Asteriod
by Jeff
Image meta text: My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.
Deep Impact is a motion picture from 1998 in which the protagonists have to blow up a asteroid that is headed to Earth. The Little Prince is a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in which the Little Prince's home was on an asteroid.
In the comic, The Little Prince's asteriod home is headed towards Earth and the Deep Impact part of the fanfic lands the nuclear robot on The Little Prince's home.
Sheeple
by Jeff
Image meta text: Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.
Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American novelist and activist whose most famous books include, Atlas Shrugged, Anthem and The Fountainhead. She was philosophical pro-individual and anti-collectivism.
The word "sheeple" is to refer to people who blindly follow direction without thinking for themselves. It is mainly used in the phrase "Wake up Sheeple!", in reference to people who are accepting the party line.
Sheeple coordinates with Ayn Rand's novel, Anthem, set in the distant future in which the word "I" has been abolished and the "evils" of the communal values have created a new dark age.
Fiction Rule of Thumb
by submission
Image Text: Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.
This explanation is by Harm. Harm is a reader of xkcd and explainxkcd. Harm writes explanations. Harm wrote that sentence mentioning that he writes explanations. Harm didn't write the previous sentence.
Here the author remarks on the trend of making up words in a work of fiction. Since fiction often takes place in other worlds, it makes sense that the natural language would be something other than English (or whatever language the book happens to be). Some writers will attempt to make up words to add a false sense of depth to their stories. Since those stories are told in English, there's little reason to over-use a fictional language when it doesn't serve the plot (hence allowing a few words for when they're required).
Lewis Carrol is the author of many works, but is most famous for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its sequel which have heavy use of intentional nonsense (his other works use a similar style), as well as "Jabberwocky" which in itself is a made-up word.
J.R.R. Tolkien is known for his "Lord of the Rings" series, which cover the MASSIVE world of Middle Earth. These books have many different races of fantasy creatures (elves, dwarfs, orcs, etc.) and each have their own (fictional) language and writing system.
Anathem is a fiction novel by Neal Stephenson that references quantum mechanics and philosophy, and uses many made-up words. Taken from Wikipedia (enjoy your citogenesis): "most of the technical words used in Anathem are derivations or puns on Latin words." Some examples include "auts" (rituals), "praxis" (technology), and "convox" (conference). To illustrate the comic author's point, reading through the article alone proved difficult due to the sheer volume of these words, and it would likely make any spell-check software cry.
Iambic Pentameter
by submission
Image text: Of course, you don't wanna limit yourself to the strict forms of the meter. That could get pretty difficult.
This comic provided by Rik 't Hoff. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=516678350
Iambic Pentameter (origin Greece) is an art of composing prose common to the much more known Haiku. In spite of Haiku, the simple rule of Iambic Pentameter is that you write no more, no less than five (penta means five in Greek) syllables per line of text. Cueball's hobby is speaking in this prose, hence, he uses five syllables per line in the above comic. The image text warns you that answering every question by using this art form can become difficult.
Therefore, I did not.
I mean, try it here.
You know, it is hard.
Explaining all things.