598: Porn

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Porn

Title text: I have a thing for corrupt women.

Explanation

Cueball's mention of how porn did not scar him is a reference to a lot of testimony on how porn has negatively affected people's lives. Of course, the porn really did affect the way he looked at women. Due to dial-up being of such a slow speed, videos that needed to be transmitted via dial-up had to be compressed using a lossy format, which reduces file sizes substantially but also causes heavy data losses; the result being that the new decompressed file would not be of the same quality of the original uncompressed file. In this case, the lossy format eats away at the detail of the picture, which, during decompression, results in blocky artifacts in an attempt to "reconstruct" the lost data. Since he associated blocky pictures with arousal, he seems to have trouble enjoying "the friendship of the thighs" with his comparatively hi-fi girlfriend. In other words, the porn really did scar him after all.

The title text expands on this, referencing file corruption. It is also a pun on female "corruption," or a woman's awareness of her sexuality.

Transcript

[Cueball is hunched up at a computer. A circle surrounds him; the rest of the panel is black.]

I shouldn't have watched all that porn as a teenager.

It's not that it scarred me.

[The computer screen is visible. It shows an online video player, with what appears to be someone performing cunnilingus. Ads are also visible, though what they depict is not.]

It's just that we had dial-up.

[A 14.4kbps modem is shown.]

And now I'm stuck with a fetish.

For video compression.

[Cueball and Megan are in bed together.]

Cueball: Can you try to look... blockier?

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Discussion

I also remember the days where "Interlaced" wasn't a description of what they were (almost) wearing... 178.105.100.250 19:22, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Waiting for an image that took over 10 seconds to load, when your mom could wake up at any minute....yeesh, those were terrible times. 162.158.214.58 04:17, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

I wish that the x10 was X11, just for the Unix. --162.158.74.157 00:05, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Why is fleshlights a category for this comic?--Arlo (talk) 04:05, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Mentioned (as 'possible') in the Transcript of the image. It's a stretch bit more speculative than I'm comfortable with happy to believe, before specifically looking at the high quality image to check, but it could be that. 172.71.178.69 11:00, 15 September 2023 (UTC)