonorientable Spaces'.

The worst is when you run out of monospaced fonts and have to use variable-width variables.

If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.

Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.

I guess I need to apologize to my parents, friends, and the staff at Chuck E. Cheese's for all the times I called the cops on them.

James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.

I mean, if it's that easy to get a theorem named for you ... "a straight line that passes through the center of a coplanar circle always divides the circle into two equal halves." Can I have that one? Wait, can I auction off the naming rights? It can be the Red Bull Theorem or the Quicken Loans Theorem, depending who wants it more.

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

Both too cautious AND not cautious enough: "I'm skeptical that those are aliens, so I'm going to try pulling off their masks."

According to River, 'adequate' vacuuming systems drain the human body at about half a liter per second.

'Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]

The IAU is sad to announce that at 00:39 UTC on December 22nd, Jupiter and Saturn did unfortunately come into contact, and appear to have blooped together.

November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

You're a turtle!

And let's be honest, it's more like two and a half stars. Proxima is barely a star and barely bound to the system.

Squinting at a graph is fine for getting a rough idea of the answer, but if you want to pretend to know it exactly, you need statistics.

"I wish for everything in the world. All the people, money, trees, etc." "Are you SURE you--" "And I want you to put it in my house."

'... hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today. ABC will likely announce new ...'

I don't know about houseflies, but we definitely caught a lot of fruit flies with our vinegar bowl. Hooray science!

'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'

Hey, are you friends with any hamsters? This kite needs a passenger.

My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels.

Do you make a distinction between shallots, scallops, and scallions? If you use all three words, do they all have different meanings, all the same, or are two the same and one different?

Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.

I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.

We watched DAYTIME TV. Do you realize how soul-crushing it was? I'd rather eat an iPad than go back to watching daytime TV.

"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."

"And in maritime news, the Coast Guard is on the scene today after an apparent collision between two lighthouses."

After a while, the squirrel starts making that beeping noise and doesn't stop until it hops back up onto the stump.

Curdled milk, of a peculiar kind, made after a Bulgarian recipe and called "yaghurt," is now a Parisian fad and is believed to be a remedy against growing old. A correspondent who has tried it, says he would prefer to die young. (1905, The Elk Falls Journal)

(It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

If you're turning 27 and were born in the Northeast, maybe you were conceived in the April blizzard of 1982. Imagine: snowed in, candles, massage oil, your mom sporting nothing but her early 80's haircut and a smile ... aren't you glad you read the title-text?

Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the 'RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS' thing.

I hear that these days Bill Watterson is happy just painting in the Ohio woods with his father and doesn't get any mail or talk to anyone.

I ended up getting my tax return prepared at a local place by a really friendly pretrained neural net named Greg.

An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.

They estimate the rocket should be free by approximately ... uh ... well, in about two hours.

If you closely examine the cosmic background radiation, you can pick up lingering echoes of 'I Got You Babe'.

I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.

I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?

The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

We're getting a lot of complaints from commuters who were routed onto a coaster, but the theme park patrons who spent hours stuck on an intercity line are also not happy.

My life goal is to launch a barge into the air and have it land on one of Elon Musk's rockets.

In addition to gravity, burritos interact through the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, which is believed to be a major contributor to their popularity.

The film is set in 2018, but when Commander Bremberly chases the hologram through Times Square, there's a billboard for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Depending on the date, that billboard would have been advertising either Infinity War or this movie.

You can do a lot better than 1% if you start keeping track of the patterns in what numbers people pick.

Good thing we're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with ourselves. I mean, that'd be a hell of a waste, right?

He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.

That night, retired USAF pilots covertly replaced the '62' with '50'.

You can tell most people don’t really assign an absolute meaning to these numbers because in some places and time periods, “billion” has meant 1,000x what it's meant in others, and a lot of us never even noticed.

You'd think it'd be easy to just bet money against these people, but you have to consider the probability of them paying up.

'Pick you up at eight?' 'Nine. I've got to re-mine the driveway.'

There was a schism in 2007, when a sect advocating OpenOffice created a fork of Sunday.xlsx and maintained it independently for several months. The efforts to reconcile the conflicting schedules led to the reinvention, within the cells of the spreadsheet, of modern version control.

