964: Dorm Poster

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Dorm Poster

Title text: I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.

Explanation

The poster on the wall is the album artwork for Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon. It shows a beam of light passing through a Dispersive Prism and separating into a rainbow. After thinking a bit, the new student makes a poster that uses a lens to reverse the rainbow into another prism.

In the title-text, the words "Pink FTFY" would come alphabetically after Pink Floyd, but Randall sems to believe noone would see it.

Transcript

[Person 1 finds dorm room]

[View into the dorm room. The left half is already occupied, and Person 2 has filled his side with the normal accoutrements of dorm life. There is a Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" poster hanging on the far wall, offset and only on Person 2's side]

[Person 1 has a bit of a ponder]

[Person 1 leaves for a bit]

[Person 1 returns with an item]

[View into the dorm room. Person 1 is moving in, and has placed a second Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" poster modified with a lens in the rainbow's path. The poster is placed upside down on Person 1's side of the far wall to catch the rainbow, feed it back into the prism, and turn it back into a narrow stream of white light.]

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Discussion

I just noticed that he has the same poster, he (cueball) just turned it upside-down and drew a lens on it. 66.217.162.41 02:53, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

The poster is not the same poster turned upside-down. If you look at the rainbow, the rainbow still matches up with the original poster on the left, meaning that if you turned the poster on the right "right-side up", the rainbow would be upside-down when compared to the one on the left.--108.162.238.155 06:56, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Note also that cueball's side of the room is an inverse of the left side of the room in other ways. The left bed has linens, the right does not, the left side of the room is messy, the right is not, the person on the left is sitting at a desktop, cueball is standing at a laptop and so on.

Given that in the first panel the guy is looking at a piece of paper with the room number, and that the right side isn't just clean, it's devoid of any items save the desk and the bed (sans linen), I'd say it's likely the second guy has just moved in, and hasn't had a chance to cause a mess.-Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 02:37, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Possibly, but it might also be that he's an ultra-minimalist obsessed with purity - he's working on his laptop before even finding a chair - and has created this new poster to purify the light and get rid of all those messy colors.141.101.107.42 17:37, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Also worth mentioning that this album cover is a very popular - to the point of cliche - poster to have in a student dorm. 31.221.45.4 14:26, 15 March 2013 (UTC)Chris C

Did anyone notice that the room number is 117? Does Randall play Halo? Or is that just a coincidence? You just lost the game. NinjaWolf064 (talk) 05:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Have to agree with NinjaWolf064 on this one. Or it's a reference to a hotel room in the Bourne Ultimatum film in the Tangier scene. Grif (talk) 00:12, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

The original vinyl sleeve actually looks like those two posters but backwards. The back of the jacket is split light being recombined by a prism and shot at an upwards angle into the prism on the front cover, where it is split again. Demonstrated here: http://mobile.collectorsfrenzy.com/gallery/230925609565.jpg 68.170.77.75 20:25, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Also, the other figure in the dorm seems to be the "total douchebag" with a goatee and glasses from http://www.xkcd.com/796/. I think this is his only other appearance, does this say something about Randall's view of Pink Floyd and their fans? 141.101.99.165 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

That goatee/glasses figure is also a psychologist in http://www.xkcd.com/435/ and a person riding the escalator in http://www.xkcd.com/954/. 108.162.246.211 06:07, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

   [Cueball finds home.] 

   [View into the dorm room. Cueball II lives there.] 

   [Cueball sees his life unfolding.] 

   [Cueball fetches his clobber.] 

   [Cueball returns.] 

   [View into the dorm room. Cueball / Cueball : Ying / Ying. All is harmony.] 

I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 21:07, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

The second prism is dispersing (un-dispersing?) light the wrong way, in that it is bending red light through a larger angle than purple. The first prism has it correct. As I'm kind of new here, appreciate any thoughts on whether this sort of thing belongs in the explanation, or trivia section, or it's fine just keeping it to the comments section. Redbelly98 (talk) 00:18, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

The prism is also incorrectly flipped over on the back cover of the actual Pink Floyd album, so it seems likely that R.M. knew about the original album cover design when he drew this comic.108.162.241.202 18:42, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Anyone else think the figurine on top of the desk (left side, next to the water bottle) looks like Trogdor The Burninator?

This is really interesting. See ... you're all using a left-to-right writing system (English in Roman letters), so you read the light as coming from top left and exiting bottom right, like the text on this page. Of course, in terms of it being a picture, there's no reason the light source couldn't be on the bottom right (in the last panel) and being dispersed/combined in the other direction. Nitpicking (talk) 21:03, 17 September 2021 (UTC)