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| Siege Engine |
 Title text: They initially thought the containment structure alone would be sufficient, but for good measure they decided to include the Elephant's Foot inside. |
Explanation
This comic compares siege engines to the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement. In the latter case, a containment structure had to be assembled some distance from the reactor, then moved over the reactor, as construction near the final location would have involved too great an amount of exposure to radiation from the site. The assembled structure was then moved to cover the reactor in a much shorter exposure window for the construction crew, achieving the goal of containment while minimising radiation damage to the workers. A siege engine is also often a covered structure that is moved towards another structure. In the comic, a similar large rolling structure being used as a siege engine is being moved to completely enclose the fortification, which was so well defended that it repelled direct assaults. In the title text, it mentions the elephant's foot, a radioactive mass of corium formed beneath the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Transcript
- [A large structure on wheels is moving towards a castle]
- After our normal siege engines were foiled by the castle's defences, our king hired the Chernobyl cleanup engineers.
This Week's Explanation for Improvement
As part of the Explanation Improvement Project, each week the community selects one older, stagnant, or otherwise neglected explanation to expand and polish together. This week's pick is comic 1334: Second, you can help us by editing its explanation!
To get involved with the project, you can also nominate an explanation that you think should be improved, or vote on current nominations!
| Second |
 Title text: Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING? |
Explanation
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Welcome to This Week's Explanation for Improvement! Anyone is encouraged to help explain comic 1334: Second; click here to get started! If you are new to wiki editing, you can read our editing FAQ for guidance. Here are some suggestions for improving this explanation: .svg){kind=icon} Help us re-organise the explanation!
.svg){kind=icon} Improve the explanation of "webrings", mentioned in the title text
.svg){kind=icon} Maybe we could add the newer developments in the 12 years after this comic was posted, such as the AI summaries and the enshittification of Google results
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Google is a popular search engine,[citation needed] and its searching algorithms are widely regarded as the most accurate and useful. If your search terms were sufficiently detailed, you will be able to find what you were looking for on the first page. Having to view the second page indicates your search terms were too vague or the answer to your query doesn't exist. When the search results typically number in the tens of millions (or more; in fact, more popular search results are in the billions), only the very first results relate to the user's real query, so the second page is typically not helpful for the issue.
Cueball, after failing to find his query in the first page of results, takes a curious peek at the second page. This is represented by a not-at-all subtle metaphor in which Cueball is about to wander into a sun-baked desert. According to the title text, he finds one vaguely relevant webpage, but the copyright starting with '19' (i.e. from the 1990s or older), means that it's probably too old to be of any use.
The title text refers to webrings. Webrings consist of multiple websites that are connected together through links, usually with a common theme. They connect from one website to the next, eventually leading back to the starting site. They were popular in the 1990s as a form of web directory, popularized by the titular "The Webring" (later WebRing) and typically curated by a 'ringmaster'. Web directories in general fell out of use with the rise of search engines, so seeing a webring could mean a site has not been updated since then. Yahoo acquired WebRing in 1999 as part of its acquisition of GeoCities and rebranded the service to Yahoo! WebRing in 2000, leaving ringmasters "angry" in part because their customizable homepages had been replaced by the design of Yahoo! WebRing. Taking off in the early 2020s, people have been creating new webrings, often in connection to the web hosting service Neocities, launched in 2013 and inspired by GeoCities. At one time, the importance of a webpage was judged partly on the number of pages linking to it; a webring has at least one page (the previous page in the ring linking to it) but often nothing else (if they were notable enough to be otherwise linked, they were less likely to be on a webring), meaning that reaching a webring meant that one had reached the one-incoming-link level of unimportance.
Transcript
- [Cueball in a desert standing before a rock.]
- Rock: Greetings, stranger.
- Rock: Whatever quest drives you, abandon it.
- Rock: You shall find no answers in these desolate wastes.
- Cueball: I knew I wouldn't.
- Cueball: I guess I... just had to see.
- I hate feeling desperate enough to visit the second page of Google results.
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