As the King of All Cosmos remarked, 'Is it that it's fun, or that it lets you forget yourself?'

I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.

This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.

This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

Unlike an Iron Age collapse, a Bronze Age collapse releases energy, since copper and tin are past the iron peak on the curve of binding energy.

I'm SO glad I escaped. They almost had me caught in their weird ... thing.

If you're interested in the subject, Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' is pretty good

I ADMIRE HOW YOU SET BOUNDARIES AND I HOPE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPECT THEM! PLEASE SPARE MY LIFE!

Oh sure, I know Keira Knightly, from the first movie in that series by The Land Before Time producer. You know, the franchise with the guy from Jurassic Park and Ghostwriter, and script work by Billie Lourd's mom?

Luckily for my interpretation, no precincts were won by the Green Party.

Sorry, in SI units that's "there's a big football in there."

Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur.

More generally, with great power comes great dEnergy/dt.

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

The creepy fingers that grow from a vibrating cornstarch-water mix can be modeled as a chain of inverted vertical pendulums (DOI:10.1039/c4sm00265b) and are believed to be the fingers of Maxwell's Demon trying to push through into our universe.

"Ow! One of the petri dishes I left on the tower railing fell and hit me on the head! Hey, that gives me an idea..."

[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.

Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I've said about them.

Assume r' refers to the radius of Earth Prime, and r'' means radius in inches.

It's okay, I'm at 10%, so I'm good for another month or two.

I pronounce epitome "EPPY-tome", but EpiPen "uh-PIE-pen".

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.

'So we just have a steady flow of metal piling up in our server room? Isn't that a problem?' 'Yeah, you should bring that up at our next bismuth meeting.'

Cosmologists estimate the spaghetti strand to be about 200 septillion calories, though it could be higher depending on the nutritional value of dark matter.

Pontoon bridges are just linear open-sided waterbeds.

Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.

My hobby: Pretending to miss the sarcasm when people show off their lack of interest in football by talking about 'sportsball' and acting excited to find someone else who's interested, then acting confused when they try to clarify.

I think the IETF hit the right balance with the 128 bits thing. We can fit MAC addresses in a /64 subnet, and the nanobots will only be able to devour half the planet.

The statue should be in the likeness of whatever sculptor posted the sculpting tool repair video that was most helpful during the installation of the statue.

The SLS head engineer plans to invite Shania Twain to stand under the completed prototype, then tell her, 'I don't expect you to date me just because I'm a rocket scientist, but you've gotta admit--this is pretty fucking impressive.'

Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.

[Decades in the future] "Well, the good news is that we've received definitive communication from aliens. The bad news is that they're asking about Cats (2019)."

Placeble 228 x/6n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

It has been −2,147,483,648 days since our last integer overflow.

Update: Santa has been destroyed by the range safety officer.

It's annoying that the Nastapoka Arc isn't a meteor impact crater, but I truly believe that--with enough time, effort, and determination--we could make it one.

"Okay, for the last time, the shot is free, so we can't--" "Shut up and take my money!"

Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.

The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.

The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.

David did this

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING][tab] "Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown."

I dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

I think it's the sheep zapping the cactus and not vice-versa

That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.

Obligatory bad guy: This operation is sheer foolishness, and it's not happening on my watch! Mainly because I can't figure out how to adjust the time.

Though 100 years is longer than a lot of our resources.

'ARE YOU TURNED ON YET?' 'I DON'T THINK SO--ARE YOU?' 'MAYBE A LITTLE!' 'OK, FIVE MORE MINUTES.'

I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.

It's crazy how much my gut opinion of a movie/song is swayed by what other people say, regardless of how I felt coming out of the theater.

Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)

To anyone I've taken on a terrible date, this is retroactively my cover story.

"So, like, sexy news videos?" "No, people have tried that--it's still just video content. We need to actually inform people THROUGH making out. I would call it 'Mouth Content,' but I think that's already the title of a Neil Cicierega album."

Stay while I recount the crazy TF2 kill I managed yesterday, my friends.

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.

"Sir, it looked really cool." "Oh no--prestige TV. Okay, which of you has a terrible secret that's being slowly revealed to the audience through flashbacks? Just spit it out so we can escape this arc!"

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?

