861: Wisdom Teeth

|< < Prev Comic #861 (February 16, 2011) Next > >|

Wisdom Teeth

I heard that minecraft is run by the papal-foxes of nine plus ten eaquals twenty one Title text: I heard that minecraft is run by the papal-foxes of nine plus ten eaquals twenty one

Explanation

Wisdom teeth, as many people are no doubt painfully aware, are the third set of molars found in humans. Because human jaws are smaller than other ape jaws, most of us don't have room for a third set of molars, and the teeth become impacted so they grow straight into the other teeth, requiring a painful, debilitating procedure to remove them.

But that's just the title of this comic. It's mainly about minecraft superflat worlds

The title text is refrencing that minecraft is owned by the papal states not, contrary to popular belif, mojang

Transcript

[Megan is seen side-on, with her right arm raised & bent at the elbow to hold a partly-visible cellphone up to her ear. Cueball appears in a small inset panel halfway up the left side of Megan's panel, holding a cell phone against his cheek.]

Cueball: Hey! Know how you've been bugging me to play Minecraft for the past year? I'm game.

Megan, on phone: But you said you didn't want to "get hooked and spend days on end moving virtual cubes around while sitting motionless." What changed?

[In the second panel, Cueball is sitting in front of a coffee table as seen from his right side, with thin lines representing a stack of magazines on top of the table & a small potted plant with four leaves on the other side.]

Cueball, on phone: I'm having my wisdom teeth out, and I'll be useless and doped up on painkillers for the next few days, so that actually sounds like the perfect distraction.

Megan, on phone: Oh. I'll set you up on our server!

[A caption box on top of the third panel reads:]

72 hours later...:

[Megan is sitting at a desk, her phone again raised to her right ear. She is looking at a LCD monitor standing on top of her desk, while her left hand is on the keyboard shelf.]

Megan, on phone: Hey — starting to feel better? Enjoying the game? Let's see what you've... What the hell? Where IS everything?

[View of a Minecraft screen showing a vast empty expanse of land. In Megan's hotbar is, from left to right, an stone pickaxe, sword, and shovel, seven feathers, 42 torches, a non-enchanted bow, a blank space, 64 blocks of stone and a clock. He has full health and 15 armor points.]

Megan, offscreen: ...You made the entire continent perfectly flat?

Cueball, offscreen: And sorted it into layers.

Megan, offscreen: ...

Cueball, offscreen: I feel good about things. This is a good game.

[Cueball is sitting on the floor at his laptop, bleeding from the mouth, surrounded by bloody wadded-up tissues and holding a bottle of medication.]

Megan, on phone: ...What exactly is in the painkillers they gave you?

Cueball, woozy: I can't read the label because I'm a hologram.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

Why should all three parts of the anesthetic have to wear off? It seems like Randall would probably not write "Everything ok" if he could feel the procedure. 75.69.96.225 02:10, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

^ Agreed, it is most likely the anæsthetic and paralytic wore off, leaving the analgesic. So, he was awake, but "Everything [was] ok", because he was not feeling pain. 108.162.216.14 15:39, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

I Gotta get my wisdom teeth removed asap! ~~JFreund

Could this be a reference to superflat mode?108.162.216.84 22:31, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

^ No, this was during beta 1.2 when there were no modes. ~iFinity

Related? http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=846 108.162.238.176 21:22, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I think that the guy was crazy but if this was before super flat, it could have possibly have been a model used in the mode. -- Otis (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The phrase "Due to the inhibitory effects of painkillers" is flat-out wrong (pun intended). Opioids don't cause that kind of behaviour, and even if they did in some people, this wouldn't be due to their inhibitory effects on pain (they in fact exert a stimulatory effect on the mu-opioid receptor and more or less an happy and easy-going, while sleepy, state of mind). This is more a reflection of the personality of Cueball being exposed by his drunken-like state, if anything. I edited the sentence by replacing this with "While intoxicated with painkillers" ~~ A concerned M.D.

Could the title text be a reference to Memento? --Nick818 (talk) 21:59, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

In Minecraft: Playstation 4 version, there is a option to do a flat world like that in comic. 141.101.96.209 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

In actuality, no Minecraft map is infinite- just obscenely big. This probably could not be done in the appropriate time span given, but it could eventually be done. {Sauron, the Dark Lord}

We're just gonna ignore the thing about being a hologram, huh? 172.69.170.56 18:44, 11 December 2020 (UTC)mezimm

Looks just like a superflat world; also LOOK AT ANCIENT MINECRAFT :OO THE ARMOUR BAR IS IN PLACE OF THE HUNGER BAR :OOO Beanie (talk) 10:30, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Do you think that ancient Minecraft is better or present version: 1.20? 42.book.addict (talk) 18:14, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

The last time I played with Minecraft, it was the version where Endermen were introduced (and while there was the Magma-land, to portal to, it was before the actual Ender that I understand later got added). Changed computers, didn't get around to porting everything across to keep up. Apparently the mana-stuff you could collect (but not use) in 'my' version went into a whole magic-craft thing, but (from what I heard) it sounds like it was gilding the lilly. I could have done without the Enderman threat of picking up and setting down blocks, actually. I'd got used to fending off every other (potentially-)hostile mob and getting on with whatever megaprojects I liked to do at the time (dig huge holes, construct huge towers, etc, often in the same place; or create a sub-ocean-floor 'genesis cavern', casting buildings out of obsidian, etc).

Enderman interference was offputting and there wasn't much you could do except for maybe filling a wall-gap with water to make sure that if one of them did incidentally remove a block from it that they'd get hit by the water (and make it obvious where the damage had occured, on a quick circuit). Not sure I could get back into the latest (witches, farmers, trading, concocint potions/artefacts for things like breathe-underwater? ...when I constructed/excavated underwater, I just made sure that I had set up a 'breathing chamber' in or on the seabed (earth-structure with bucket-removed block of water giving an air-space at head-height) and kept dodging back to it periodically as needed).

I did start with even more ancient version (where you couldn't actually make air-pockets at all, IIRC) and I still have access to the Raspberry Pi's version of severaly restricted Minecraft port (I occasionally go in and do some more work on a megaconstruction excavation/castle I started on that, but there's no Survival Mode at all so it's pure vanity without any challenge at all).

I can say that (Raspberry Pi edition, excepting) it would be a remarkably difficult task to make a truly uniform flat landscape over presumably several chunks. Unless it was just a matter of gathering up as many soil-blocks as one could (dismantling hills and taking out of rock-voids, possible just junking/chesting all the spare cobblestone) beneath which was the rather obvious remains of the strip-mining operation conducted to sustain the effort (as soil is not a replenishable block-type, and you'd be using up some other non-renewable materials to make the tools to assist with the additional block-mining/destruction necessary to continue the task).

...I could while away hours on doing that sort of thing. Probably a good job I let it slide, or I might have wasted even more of the intervening time. And never had time to have dug out my many hundreds of subsequent Dwarf Fortress forts, instead! 162.158.74.49 19:29, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Sea level is at Y 62! 162.158.86.253 (talk) 10:21, 1 December 2022 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)