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

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We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it's an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!

When I was a kid, I asked my parents why our houses didn't have toothpaste pipes in addition to water ones. I'm strangely pleased to see Amazon thinking the same way.

The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.com whenever that project gets going.

Scientists still don't know how marine biologists manage to so consistently bring up whalefall ecosystems, when relevant conversational openings are so few and far between.

I'm hoping 2022 is relatively normal because I don't know what symbol comes after the asterisk and the dagger.

If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether "a couple" should always mean "two". As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.

'How could you possibly think typing 'import skynet' was a good idea?'

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

Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propaganda.

'Wow, that must be why you swallow so many of them per year!' 'No, that's spiders. You swallow WAY more ants.'

The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

Thankfully for everyone involved, the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.

This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now

Hard to believe that for so many years once they were fully extended we just let them tip over.

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

My theory predicts that, at high enough energies, FRBs and perytons become indistinguishable because the detector burns out.

Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.

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.

I run a business selling rural internet access. My infrastructure consists of a bunch of Verizon wifi hotspots that I sign up for and then cancel at the end of the 14-day return period.

We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]

Also, it's not like anyone actually calls up the Nobel committee to double-check things.

I'm normally a pretty frugal person, but I still compulsively buy any R/C aircraft that's less than $30. In the last few years, this has become a problem.

'And ovaries. Man, ovaries, huh?' [awkward pause] '... faithfully.'

When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.

Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down.

"Wait, how often are you getting bitten by snakes? And why are you boiling water?" "Dunno, the CDC people keep showing up with complicated questions about the 'history of the property' and 'possible curses' but I kinda tune them out. At least one of them offered me the flu shot."

With most labs, the hushed horror stories are about something like dimethylmercury or prions, but occasionally you'll get a weird lab where it's about the soda machine or the drop ceiling.

[Dog returns with the end of a string in its mouth] [Voice drifts down from the sky] Kites are fun!

::click:: Come back! You didn't see the one of Whistler's mother!

More actual results: 'Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You [are the best. The best thing ever]', 'Revenge is a dish best served [by a group of people in my room]', and 'They may take our lives, but they'll never take our [money].'

We're building on our earlier success getting web developers to pay to change the backslashes in our displayed payment URL to forward slashes.

Real-life prospective-pairing curves over things like age can get depressing.

It's important to learn the moves that take you into the vortex, but it's best not to study vortex itself too closely. Even grandmasters who have built up a tolerance lose the ability to play for a few hours after studying it.

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

I'm leaning toward fifteen. There are a lot of them.

Why are we spending billions to ruin Mars with swarms of robots when Elon Musk has promised to ruin Mars for a FRACTION of the cost?

I usually respond to someone else doing something good by figuring out a reason that they're not really as good as they seem. But I've been realizing lately that there's an easier way to handle these situations, and it involves zero internet arguments.

I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fixed a bug that caused some rocks to generate virtually infinite heat while just sitting there.

Somewhere in the world, my actual grandmothers are reading this and angrily exclaiming that I never write even malformed thank-you notes. DEAR GRANDMOMS: I AM SORRY! YOU ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. LOVE reddit.com RANDALL.

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

If you live in the Northern hemisphere, anyway. In the southern hemisphere, due to the coriolis effect, babies are born nine months BEFORE they're conceived.

Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.

All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

At first I thought I would need some gold or something to pay him, but then I realized that it was the 18th century and I could just bring a roll of aluminum foil.

Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that's beside the point!

1937-2020

Ugh, and we JUST went through this yesterday with javelin.

If you get your hands on that one, it's the worst place to have a breaking-up conversation.

You laugh to keep from crying, you do math to keep from crying . . .

I take it Narnia doesn't have Cinnabons? Because if you can magic up a plate of those, I'll betray whoever.

The worst was the time they accidentally held the can upside down and froze all the Earth's magma chambers solid.

zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi

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.

It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'

I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.

This one is from the Red Belt collection, of 'medium' difficulty.

I was banned from the airliners.net photography forum by concerned moderators after the end of my lens started brushing against planes as they flew by.

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)

Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.

Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!