And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.

Stay right there, we'll be back in a minute. We've just gotta brainstorm some new wonders. Have you all figured out gears yet? Yes? Crap.

Chemists actually find it simpler to define a general odor of rotten eggs as a baseline, and the LACK of rotten eggs as a distinct smell.

If you encounter a hex bolt, but you only brought screwdrivers, you can try sandwiching the head of the bolt between two parallel screwdriver shafts, squeezing the screwdrivers together with a hand at either end, then twisting. It doesn't work and it's a great way to hurt yourself, but you can try it!

I'm really worried Christopher Nolan will kill a man dressed like a bat in his next movie. (The man will be dressed like a bat, I mean. Christopher Nolan won't be, probably.)

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically.

To prove you're human, please click all the number pairs that appear together in your Social Security number.

Reportedly, double-walled inflatable balls like this exist somewhere. Now to find that place.

And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.

I once got to second base with a basketball player. She was so confused.

Dinosaur Cosmics

I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

Unless the next line is, "After we broke up, she blamed the painting and spent years planning her revenge, so my sorrow is mixed with relief that the dogs at least denied her that triumph."

If you're planning to challenge the royal family, you should probably wait 6-8 weeks, since a number of the younger ones have diplomas and Kate was actually on the varsity lightsaber team at St Andrews.

You may point out that strictly speaking, you can use that statement to prove that all risks are tiny--to which I reply HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT DOG!

I'm currently in the I Have Cheese phase of this cycle.

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

If you don't end the 99 Bottles of Beer recursion at N=0 it just becomes The Other Song That Never Ends.

I think Voyager 1 would be just past the event horizon, but slightly less than halfway to the bright ring.

No, YOU stumble past a series of post-breakup hookups in a daze as you slowly realize what you've lost and how unlikely you are ever to get it back first.

And I was really impressed with how they managed to shock the Goatse guy.

They're standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn't clear at all.

Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I'd landed.

Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.

Researchers claim to have synthesized six additional elements in the second row, temporarily named 'pentium' through 'unnilium'.

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.

DUCKLOOP'D?

I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.

There's a red convertible outside my building with the license plate 'DADS MNY'.

I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.

'Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own busines and don't do anything weird.' --The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

Wait a minute. If I'm escaping from a submarine at 50 meters, then I'll *definitely* need a flashlight to find air pockets for gradual decompression on the way up. Time to start shopping professional dive lights.

( MSTE ( AR ) CD )

If the breaking news is about an event at a hospital or a lab, move it all the way over to the right.

Neither group uses iso 8601 because the big-endian enthusiasts were all at the meeting 20 years ago.

'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

I mean, half of these are undefined. And your multiplication dots are too low; they look like decimal points.

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

Could be worse. In some towns north of here, it's already December, and the 21st will last for nearly a week.

And because if you just leave it there, it's going to start contaminating things downstream even if no one touches it directly.

This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'

The Taylor series should have been canceled after the first term.

Maybe I should let up on Megatokyo a little?

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

Changes with this update: If you use the combined scan-shred function, it now performs them in that order instead of the reverse, saving a HUGE amount of CPU time.

My other (much harder) hobby is trying to engineer situations where I have an excuse to use more than one of them in short succession.

The joke will be on him in a few weeks when animal control shows up and takes custody of his Roomba.

Unfortunately, my scheme to trick NASA has now taken over a decade longer than planned and has run way over budget.

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

Applying renormalization to bullies successfully transformed Pete & Pete's Endless Mike into Finite Mike.

Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough--maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.

You can leave at any time through the door over there. It's a Louisville door, so you'll need to find a compatible knob. No, don't be silly, that one is a Lexington knob! Of course it won't fit.

It's made me way more excited about ferris wheels, subways, car washes, waterslides, and store entrances that have double doors with a divider in the middle.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.

With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)

And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.

Easier to escape: n-layered nested quotes or an iron maiden?

In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.

You ARE getting older, though.

[Halfway to the Sun ...] Heyyyy ... what if this BALLOON is full of acorns?!

Ma'am, I admit that wasn't in the best taste, but you have to admire my delivery! Ha ha, get it? Oh God, don't throw those syringes! Your baby's fine!

