Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD

In case you did not know: a tautology is a statement that is necessarily true, based only on the facts presented in the statement.

While applying for colleges, the author noticed the vague tautology of showing your honor by joining a club that shows you are honorable. With this keen observation, he invents a hypothetical and comical “tautology club.” This club’s activities, as seen in the last panel, consist of saying humorous tautologies at each other.

Also, the third member (from the left) of the club is Jason from the (non-web) comic strip FoxTrot.

Here, various jokes are represented as a grid of animal footprint diagrams. In comic-book-reading order, with which you should have no trouble following, here are the explanations:

1. Cat Just a cat’s footprints - this non-joke is used as a foundation for the jokes that follow to build upon. If it helps, you may think of it as a “control group.”
2. Moose and squirrel A reference to children’s show The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
3. Longcat a reference to an internet meme of the “lolcat” variety.
4. Mouse riding Bicycle from The Mouse and the Motorcycle children’s series.
5. Rabbit stopping to use hair dryer It’s funny because rabbits don’t use hair dryers. It is also a setup for a homographic pun.
6. Legolas An “elf” from the Lord of the Rings movie series who leaves no footprints (get it?).
7. Bobcat on pogo stick Something random and wacky.
8. Knight The footprints move in the manner required of the knight piece in chess.
9. Kid with Transmogrifier A reference to the children’s comic Calvin and Hobbes.
10. Kid with Duplicator A reference to the children’s comic Calvin and Hobbes.
11. Prius A topical joke referencing the malfunction of the new Prius’ braking system.
12. Higgs Boson The tracks in this diagram resemble the output from the Large Hadron Collider that may prove the existence of the Higgs Boson particle.

In summary children’s series, lolcat, children’s series, homographic pun, Lord of the Rings, random/wacky, chess, children’s series, children’s series, topical joke and physics.

Note: you may consider the previous summary to be of this comic strip, or of the entirety of XKCD, the choice is yours.

I knew I was in for a real treat when I saw the title of this comic strip, “Science Valentine.” With gritted teeth and heavy breaths, I actually managed to read the entire thing. Now, poor reader, I will attempt to explain it.

The Author is not a scientist. He wishes that he was, but he is not and will never be one. It’s this desperate yearning that drives him to doodle fake graphs and charts that lack any data or substance behind them. He is a one-man cargo cult, playing out his ritual on the internet for hundreds of thousands to see.

This comic is a metaphor for the Author’s failed relationship with science. In it, the stick figure man is the Author and the receiver of the valentine is science. He begins the narrative by doing what he does best: sitting down and miming the work of a scientist. He draws some squiggly lines and writes down some numbers. But, the more he does this, the sadder he becomes. As hard has he tries, he can’t actually do any science. He couldn’t “defend the hypothesis” that he had an aptitude for science.

With this discovery, the Author officially ends his troubled relationship with science. It leaves one wondering, what is next for him? Will he still aimlessly draw “cute and funny” charts or graphs, or will they just remind him of this bitter break up? Will there be more observational humor about his perceived notion of the scientific method? Physics puns?

Without a girlfriend or science to keep him company at night, what will?

A male character decides to test the effectiveness of acne cream by applying it to only half of his face for a few weeks. Near the end of his trial, he decides to include some of his similarly disfigured friends in the experiment. To be extra-super-scientific about it he decides to randomly (through coin toss) choose who uses each type of cream. As he flips the coin, Batman yells “You!” and punches him in the face.

The reason batman did that is because the male character had acne on half of his face and was flipping a coin, so he looked like the villain Two-Face.

Don’t worry, calm down, there is still a graph in this comic strip. It’s right there in the first panel for some reason.

A man, presumably the Author, stands bedecked in the trappings of a doctor. He explains to a presumably pregnant woman that her unborn child “has not decided which opening it will exit through,” implying a dizzying array of choices. The woman, placed in the classic compromising position of trust that all females must face when their Obstetrician is male, is shocked as she tries to reconcile what she knows about her body with what the trusted patriarch is saying.

