Suckville
by Jeff
Image text: Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit.
Ok, so Megan and Cueball are playing a card game, that I am not able to identify from simply the piles (anyone know what game it looks like?) and Megan whips out one of the oldest insults in the book, a play on the word "suck" and adds a typical city name to the end of it. Other variations are: "losertown", "lameville", etc.
The phrase is originally based on the ubiquitous signage you see along roads that say "Welcome to Town X - Population Y". Really, it is just some creative smack talk that basically says "You suck".
Then, since Cueball one-ups Megan by indicating there is a city by that name, she can only resign herself to the fact that her smack talk did not work.
Also, she has a strange number of legs and arms in the 3rd frame. I'm not sure if that is supposed to be showing motion, or what. Either way, it is not working for me, she just looks like a spider on a laptop, which is completely terrifying.
January 25th, 2012
I do not get it. I was at least able to find out that “SF” stands for “summary file”, which seem to be some kind of press release of the results of a census. I was, however, not able to access SF 1 of the 2010 census.
Is there some kind of joke in SF 1, Table P1? Does it have anything to do with Detroit?
And even if so, why isn’t it “located anywhere near Detroit”?
Population 83? I.e., not even the double of 42? Does that indicate something? Do 83 people suck at this card game?
From the fact that I have more sentences ending in question marks than in full stops you may see that I’m rather lost at this one. Please help!
January 25th, 2012
I’m guessing the town of Suckville, MI actually exists in Summary File 1, Table P1 and I downloaded the file to try to find out, but I don’t have MS Access (gah!) to even try to look at the data.
January 25th, 2012
You don’t need Access, you actually need to download each state’s .zip file, each of which contains 49 text files. The ??geo2010.sf1 files contain geographic entities, including cities. I downloaded Michigan (migeo2010.sf1) and it doesn’t appear to include Suckville. Of course, there’s nothing that says Suckville, if it existed, exists in Michigan. The comment about “not being located anywhere near Detroit” means it could be any state.
If you want to download all the states and search them all, it’s only about 13.5 gigabytes to download, and expands to only about 133GB uncompressed. Beware especially of Texas. Information from 0README_SF1_v2.pdf located, along with all those files, at:
http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/04-Summary_File_1/
As for the Access database, it appears to be useless unless you *also* download the state’s data files for those states you are interested in.
January 25th, 2012
“Suckville is part of Detroit” implies that Detroit sucks. The author is just talking smack about Detroit.
January 26th, 2012
Detroit had the worst urban decay in the US, leading to much Detroit-bashing over the years. Between 1950 and 1980, most industry left inner-city Detroit for the suburbs (and overseas), and many people left with it. Some neighborhoods (especially around Downtown) revived in the 1990s and 2000s, but large parts of the city are still rather empty and abandoned.
Detroit wasn’t the only US city this happened to — most major cities suffered it to some degree — but it was the hardest-hit.
January 31st, 2012
You skipped 2010->Present
Detroit’s coming back in a variety of big ways, but to name three: auto industry, software/information industry, sports.
January 25th, 2012
Okay, SF1 P1 = Summary File 1 Table P1 which has “Total Population” figures ( http://2010.census.gov/news/xls/sf1_crosswalk.xls ).
Census data is broken down in multiple ways, one of those ways is by Metropolitan Statistical Areas ( http://www.census.gov/population/metro/ ). If you know anything about Detroit, MI, you would know that it is a rough town that pretty much sucks, so the joke is that “Suckville” is included in the Detroit MSA even though it is not anywhere near it… probably solely based on the fact that both suck bad.
The 83 has no significance other than being a number higher than 1 which shows that “Suckville” has had a modest population growth over the previous 10 years.
January 25th, 2012
I think the premise of the strip is the absurdist premise that there is a real “Sucktown” and that when you say “Welcome to Sucktown”, it involves the person actually becoming a resident of “Sucktown” which equally absurdly appears on the US cencus. Thus, I think the strip is suggesting that 83 people have had this said to them since the last cencus.
Or perhaps it simply is a joke that no one imagines Suckville really exists, when it actually does (at least in the strip), which makes the insult less insulting and the fact that Megan actually looks it up (or the Cueball even knows about it and exactly where to find the cencus data) are equally unlikely.
January 27th, 2012
Please, spell CENSUS, not CENCUS.
O.K. both the spellings might look illogical, anyway.
January 25th, 2012
I giggled upon seeing that reference. Couple months back I tracked down & played with the official Census databases, and had to figure out the hard way what SF, P1, etc meant and were for. It’s one of those things that makes sense only so long as your head is in the data.
And there’s so _much_ data. Finding even mundane data, as Bob notes, is nuts as you work out which districts to include, how they’re grouped, and digging thru the crazy amount of racial combinations enumerated (something like a dozen basic races identified, plus all their interracial permutations, plus all that depicted with and without Hispanic modifiers).
And, having seen those tables and the history of obscure XKCD references, I have no doubt that SF-1 Table P1 contains an 83 for a latitude/longitude referencing the district which corresponds on some obscure map with Suckville.
January 26th, 2012
I’m guessing that there is no “clever” joke that you are missing. I’m pretty sure that he is taking a common phrase that isn’t meant literally, and he is applying it literally to yeild absurdity.
January 25th, 2012
no one can teach you how to see
January 25th, 2012
I don’t think that Megan is saying that Cueball sucks. She is saying that her move *puts* Cueball into Suckville, that after her move his game position sucks.
