1920: Emoji Sports

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Emoji Sports
No horse has yet managed the elusive Quadruple Crown—winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, and the Missouri Horse Hole.
Title text: No horse has yet managed the elusive Quadruple Crown—winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, and the Missouri Horse Hole.

Explanation

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Emoji Sport Description
🤽🌋 Lavaball Throwing a ball into the an active volcano would quickly end the game
🤾‍♀️🤺 Bladeball Would also lead to the quick destruction of the ball
💃💃⚽ Fancyball It would be difficult to kick a giant football while wearing high heels (though possible with a normal sized one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GykP0XsLIA)
🕳️🏇🏇🏇 Horse hole Horses might not cooperate or be serious injured when raced into a large hole
🔪🏀⛏️ Basketball Shredding Another sport which would be destructive on the equipment
🥚🔭🕵️‍♀️ Eggspotting A popular sport on Pinterest
⛷️🐊 Alligator Jumping Fast paced and popular spectator sport but limited season when both snow and alligators are readily available. This is actually a crocodile emoji.
👩🎣🧜‍♂️ Merfishing
👨🏸🧚🏸👩 Tinkerball Playing badminton with a fairy, named after Tinker Bell
🥌🦔🥌 Hedgehog Curling
🗜️🍔 Burger Clamping
👩‍🚀🏹🛰️ Consequence archery Archery on a space station would lead to the decompression of the space station, and necessitate the evacuation of the astronauts aboard.
🦉➡️📬 Owlstuffing Although the flag is up, the mailbox seems to be missing mail. Possible reference to Harry Potter owls carrying mails.
🍴🕯️🍴 Candle Eating
⛳💣🏌️‍♀️ Consequence Golf
👉🐍👈 Snake Shaming
🔥🧗‍♀️🔥 Hell Escape
🎮🥑🎮 Multiplayer Avocado May lead to guacamole

Transcript

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Discussion

It seems like in addition to the destructive sports thing, he's also playing on the emojis made from other emojis in multi character Unicode, but as it's 3 in the morning and I can't even remember what things are called I'm not gonna even try to edit right now. 162.158.62.33 07:50, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Hey! An early published comic! 3AM Me And Randall time Thursday night right now. Fun since I only read on Monday and Thursday nights. :) NiceGuy1 (talk) 08:14, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Actually candle eating isn't so far out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXg3l_Lnmdo

It seems like the joke in the title is about the fact that a horse winning a HorseHole race wouldn't actually be able to compete anymore (dead or hurt). Which would explain why no horse ever won the 4 different races. 162.158.150.40 09:58, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

The horse can easily do the HorseHole last. -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:49, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Re. " the mailbox seems to be missing mail" - If there was mail in there, there wouldn't be room to stuff the owl in.141.101.104.239 11:22, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

What a dumb idea for a comic. It's kinda like comedy central when they run out of ideas, they run South Park day and night, or TruTV running Impractical Jokers episodes because they ran out of other remotely funny stuff. 172.68.58.113 11:52, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

What a dumb idea for a comment. It's kinda like a kid in the playground who doesn't have the imagination to join in with the other kids' games, so decides to just try to spoil them instead.141.101.104.239 09:24, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
^This guy for President AtrumMessor (talk) 21:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
But they're right. It does seem lazier than Randall's usual comics, maybe he was just busy or something. Let's not pretend that 100% of xkcd is gold.162.158.78.196 15:24, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Is it worth mentioning that a version of Alligator Jumping appears in the Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album? As befits MP, the sport involves running at a crocodile, then diving into its mouth. There is controversy in the sport regarding whether or not to coat yourself with a marinade. 162.158.111.85 12:28, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Alligator jumping sort of reminds me of the old Pitfall series of games. Shamino (talk) 15:33, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

I vaguely remember that "Consequence XXXXX" is a thing; finding a reference for that would be helpful. Also, any way to increase the size of the emojis? They're pretty hard to read at the usual font size. -- 173.245.52.145 15:15, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't think the ball in Fancyball is supposed to be giant; they are just emoji and I don't think they're representative of the sizes of the participants/objects in the game. After all, I don't think there is a man the size of a volcano... Also, water-skiing is a sport - is the person jumping over the alligator necessarily confined to snow? Although the person in the emoji does have ski poles so perhaps that is the case. 162.158.34.76 15:31, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Multiplayer 🥑 Might be a reference to polygamy, as there is an app called avocado that is supposed to be a safe app for couples to share within.

