940: Oversight

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Oversight

Title text: I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.

Explanation

Fitocracy is a web site that turns workouts into a social game by awarding points, badges, levels and all sorts of other gamification. Megan and Cueball, by their judgement, have spent approximately two hours engaged in sexual activity. However, according to this cartoon, Fitocracy does not consider sex to be an activity acceptable for its site, despite the vigorous nature of Cueball and Megan's sexual workout.

The title text explains how sites like Fitocracy are so successful. Because human brains, especially the cynical ones, like to game the system whenever they can, they will find easy things to do that also score high. In the case of Fitocracy, these are simple exercises that add up a lot when applied daily. But the creators of Fitocracy (and other such successful sites, like Weight Watchers or Lumosity) know this, and, as "in Soviet Russia" joke, the system games you shown.adopting an exercise regimen, or losing weight, or getting smarter, or whatever else there is.

Sex does raise your breathing rate and heartbeat, but as sparkpeople (a similar site to fitocracy) notes, it is not as effective as a session at a gym, as it does not typically use the main muscle groups in their full range of motion, and doesn't sustain a raised heartbeat for a sufficient length of time. They consider sex to be less effective as cardio than brisk walking, as it burns only about 100-200 kcal per hour, which is little raised above a typical resting rate of about 60 kcal per hour.

Please note that on the xkcd browser for Android, instead of the correct comic, the following unpublished 'Five Minute Comics' is shown. Interestingly, it contains an early version of 942: Juggling, which was published less than a week after this comic.

Transcript

[Megan and Cueball have sex up against a wall.]

[Megan and Cueball have sex standing in an armchair.]

[Megan and Cueball have sex in a swing, swaying above a table with a flower vase on it.]

[Fitocracy. The search phrase is "sex" and the site returned "activity not found."]

[Megan and Cueball stand in front of the computer, Megan is at the keyboard, Cueball stands back wearing a towel tied around his waist.]

Megan: Come on! That was like two hours of cardio!

Cueball: Hmm, let's see... The part on the dresser was kind of like skiing...

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Discussion

Are you sure it’s Megan and not Danish? -- MobileGamr (talk) 13:05, 9 April 2022 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Well it's probably supposed to be a family-friendly site. That, and sex with an automatic toy could be technically be called sex, but it's not very strenuous. Davidy²²[talk] 09:07, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, technically sex is the most family-friendly activity existing as it creates children and therefore families. But you are right, they should probably include more specific categories. In my mind there is a scoring matrix of positions, "speed", and weather you are the more active or more passive part in the position... 84.137.246.233 21:43, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

"family-friendly" applies to whether the subject material is age-appropriate (or accessible/physically safe/etc), typically, for families with young children. Most of the sorts of activities that result in having children are not "family-friendly" on that basis. I had never considered the potential irony of that before, though... Tryc (talk) 19:18, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

r/woooosh (I know it doesn't work but it works in this situation) 172.68.54.10 14:37, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

This is not incredibly relevant, but I would like it to be known that on the mobile app of XKCD, this comic image is replaced by one of the five-minute comics ‎76.28.109.218 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

What is a five minute comic? I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 12:54, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

For example, https://xkcd.com/819/ 141.101.98.33 13:29, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Can someone do an explanation for the 5 minute comic at the bottom? 108.162.219.34 21:37, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

That has been done some time ago when the comic originally at the bottom of this page was moved here: Five-Minute Comics: Part 4. --Kynde (talk) 14:02, 3 November 2016 (UTC)