Do you think you could actually clean the living room at some point, though?

All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that so much to ask?

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've looked at clouds from both sides now.

Update: I've been banned from the physics department for the way I pronounce "Doppler effect."

My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted a calendar. It used SEQUENCE(), REGEXMATCH(), and a double-nested ARRAYFORMULA(), and it locked up the browser for 15 seconds every time it ran. I think he learned a lot about asking me things.

There are regularly placed bumps on the underside just the right size to press the rocker switch on the power strip.

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]

Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.

Plus, you have to control for the fact that some people are into being blindfolded.

I'll never install a smart home smoke detector. It's not that I don't trust the software--it's that all software eventually becomes email, and I know how I am with email.

My upcoming album, 'Linked List', has covers of 'The Purple People Eater', the Ninja Turtles theme, 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', and the Power Rangers theme, with every song played to the tune of the next.

To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.

NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.

But listen, if getting your car out from under the pile is REALLY important to you, we do have an axe you can borrow.

CORRECTION: After careful evaluation, we have determined that the axis label on this chart was printed backward.

They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.

It can be expensive to hire a professional spectroscopist for your wedding, but the quality of the spectra you get is worth it.

Now that airlines have started adding wheel locks to their drink carts, less than half of flights have one accidentally fall out through the hole.

Well, the kid's definitely getting the biology geek phenotype.

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

His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.

'The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,' he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.

[They do not move.]

Markets have been rocked by a second day of uncertainty after someone set up a giant Ouija board on the NYSE wall controlled collectively by the movement of the stock tickers.

The choices we make Tuesday could have MASSIVE and PERMANENT effects on the charts on Nate Silver's blog!

Eno's storied aria was once soloed by Judge Lance Ito on the alto oboe at Ohio's AirAsia Arena.

But the past was much too cramped!

This really is a true story, and she doesn't know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn't worked for weeks.

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

It may be a fundamentally empty experience, but holy crap the Droid's 265 ppi screen is amazing.

U[unprintable glyph]: The elements a higher power uses to bend that moral arc. U[even more unprintable glyph]: The higher power's overall experience bending that moral arc.

It's a long way down.

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

Refs generally say that you can exercise enough altitude control to avoid the ground, but if you start strategically choosing air layers to steer yourself, that's traveling.

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.

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

I wonder how hard it would be to ride an electric scooter in a hamster ball.

Bloody Mary is made of antimatter. It explains so much.

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.

Three headstones down, I got a call from my mom and it went from bad to worse.

Sure, taking a few seconds to be respectful toward someone about something they care about doesn't sound hard. But if you talk to hundreds of people every day and they all start expecting that same consideration, it could potentially add up to MINUTES wasted. And for WHAT?

Use your mouse or fingers to pan + zoom. To edit the map, submit your ballot on November 6th.

Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by Roger Ebert'.

I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.

They're robust against quantum attacks because it's hard to make a quantum system that large.

We actually divorced once over the airplane/treadmill argument. (Preemptive response to the inevitable threads arguing about it: you're all wrong on the internet.)

Just think of all the countless petty squabbles and misunderstandings, of all the fervent hatreds, over so insignificant a thing as the direction and duration of a rocket engine firing.

As of this writing the NASA/JPL websites are still overloaded. Trying CURIOSITY-REAR-CAM_[256px_x_256px].torrent.SwEsUb.DVDRip.XviD-aXXo.jpg instead.

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.

Theory: Smugness is proportional to the negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time.

James Cameron's Terminator 3 was the REALLY prophetic one. That's why Skynet sent a robot back to the 1990s to prevent him from ever making it, ultimately handing the franchise over to other directors.

Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.

They're also refusing to fund my device that demonstrates uncontrolled hot fusion.

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.

Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.

She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]

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

The 1919 Great Boston Molasses Flood remained the deadliest confectionery containment accident until the Canadian Space Agency's 2031 orbital maple syrup delivery disaster.

I asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

Or the pressure at the Earth's core will rise slightly.

The projection's north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined.

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

Great, LO-M. Do you speak Bocce? I'm supposed to find one that speaks Bocce.

You make forgetting look so easy.