I wonder if it might be possible to have a fallback for Emoji that aren't as well supported. I note a few that don't work on my Firefox version. I also wonder how useful the transcripts are with the emoji: do screen readers properly handle them? Trlkly (talk) 22:12, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I have all on palemoon, which makes me thinking it's not related to browsers, just what font you have installed. Try twemoji. -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:49, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
About half the emojis in the transcript are just squares for me. And I'm on an iPad, no installing fonts or anything for me. (Granted, it's an iPad 1 whose highest possible iOS is 5.1.1, but still). I would agree that having actual emojis seem useless to a reader program, BUT I note that there's also text descriptions. NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:53, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Originally though that the consequence archery is supposed to be about shooting down satellites from orbit while standing on earth, but that would be very hard to do with conventional bow (or, frankly, anything else except rocket). -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:49, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

It looks to me like the archer is an astronaut, suggesting he's in space himself. I think the idea is that hitting the satellite will make it crash into him, but that would take some strong heavy arrows. NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:53, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Regarding the Tinkerball, it can be dangerous for players too, especially if the Fae notices what they plan to do before is too beaten to cast spells. -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:49, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

couldn't disagree more with this explanation 173.245.52.157 01:37, 27 November 2017 (UTC)...

How so? 172.68.47.6 06:34, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

- when I read it, I imagined the satellite firing back at the archer. It definitely has absolutely nothing to do with the satellite falling on top of you, and the "archery in a space station" thing is a real stretch... it's a satellite.

Can we not hedge our bets with "rarity" of mermaids? I'm pretty sure that everyone on this site can agree that mermaids do not exist. Really. 162.158.74.177 14:50, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. Editing shortly. AtrumMessor (talk) 21:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
That's the very challenge of the sport. :) NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:53, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
But no such objections to fairy badminton?141.101.104.239 17:38, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Eggs most certainly are found in nature, in bird's (or reptile's) nests.

Editing "Consequence Golf"--well-cared-for lawn grass (and there's no better than on a golf course) has high water content and is a lot harder to ignite than you'd think. A detonator fuse doesn't actually throw flames (or as much heat as one would assume) so the green catching fire would (a) be very unlikely, and (b) be the absolute least of your problems. Just don't ask me how I know. AtrumMessor (talk) 21:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

I think the idea is that the "golf ball" is a lit bomb which might explode in your face, making this golf like Hot Potato or Russian Roulette. NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:53, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

What does "consequence" mean? Is this a snowclone from something commonly known but unknown to me? Anyway, I think it needs an explanation... Mathmannix (talk) 01:27, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

"Consequence" is a result or response to something, like a punishment. If you drive too fast, you will get a speeding ticket as a consequence of speeding. To make you regret doing it. In this case (can't see the comic but I remember consequence archery and consequence golf), if you participate in the archery and shoot down the satellite, it might crash into you. If you play the golf, the "ball" will probably explode near you. NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:53, 28 November 2017 (UTC)


Not sure I’d anyone else recognizes, but in the What If? book, the chapter “weightless arrow” May describe consequence archery. The question is that if an arrow is fired in a micro-gravity environment with an earth-like atmosphere, such as the international space station, how far would it go? The end of the chapter states, “And the largest ISS module, Kibo, is only 10 meters long. This means that if you actually performed this experiment, the arrow would fly no more than 10 meters. Then, it would either come to a stop... or really ruin someone’s day.” This comic was published several years after the book release, so I’m not sure whether the comic was inspired by this passage. Either way, should we include this in the article? Dan Smelly (talk) 00:35, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Eggs are not limited to birds, or as mentioned above, reptiles. A egg spotter could also find the shell-enclosed forms of insects, crustaceans, amphibians, and many groups of worms. Add in underwater eggspotting, and you get everything from sea urchins to trout. Nitpicking (talk) 18:41, 22 May 2022 (UTC)