888: Heaven

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Heaven
If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.
Title text: If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.

Explanation

This comic shows the popular video game Tetris, in which you use different shaped pieces to fill in lines to score points. The more lines you fill at a time it results in more points.

Heaven is, when you get the perfect piece in Tetris that fills out all the empty space you have on the board. The next piece here is really odd, but it fits exactly the empty spaces.

The title text compares this experience with an orgasm. After "the brief feeling of satisfaction" you are bored, ennui means a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest, but at the end you want more.

A fan even made a modified version of the classic Tetris game, where at a certain frequency, a 'heaven' perfectly fitting block comes along. The game can be found on. http://www.gudmagazine.com/games/heaven/.

Also see comic 724: Hell, which presents an opposing situation in which the game is impossible to play.

Transcript

[The display is a tetris game. A large oddly shaped piece is falling towards the board. The piece fits into the gaps exactly to complete multiple rows at once. The next piece is simply a very long brick.]
Top 0002187
Score 0002186
Level 5
(The above are within the game; the next line is outside the game.)
Heaven


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Discussion

I also think that the comic number '888' is a reference to the chinese belief that eight is a lucky number, and '888' even more 61.22.6.176 01:56, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

In Chinese 8 (in some dialects) sounds like "being rich". 173.245.48.96 06:16, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Also I think the next piece after that is a longer than usual L block which basically fills the whole line 108.162.250.7 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The player is also about to smash the previous high score. 108.162.222.35 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Yes, he's only 1 POINT DOWN!!!!! SilverMagpie (talk) 22:20, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
I have added all the above to the explain along with the idea that the long next block represents the cigarette people used to smoke after sex (in old films at least). Guess this is no so much in any longer... Kynde (talk) 10:34, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
Should be trivia; doesn't explain the comic itself. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:44, 29 August 2014 (UTC)