The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data.

Wait, is that the ORIGINAL voynich manuscript? Where did you GET that? Wanna try playing a round of Druids and Dicotyledons?

Actually, 'RSS&M' is kinda catchy.

If you're going to let it burn up, make sure it happens over the deep end of the bathtub and not any populated parts of the house!

Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

"I've always wanted to run naked through town, but I don't want to get in trouble with the king or be remembered by history as a weirdo. I wonder how I could ... EUREKA!"

I think I accidentally installed an Overton window in my bedroom. A few months ago, the sun wasn't in my face in the morning, but now it is.

I hate how the media only ever uses the first part of this quote, stripping it of its important context.

When we take into account the recent discovery of previously-unstudied history in the 1750s, this year may have been an outright loss.

Oh, your brother is Luke. Sorry, should've mentioned that first.

This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.

The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'

Hey, let go! We were all thinking it! Someone had to speak truth to power!

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.

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

For those of you also taking Game Theory, your grade in that class will be based on how close your grade on this exam is to 80% of the average.

If I'm such a god, why isn't Maru *my* cat?

No one wants an explanation more than us. Except Ms. Garofalo.

... okay, but because you said that, we're breaking up.

We've secretly replaced this customer's instant coffee with our patented substitute. Let's see what she ... uh oh, I think she spotted us through the window. Now she's getting something from the closet ... oh jeez, she has a sword! Run!!

You fancy me mad. Could a madman have outsmarted the greatest electronica/techno artists of our era? Next to fall will be Roderick Usher's house/trance band.

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.

And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

If I get a Wii, it will be the first game console I've owned.

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

If most people turn into muderers all of a sudden, we'll need to push out a firmware update or something.

I sort of wish my texting app showed the percentage next to each person, but also sort of don't want to know.

I just want to stay up long enough to watch the ball drop into the hole number 2018.

Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit.

That was quicker than usual! The cabin's sprinkler system often makes it really hard to keep anything lit.

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

Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.

There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

Increasing-precision timestamps are the Jaws theme of incident reports.

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

To get more knowledge

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.

That one is a variable star which pulses every 30 seconds. Its name comes from a Greek word meaning "smoke alarm."

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

Thank you for making me feel less alone.

If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.

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

NPR encourages you to add comments to their stories using the page inspector in your browser's developer tools. Note: Your comments are visible only to you, and will be lost when you refresh the page.

Man, this emo shit was supposed to be for people who didn't have hats.

I'm staring at the "doctor" section, and I can't help but feel like I've forgotten someone.

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!

The 2007 Bridge to Terebithia trailer put me off too much to see that particular movie, but I am cautiously optimistic about Where the Wild Things Are.

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

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.

You may notice the first half of these instructions are similar to the instructions for a working nuclear fusion device. After the first few dozen steps, be sure to press down firmly and fold quickly to overcome fusion pressure.

Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it's quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all.

You can evade blue shells in Double Dash, but it is deep magic.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.

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

'Meet hot young singles in your mom's basement today'? Man, screw you, GeoIP.

Data adapted from 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum' by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown' and 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift'.

People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have.

First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

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

Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We're putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.

A lot of these are actually non-venomous, but I can see which species you mistook them for. If you pause the crane for a sec I can give you some ID pointers for next time!

If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

Plot twist: Thanks to [mumble mumble] second-order [mumble] Rayleigh-Taylor [mumble] turbulent [mumble] shear, it turns out powered flight is way EASIER on Mars!

... go go gadget video camera. Go go gadget cup.

Sure, it may not meet science fair standards, but I want credit for getting my baking soda and vinegar mountain added to the Decade Volcanoes list.

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

Click for an actual flowchart for identifying a meteorite. My favorite part is how 'Did someone see it fall? -> Yes' points to 'NOT A METEORITE.' This is not a mistake.

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

PHARAOH IRY-HOR, FROM THE 3100s BC, IS THE FIRST HUMAN WHOSE NAME WE KNOW.

On the other hand, it took us embarrassingly long to clue in to the lung cancer/cigarette thing, so I guess the real lesson is "figuring out which ideas are true is hard."