They'd convince me to come out of retirement for one last job: biting into a giant lump of slightly soft wax a couple of times.

They'd use that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, but even spambots cry at that.

Congratulations to whoever wished for revenge on a forest near the Tunguska River, a 1980 Chevy Malibu in Peekskill NY, Alabama resident Ann Hodges, every building in Chelyabinsk with glass windows, and the non-avian dinosaurs.

Those few who escaped found the emergency cutoff box disabled. The stampede lasted two hours and reached the bottom three times.

If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

If we find one of those tire dumps, the next time he tries to get his truck back we can just retreat and let him have it.

Nowadays the only ones left that do anything are turtles.

dpkg: error processing package (--purge): subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit 163: OH_GOD_THEYRE_INSIDE_MY_CLOTHES

My connection to it goes way back, to my early days, when I was just a cloud of primordial hydrogen collapsing in the darkness of space.

True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.

The average error in the NHC forecasted position of a hurricane three days in the future has shrunk to a third of what it was in 1990--a staggering accomplishment. However, as you may have gathered, forecasts of future storm *strength* have proved more difficult to improve.

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written.

With just one extra line, he could have anticipated the 2003 film The Core, but some things are too audacious for even the greatest visionaries.

ERROR: We've reached an unreachable state. Anything is possible. The limits were in our heads all along. Follow your dreams.

And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.

[Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]

'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

Created by the collapse of: [massive stars] [Florida limestone bedrock]

That's my hat! You took my hat!

In C, the multiocular O represents the bitwise norxondor gorgonax.

In the future, every single pipeline will lead to the bowl of a giant blender, and we'll all just show up with a bucket each day to take our share of the resulting smoothie.

Qua qua qua is the sine qua non of sine qua non qua sine qua non.

I'm looking to virally monetize your eyeballs by selling them for transplants.

Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: Every minute you spend thinking about Hofstadter's Law is a minute you're NOT WORKING AND WILL NEVER FINISH! PAAAAAANIIIIIIC!

'Your chitin armor is no match for our iron-tipped stingers! Better go hide in your jars!' --common playground taunt

Backward-compatible with many existing cables, and can connect directly to phones or tablets if you press them down hard enough.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

FYI: The 'drop, cover, and hold on' advice only applies to earthquakes. If you encounter a mountain lion, you should absolutely not drop to the ground, crawl under it, and hold on to one of its legs.

In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.

Every choice, no matter how small, begins a new story.

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

Why I'm Moving Most of My Social Activity to Slack, Then Creating a Second Slack to Avoid the People in the First One, Then Giving Up on Social Interaction Completely, Then Going Back to Texting

"Wait, we've MOVED since 2010. How on Earth did--" "Look, some of us were just born to be champions."

More likely: Click on all the pictures of people who appear disloyal to [name of company or government]

Where did you even get this wall? Return it there and stand it back up right now.

This works on pretty much every level.

For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.

Sometimes, you can tell Bloom filters are the wrong tool for the job, but when they're the right one you can never be sure.

Oh no, I haven't checked in with Yvonne in YEARS.

The text ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US with a lengthy footnote explaining that I got this tattoo in 2020 and not, as you may assume, 2001, but offering no further clarification.

Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

Shoot, it landed in the golf course. Gonna be hard to get it down the--oh, never mind, it rolled onto the ice hazard. Face-off!

Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase 'by the next business day.'

We're considering installing a pressurization system to keep the tanks at constant pressure solely to deter them.

If so great a deductive mind as Arthur Conan Doyle can be fooled by the Cottingley Deepfakes, what chance do we mortals have? Soon our very reality will be dictated by the whims of Frances (9) and Elsie (16).

'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'

'They really shouldn't let those small cars drive in traffic. I worry I'm going to kill someone if I hit one! They should have to drive on the sidewalk, safely out of the way.'

Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

On Mondays I go running, so you'll have to get up early and follow along on a parallel street. What fun!

You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.

Guest comic by David Troupes of Buttercup Festival, who is living in that lovely tree outside your window.

This was an actual mock conversation between me and a friend at TGiF. The waitress walked up around panel 5 and was somewhat put off.

Interestingly, on a true vertical log plot, I think the Eiffel Tower's sides really would be straight lines.