The caption delivers the punchline: an admission that the Author discovered how easy it was to deceive women at their most vulnerable moments. A simple bit of deception and he can cause untold confusion, doubt, and even fear in women.

This comic speaks to the darker nature of XKCD’s presentation of women. Underneath the consistent wheedling and ingratiation is a subtle need for control and dominance; a desire to control women by becoming co-dependent and pulling them into a cycle of obligation that is far easier to establish than a healthy relationship. These passive-aggressive shows of dominance are calculated to exert the most dominance while exposing the male to the least reproach, thus avoiding the deep fear of female disapproval that sits at the heart of many XKCD comics.

Curator’s Note: To make it perfectly clear to some of our dear readers who may be uncertain on matters of female reproduction: women cannot give birth through their mouth, sinuses, or anus.

I… okay. Okay… here we go. I can do this.

Here we see.. Okay. Here we see a male and a female attempting to end a phone conversation of the cliched “so in love neither one of them wants to be the first to hang up” variety. This kind of conversation can only happen between a female and a severely emasculated male (the Author), since in his mind he should be mimicking the female’s actions in order to please her. Essentially, he becomes a female and causes a deadlock of emotional neediness.

In addition, you will notice that the female character in this comic strip is the one to escalate the argument, with the male simply matching her aggression level in turn. This aggression, mixed with the emotional neediness from before and a lack of confidence, leads to the two people “breaking up” but continuing to stay on the phone with each other. This kind of breakup could only happen between two people with the emotional maturity of 14 year olds.

A space elevator is a conceptual structure that could carry things from Earth into space on a fixed track or cable. It has been proposed as a much cheaper method of traveling to and from the Moon.

In this comic, we see a hypothetical grand opening for a space elevator that utilizes tether propulsion, a system involving a very long, strong cable to propel a space craft rather than a rocket engine.

The joke here is that at a traditional “grand opening” a ribbon of some sort is cut to symbolize the opening, except in this case someone has cut the elevator’s tether rather than a ribbon. This would completely destroy the elevator, thus invalidating the grand opening.

The curse-word “fuck” is also used in the punch-line to add some more humor.

The premise of today’s strip is a brief and informal survey of popular group games and their likelihood to be used as a prelude to awkward group nudity and/or sex. But, you may ask, how did this comic strip come about? Why was it created? Let me tell you now.

While attending a small birthday party for an acquaintance, the Author and four other white young-adults were in the early rounds of a game of Settlers of Catan. During a lull in the fast-paced excitement of the game, one of the four males playing the game jokingly suggested they instead play “strip Settlers of Catan,” in the hopes that he would possibly get to see the bra of the female player. During the awkward and strained laughter, it dawned on the Author that this concept was humorous. “It is funny because you would normally not play a strip version of this complex game,” he thought. He immediately pulled the Nexus One from his cargo pocket and entered the web address “www.gooogle.com” into his phone’s web browser (he likes to use this lesser-known address for the popular search engine because it makes him laugh). Only a few searches in, he noticed a hilarious pattern forming that could be used in the creation of a new comic strip. With that idea and a half-bottle of Smirnoff Ice (Green Apple Bite flavor), he shot out the door and ran home to craft this magnificent web cartoon.

This comic strip attempts to project the insecurities and emotional fragility of a human (the Author) onto the Spirit rover, a robot that performed its data-collecting tasks on Mars over 20 times longer than planned (before getting stuck in soft sand).

Thankfully, the spirit rover could never have experienced these emotions, as it is simply a mechanical device whose motions and actions give it the perception of agency.

Having nothing of note in current geek culture to make observations about, various references to geek culture from seven years ago are made. These references include: Kazaa - a popular file sharing application, Friendster - a popular social network and Howard Dean - a presidential candidate for the 2004 election.

It is enjoyable to look at this comic strip because those are things that happened in the past to many of us readers and it makes us nostalgic.