They had BETTER make this a sample return mission.

There's an intersection I drive through sometimes that has a forward green arrow, a red light, and a 'no turns' sign all on one pole. I honestly have no idea what it's telling me to do.

Sn = tin

The government has been trying to sell off the Federal Helium Reserve for a few years now, but the sale has been on hold while they try to figure out how to explain this situation to buyers.

Here in the entomology department, we have a simple two-step formula for answering any question: (1) ants are cool, and (2) we forgot the question because we were thinking about ants.

I still think the Cold Stone Creamery partnership was a good idea, but I should have asked before doing the first market trials during the cryogenic mirror tests.

Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.

My trash can broke recently and I had to get rid of it. When I picked it up, I suffered a brief but harrowing existential crisis.

<A>: Like </a>this.

Never give your password or bank account number to anyone who doesn't have a blue check mark next to their name.

The hardest refresh requires both a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard as a security measure, like how missile launch systems require two keys to be turned at once.

Below the Web, and the Dark Web, a shadowy parallel world of Cybiko users trade messages on the Translucent Neon Plastic Web.

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

413 nanohertz, by the way.

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.

It's early 2020. The entire country is gripped with Marco Rubio fever except for Alaska, which is freaking out. You're frantically studying up on etiquette and/or sexting.

We are sexy, sexy Von Neumann machines.

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

WARNING: PEOPLE NAMED EVE ARE PROHIBITED FROM INSTALLING THIS APP!

Things are looking good for the eclipse--Nate Silver says Earth will almost definitely still have a moon in August.

Arguably, the '1/2' in the drag equation is purely decorative, since drag coefficients are already unitless and could just as easily be half as big. Some derivations give more justification for the extra 1/2 than others, but one textbook just calls it 'a traditional tribute to Euler and Bernoulli.'

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

Mr. Jones, watch out for Ms. Lenhart! She's from genus Photuris!

[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'

Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing.

Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.

2030: "I just bought a house for one bitcoin. No, it's the equivalent of a dollar. Houses are often transferred for a nominal fee because the buyer is taking responsibility for containing the holo-banshees in the attic."

It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)

There's no group chat member more enigmatic than the cool person who you all assume has the chat on mute, but who then instantly chimes in with no delay the moment something relevant to them is mentioned.

Most chemists thought the lanthanides and actinides could be inserted in the sixth and seventh rows, but no, they're just floating down at the bottom with lots more undiscovered elements all around them.

They say if a mathematician doesn't do their great work by age eleven, they never will.

"You still can't walk into someone's house without being invited!" "What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat VIRUS. I'm fine with doorways and garlic and stuff."

I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

It's taken me 20 years, but I've finally finished rebuilding all my software to use 33-bit signed ints.

The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

The likely shape of the bells was determined through consultation with several bellringing experts at the Tower of London. Transcripts of those interviews are available in Appendix VII.

There was no alt-text until you moused over

The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.

Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.

The rarest of all clouds is the altocumulenticulostratonimbulocirruslenticulomammanoctilucent cloud, caused by an interaction between warm moist air, cool dry air, cold slippery air, cursed air, and a cloud of nanobots.

WAKE up in the MORning and my BREATH ain't PREtty / and noBODY'S gonna KISS me if my MOUTH smells SHItty / so I ALways brush my TEETH before I START on the JACK / sure, my DRINKing's out of HAND, but I'm conTROLLing my PLAQUE.

Of course, I sort all my bookshelves the normal way, alphabetically (by first sentence).

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

'What was the original problem you were trying to fix?' 'Well, I noticed one of the tools I was using had an inefficiency that was wasting my time.'

And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands.

2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?

My shooting will improve over the short term, but over the long term the universe will take more shots.

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.

Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!

Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

This is also one of only five identified situations in which a vuvuzela is actually appropriate.

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

"What? I can't hear--" "What? I said, are you sure--" "CAN YOU PLEASE SPEAK--"

A whirlpool!

Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.

We had gathered that raw information, but had yet to put it all together.

Remember not to take it easy. Put a hot washcloth on your forehead, remain standing, and breathe dry air while taking lots of histamines. You need to give your body a chance to get sick again.