The biggest I've seen in a published source in the wild is an 80-fold error in a reported distance, which I think came from a series of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.

Uh-oh.

'Oh no, the box is drifting out into the harbor!' 'Yeah, I wouldn't worry about losing it.'

I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like 'The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).'

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way.

The dump also contains a list of millions of prime factors, a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit, and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code.

And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.

Any arrangement is an edible arrangement if you're hungry enough.

<3 If there's anything you can do, I'll let you know. For the moment, any simple distracting online games sent to sick@xkcd.com will not go unappreciated [EDIT: Holy crap 2,700 games before noon. I love you guys; thank you. They will be passed along and played by us all.]

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

This works for a surprising range of sunlit things, including rooftops (sure), highway surfaces (probably not), sailboats (maybe), and jets, cars, and wild deer (haha good luck).

It's totally a reasonable modern analogue. Jefferson would have been all about crypto.

"Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out."

When Vera Menchik entered a 1929 tournament, a male competitor mocked her by suggesting that a special 'Vera Menchik Club' would be created for any player who lost to her. When the tournament began, he promptly became the first member of said club, and over the years it accumulated a large and illustrious roster.

Joke's on you--the Roomba and I had a LOVELY evening.

Seriously considering buying some illegal drugs to try to turn them back into cold medicine.

It turns out that saying "Oh, so THAT'S why they call it Boxing Day" is a good way to get punched a second time.

P((B|A)|(A|B)) represents the probability that you'll mix up the order of the terms when using Bayesian notation.

Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.

In the latest round, 9-year-old Muhammad Ali beat 10-year-old JFK at air hockey, while Secretariat lost the hot-dog-eating crown to 12-year-old Ken Jennings. Meanwhile, in a huge upset, 11-year-old Martha Stewart knocked out the adult Ronda Rousey.

A long, long time (plus 40 years) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (plus a corrective factor involving the Hubble constant) ...

You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.

If you must know, I'm currently researching how to save this emailed tax form as a regular PDF so I can print and sign it. Our work isn't a lock for the Nobel, but we're in the running.

I'll be honest--the 1950s were a rough time for cycling.

Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.

Gen-Z got a chunk of the Carboniferous, and now all their memes are about how pathetic and small today's dragonflies are.

There's quark color, but that's not really color--it's just an admission by 20th century physicists that numbers are boring.

The value of n is still unknown, but new results constrain it to fall between 8 and 10^500, ruling out popular 'n=1' and 'n=2' theories.

People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!

It's even harder if you're an asshole who pronounces <> brackets.

'Broom first, then slippers.' 'How do I know you'll return the broom once you've secured your ticket?' 'I'll leave my little dog as collateral.' 'Great. Pleasure doing business!'

Adding data for South Korea but with their cases scaled to match the population of Japan and the land area of Australia, and vice versa.

The local police, building inspector, and fire marshal are all contesting my 'safety' assertion, or would be if they could reach me past all the traps.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

But I've made $13.72 already today! Ow, stop throwing pennies.

Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.

Aww, the oceanic crust and the continental crust are getting married!

For the moment it's a standoff

DEPARTMENT OF NEUROSCIENCE / Motto: "If I hear the phrase 'mirror neurons' I swear to God I will flip this table."

Ground-pole-ball-pole can be fun if you shake the first pole to get the second one whipping around dangerously, but the ball at the joint gets torn apart pretty fast.

Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.

'If you keep trying to spray your collaborators with the beam when they're not looking, I'm turning off the ion source and NO one will get to play with the beam!' --Physics's mom

Over the years I've decided I'd rather have them on than not, but I'm glad there aren't "has opened a blank note to compose a reply to you" notifications.

Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.

"10 minutes ago we were down to only 2 0s!" "How many do we have now?" "I ... don't know!!"

Oh, wait, I might've had it set to kph instead of mph. But that would make the discrepancy even wider!

It's hard to train deep learning algorithms when most of the positive feedback they get is sarcastic.

And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.

Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2 + 19^2/22) is pi.

The distinction between a ship and a boat is a line drawn in water.

NASA tries to coordinate launch timing with the Care Bears' cloud castle, but unfortunately sometimes collisions with stray Care Bears are unavoidable, so they just try to make the fairings sturdy and hope for a glancing impact.

