1085: ContextBot

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ContextBot

Title text: If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they're saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.

Explanation

This comic is a commentary on the practice of "vaguebooking/vaguetweeting" which is putting a vague and frustrated or sad status in Facebook or tweet on Twitter, hoping someone will respond with "Is everything OK?", "Call Me?" or whatever. The worst is when someone puts a vague status like that and someone responds asking them what happened and the initial poster responds with "I don't want to talk about it." Well, if you didn't want to talk about it, why are you putting up this vague status fishing for responses! Just keep it to yourself if you don't want to talk about it!

Ok, back to the comic, this is a fictitious Google invention which puts context for these statuses, presumably based on the personal data which Google has collected. The second context is about a torrent file which is a way to download large files from a lot of different sources, thereby speeding up the process, it is used for large files such as movies or Linux software distributions. And the 3rd one is about an xkcd favorite, Minecraft, which you can see has been used previously in xkcd comics. Diamond is the most valuable resource in the game, and if you drop it into the lava it is destroyed.

Transcript

[A social network feed with four status updates from four different people. Each one has a reply from the same account, which is called 'ContextBot', underneath.]

Close-up face with glasses: The things I put up with...

ContextBot: (His building's WiFi doesn't reach the bathroom.)

Male female couple: You'd think by now I'd have learned never to trust anyone.

ContextBot: (She downloaded a torrent that turned out to be an encrypted .rar and a link to a survey.)

Blonde girl with bangs: I officially give up.

ContextBot: (She hit alt-tab to hide Minecraft at work and accidentally dropped a stack of diamond into lava.)

Spiky hair guy: Sighhhh

ContextBot: (He thought these grapes were seedless.)

Everyone stopped complaining about Google's data-gathering when they launched ContextBot, a system which replies to vague, enigmatic social network posts with context from the poster's life.

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Discussion

Just so you know it would be fairly easy to drop a stack of diamond while alt-tabbing because the default "drop" key is 'q'.

But the Q key just drops one item, not the whole stack. To drop the whole stack you have to open your inventory, click on the stack then click outside the inventory dialog. (yeah I'm a Minecraft addict :D) -- 41.196.193.193

If you were 'holding' the stack with your cursor and left the inventory, it would also drop. Same if it was in the crafting slots. 130.160.145.224 21:17, 10 March 2013 (UTC)