The most delicious exotic fruit discovered this way is the strawberry banana. Sadly, it's only stable in puree form, so it's currently limited to yogurt and smoothies, but they're building a massive collider in Europe to search for a strawberry banana that can be eaten whole.

Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.

I'm excited about the proposal to add a "brontosaurus" emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.

In a tribute to classical Latin, I started pronouncing it 'per-kent.' Eventually my friends had to resort to spritzing me with a water bottle like a cat to train me out of it.

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.

The biggest expense was installing the mantle ducts to keep the carbonate-silicate cycle operating.

My favorite thing to do at parties is to talk judgmentally about people who aren't there.

Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.

Phil Plait once pointed out that you can calculate the total angular area of the sky this way. If the sky is a sphere with radius 57.3 degrees, then its area is 4*pi*r^2=41,253 square degrees. This makes dimensional analysts SO mad, but you can't argue with results.

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.

The last band of color indicates the snake's tolerance for being held before biting.

Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.

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.

'Yeah, that squid's a total asshole.' [scoot scoot]

It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

To me, trying to understand song lyrics feels like when I see text in a dream but it𝔰 hอᵣd t₀ ᵣeₐd aกd 𝒾 canٖt fཱྀcu༧༦࿐༄

"Ugh, TMI." "Yeah, that's some tantalizing meat info."

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.

You ARE getting older, though.

3D graphs that don't contact the plane in the closure area may proceed as scheduled, but be alert for possible collisions with 2D graph lines that reach the hole and unexpectedly enter 3D space.

Good to be a little wary of advice that sounds too much like a self pep talk.

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, the stuff you buy is truck food. A phone that's in your car is a carphone, and a car equipped with a phone is a phonecar. When you play a mobile racing game, you're in your phonecar using your carphone to drive a different phonecar. I'm still not sure about bananaphones.

Someone should really bring them a ladder and remind them to build the Endless Stair *first* next time.

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

There's a river flowing through the ocean

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

There were actually some good reasons for those laws, but IMO they now do more harm than good. Which raises a question: If there's a ballot measure to strike them down, how can I resist the urge to take a picture of my "yes" vote?

The problems started with my resolution next year to reject temporal causality.

Each one contains a chocolate shaped like a famous spacecraft and, for the later numbers, a pamphlet on managing anxiety.

My favorite might be U+1F609 U+1F93F WINKING FACE VOMITING.

Do I just leave money in my mailbox? How much? How much money do they need, anyway? I guess it probably depends how the economy is doing. If stocks go up, should I leave more money in my mailbox or less?

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

[As security is dragging me away] "Come on, at least I didn't make the mistake in the other direction!"

Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.

Ants have reverse chemtrails--regular citizens spraying chemicals everywhere they go to control the government.

What's even worse is, a month ago they transferred me to work on the game I was already playing, and suddenly I found myself procrastinating by playing the one I'd been assigned before. It's possible they're onto me and this is all part of the plan.

It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

I don't want to talk about it

Your point that the world contains multiple problems is a real slam-dunk argument against fixing any of them.

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.

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

When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.

I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.

Not to be confused with Serious PuTTY, the Windows terminal client where everything is in Impact.

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

Tomorrow's sessions will be entirely devoted to sewing machine rotary hooks.

Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]

Stanford sleep researcher William Dement said that after 50 years of studying sleep, the only really solid explanation he knows for why we do it is 'because we get sleepy'.

NOTE TO FUTURE ETYMONLINGUISTS: Our best guess is that 'blimp' is onomatopoeia. The 'B-Limp' thing is a folk etymology.

The Strong Collatz Conjecture states that this holds for any set of obsessively-hand-applied rules.

Guest comic by Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content, whose internal monologue hasn't been speaking to him for the past three years.

If it were a two or above I wouldn't be able to answer because it would mean a pause in the screaming.

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!

"Okay, that was weird, but the product reveal was normal. I think the danger is pas--" "One more thing." "Oh no."

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

If you're 15 or younger, then just remember that it's nevertheless probably too late to be a child prodigy.