Juno mission data suggests that Jupiter actually contains Matryoshka doll-style nested copies of every other planet in the Solar System.

It was their main recruiting poster, hung nearly ten feet up a wall! This means the hackers have LADDER technology! Are we headed for a future where everyone has to pay $50 for one of those locked plexiglass poster covers? More after the break ...

The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

I think of myself as the David Attenborough of factory mailing equipment.

Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

1937-2020

Don't turn it on.

My country's World Cup win was exciting and all, but c'mon, what if the players wore nylon wings and COULD LITERALLY FLY?

[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

I don't want to talk about it

I'm only willing to visit placid lakes, salt flats, and painting exhibits until the world's 3D technology improves.

Baseballs do present a challenge to this theory, but I'm convinced we just haven't found the right seasoning.

The two best reasons to get into fossils are booping trilobites and getting to say the word "fossiliferous" a lot.

Mathematicians give a third answer on the vertical axis, "That question is poorly defined, but we have a sub-field devoted to every plausible version of it."

This reminds me of that video where ... no? How have you not seen that? Oh man, let me find it. No, it's ok, we can go back to your video later.

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

Building codes in hurricane zones rely on studies of how easily flying debris can break residential windows. If you're looking for a science fair project idea and you hate your neighbors, I'm sure they could always use more data!

A circle with an A in it means that the circuit has committed a sin and has been marked as punishment.

And the possibility of lucid dreaming just makes it that much more fascinating.

We understand your privacy concerns; be assured that our phones will never store or transmit images of your face.

We have email and social media now, so we probably don't need to keep exchanging business cards by pressing them gently against each others' faces with an open palm and smearing them around.

[desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???

The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!

Fun game: find a combination of two items that most freaks out the cashier. Winner: pregnancy test and single coat hanger.

The worst is when you wipe out in the barrel and you're trapped for several million years until erosion frees you.

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1

Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.

Hey, I don't make the rules. It's in the book.

It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.

I can't get any work done because my friend Catherine is sitting on my keyboard.

Okay, now just as the loss hits him, slam on the brakes.

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.

Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.

Einstein's theories solved a longstanding mystery about Mercury: Why it gets so hot. "It's because," he pointed out, "the sun is right there."

This place has so many demonyms. Northlanders. Fair Folk. Honey Barons. Lake Dwellers. Treasurers. Swamp Watchers. Dream Farmers. Wellfolk. Rockeaters. Forgotten Royals. Remote Clients. Barrow-Clerks. The People of Land and Sky.

It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs.

In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.

Dinosaurs totally jumped the ichthyosaur when they got rid of Brontosaurus.

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

Haha, just kidding, everyone's already been hacked. I wonder if today's the day we find out about it.

While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.

Bugs are spin 1/2 particles, unless it's particularly windy.

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

My resonant tunneling diode phone has limited range but a short enough wavelength to penetrate even the densest cages. This gives me a major combat advantage, hopefully.

ACCESS LIMITS: Clients may maintain connections to the server for no more than 86,400 seconds per day. If you need additional time, you may contact IERS to file a request for up to one additional second.

We wrote our site in Linear A rather than Aksara Kawi because browser testing showed that Crete script rendered faster than Java script.

The worst part is when sidewalk cracks are out-of-sync with your natural stride.

I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audio book playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I have paid for.

Our anti-de Sitter club is small at the moment, but I've started corresponding with the conformal field theory people.

U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

Films need to do this more, if only to piss off the people who have to feed it into the projector.

'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.'

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

Thomas Jefferson thought that every law and every constitution should be torn down and rewritten from scratch every nineteen years--which means X is overdue.

Commentators agree that this will probably be the last World Cup in which Messi faces serious competition.

My hobby: Taking advantage of the rice myth by posting articles on "how to save your wet phone" which are actually just elaborate recipes for rice pilaf.

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.

If that's too easy, you could try joining Tautology Club, which meets on the date of the Tautology Club meeting.

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

Also, after all the warnings about filling in the bubbles completely, I spent like 30 seconds on each one.

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

Although maybe it's just a phase, like freshman year of college when I realized I could just buy frosting in a can.

This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.

I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.