January 25th, 2012
And if she is welcoming Cueball to Suckville, wouldn’t that imply that she lives (or is from) there too?
January 25th, 2012
I think neither the 2000 nor the 2010 U.S. Census list “Suckville” as a town, whether in Michigan or elsewhere. The joke is that what Megan intends as smack talk was taken literally by Cueball, and she, also being a nerd, can’t resist also taking it literally and looking it up.
When I go to http://factfinder2.census.gov/main.html , click on “Geographies” on the left, and search for “Suckville”, it “corrects” it to Saukville, Wisconsin. Which, amazingly enough, is nowhere near Detroit.
January 26th, 2012
As a Canadian, I am proud to present Sackville, NB. Yes, it is even further from Detroit, and I will not be surprised if its population is only 83…
http://g.co/maps/gt8v7
January 25th, 2012
This comic also implies Cueball WAS the only resident of suckville back in 2000.
January 25th, 2012
HAHA! Hiddden joke XD
January 25th, 2012
I don’t think it was hidden. That was the joke.
January 25th, 2012
And that he is been breeding rapidly the last 10 years.
January 25th, 2012
Or adopting. Less trauma.
January 25th, 2012
No need to adopt or breed. Some people are just drawn to Suckville. It’s a force of nature, like iron filings to a magnet.
January 25th, 2012
The game is probably “Dominion” by Rio Grande Games.
January 25th, 2012
Dominion has 10 piles.
January 25th, 2012
I was thinking Magic, or Pokemon, or Star Wars CCG or something similar
January 25th, 2012
The game looks a lot like Dominion. Also, Dominion belongs to the same genra of games as Settlers and Agricola, which are games that have been previously referenced.
January 26th, 2012
Yes, from the drawing, it is possible there are ten piles.
This doesn’t look anything like Magic. The closest thing is probably Dominion.
January 26th, 2012
It’s nothing like Dominion, which has at least 13 piles. I’m guessing Lost Cities, or maybe Battle Line.
January 27th, 2012
It could be UFS – people typically group all their boost cards together, resulting several piles of cards pretty easily.
January 25th, 2012
I took the third frame to indicate Megan’s two positions: first facing the game, then facing us as she looks back toward her laptop.
January 25th, 2012
My theory on panel three is that Randall was using multiple layers to try out different possible positions for Megan’s legs, and then he inadvertently left them all set to visible.
However, I’m really don’t know what Randall’s approach is when drawing comics, so this may or may not be plausible at all.
January 26th, 2012
Or maybe it’s just to distract us from the obvious crotch shot that it would otherwise be. That Megan is so hot and such a tease!
(Actually, you’re probably right.)
January 26th, 2012
He generally hand draws them and then scans them.
January 26th, 2012
I was looking for this information but couldn’t find it. Is there a source?
January 30th, 2012
So here is the best I can find: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=24141
Given that he does perform digital manipulation of the images after scanning, I still think it’s pretty likely that he was using layers to experiment with Megan’s position and simply forgot to make them invisible.
It really doesn’t look anything like a motion blur to me. It looks like a mistake.
January 25th, 2012
At first I thought the card game was Speed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_%28card_game%29 ) but that only uses one row of 4 piles in the middle of the two players. So it could be a variation but I’m not sure
January 25th, 2012
I think Megan is sitting in a chair in the third frame; like a tripod shape.
February 2nd, 2012
That’s what I thought at first, too, but I second-guessed myself upon noticing that the “chair” is present only in frame three… Can such a hypothesis be [i]sustainable[/i]? My guess is you’re right.
January 26th, 2012
The pile of cards look like a finished game of speed to me.
Here’s what it looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy1dn9P3LZQ
January 26th, 2012
Hello to the creator of this site! I’d like to draw your attention to the archives. Could you please fix them up, because I can only see the dates for a second and then they disappear. Maybe a formatting error?
January 26th, 2012
Oh, and the titles of the actual posts too.
January 26th, 2012
I think it is implied that Megan actually looked up the data beforehand, or at least attempted to, but only found old data, so it wasn’t until Cueball helped her find it that she realized there were even more people in Suckville.
January 26th, 2012
It’s actually spelled Saukville, and is in Wisconsin.
January 27th, 2012
I noticed the 3rd frame and was like “what the hell?!”
Then I read on…
January 27th, 2012
not sure whether these helps:
- Hanafuda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda)
- Detroit, Illinois (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit,_Illinois)
January 27th, 2012
Isn’t Suckville in the Shire? I’d always assumed that’s where the Suckville-Bagginses came from.
No wait … maybe I’m confused …
January 27th, 2012
This is near identical to a conversation that occured at a gaming/open source convention a few years ago. A convention that is held outside of Detroit, but not officially in it. Randall Munroe has been known to attend, and I believe he was there at this particular con. I, and several others, were engaged in a lengthy card game (which game it was has been forgotten) and the exact exchange above occured between two of the players. The only difference is that the census data was not actually accessed. It is very possible that Randall over-heard or was told about the conversation. This would explain the situation and Detroit reference. I believe that Randall added the census reference for an additional level of “geekiness.”
January 27th, 2012
I believe the town was Romulus or Troy, Michigan. Most likely the former.
January 28th, 2012
They could also be referring to this game: http://suck.miniville.fr/
January 29th, 2012
Well, there is a “Suckerville” in Maine. Thanks OpenStreetMap: http://osm.org/go/Zfa~QwrDT–
February 10th, 2012
Game looks like Dominion to me
February 11th, 2012
They’re Playing yugioh. I called it.
Magic, in cases of westernfags