"All the companies whose blimps I shot fireworks at are mad, but MetLife is especially miffed because I dressed up as the Red Baron."

Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?

"We can do 0.33 or 0.34, but our payroll software doesn't allow us to--" "NO DEAL."

That guy only drives an alkaline car to overcompensate for his highly acidic penis.

I have so many plans. It would incorporate a Galton board, a Ranque-Hilsch marble vortex tube, and a compartment lined with pinball bouncers with a camera-and-servo Maxwell's Demon that separated the balls into fast and slow sides.

The Atlantic is expanding at about 10 ppm (points per month).

If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.

If any of you want to meet some cool local oxygen atoms, I can introduce you!

Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

Even if a planet is lucky enough to have a stable orbit that weaves between the spikes, the seasons get weird whenever it passes close to them.

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

Serve one each to guests whose last cursed cocktail was more than 2 months ago.

GO FOR LUNCH, REPEAT, GO FOR LUNCH.

On the news a few days later: "Buzz is building around the so-called 'camping Roomba' after a big investment. Preorders have spiked, and..."

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?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: No further research is needed as it is frankly none of our business.

I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.

That helmet won't save him.

According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.

'Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.' 'And look to the west to see our shadows!'

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

The phone will be collected by the toll operators and mailed back to you within 4-6 weeks.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil, so to start this project I'd better come up with a system that can determine whether a possible optimization is premature or not.

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

Wikipedia's role as brain-extension, while a little troubling, is also really cool.

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

Juraaaassic Park, Juraaaassic Park, God shed his grace on theeeee

Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.

As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

New phone OS features: Infinite customization (home screen icons no longer snap to grid), dark mode (disables screen), screaming mode (self-explanatory), and coherent ultracapacitor-pumped emission (please let us know what this setting does; we've been afraid to try it).

This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

I bet my future kids will read this someday. DEAR FUTURE KIDS: how did you get internet in the cellar?

When my great grandfather designed the Titanic and it hit an iceberg and sank, he didn't sit around moping. He took those lessons to his next job designing airships, and he made the Hindenburg completely iceberg-proof!

Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.

In Dimensional Chess, every move is annotated '?!'.

You want me to pick up waffle cones? Oh, right, for the wine. One sec, let me just derive your son's credit card number and I'll be on my way.

Under quantum tax law, photons sent through a beamsplitter don't actually choose which path they took, or incur a tax burden, until their wavefunction collapses when the power is sold.

The Thirty Meter Telescope will be renamed The Flesh-Searing Eye on the Volcano.

If you don't get this one, don't google it.

I didn't even know I *had* the Monty Python 'Lumberjack' song.

It seems wrong that Fruit by the Foot is only sold by weight or by number of rolls.

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.

Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.

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

I want to sell apples but I'm still working on getting the machine to do the cutting and grafting.

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

It's science!

Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!

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

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

This was always going to be a controversial Wirecutter post, but what really got them in trouble were their 'budget' and 'upgrade' picks.

If you're not completely satisfied with the phone after 30 days, we will return you to your home at no cost.

Why do all my attempts at science end with me being punched by Batman? (P.S. benzoyl peroxide soap works great.)

Once they selected the other proposal, we could have kept shopping ours around, but we would had to modify it include an aqueduct over their canal, which would be totally unreasonable.

"Cumulative number of coronavirus spreadsheets created over time" is a spreadsheet I am coming dangerously close to creating.

Sorry, I've just always had these random things I don't like--like olives, or robots drilling holes in me without warning.

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

So I'm a bad person.

I was sure he was just getting revenge, but then he did the same thing to Carrie Underwood. Then he mailed me a scone. I think I'm giving up dating.

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

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

When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?

Someone's probably working on an eBook app where, if you stop reading right before some plot twist happens, the app will wait a while and then send you a breaking news alert about what's happening, prompting you to open it and read the next few pages to learn more.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

At the bottom left: The mystery of why, when I know I needed to be asleep an hour ago, I decide it's a good time to read through every Wikipedia article in the categories 'Out-of-place artifacts', 'Earth mysteries', 'Anomalous weather', and 'List of people who disappeared mysteriously'.