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| Geology Class |
 Title text: The rise of AI review bombing tools threatens to take away a crucial source of experience for geology undergraduates. |
Explanation
A roadcut is where part of a hill was dug or blasted away to make room for a road to go through. Since it makes a vertical "slice" through the hill, it exposes many layers of rock, making it useful to geologists who want to examine those rock layers, who would otherwise not have had easy/practical/legal access to excavate the site themselves. Ponytail is attempting to manipulate where her state is building a new highway, which will therefore create new roadcuts through a specific layer of Triassic shale that she wants to study. She is doing this by a set of initial actions entirely unrelated to geology, despite involving her geology students in these initial stages of the plan.
Given the permitting and construction timelines involved, this project is not likely to bear fruit anytime soon (perhaps not for years, if at all), but as a geologist Ponytail probably thinks that anything less than a thousand years is "quick enough". This is due to the extremely long (to most people) timeframes that geologists work with, due to how slowly tectonic plates move.
"Review bombing" is the process where a group of people leave negative reviews to artificially lower a score of a piece of media or property; some forms include games via the Steam Reviews, movies and shows via IMDb, and various stores via Yelp or Google Maps. Review bombing is usually caused by some sort of hatred towards the targeted media and its creators, although it may happen for other reasons.
Ponytail being a teacher instead of Miss Lenhart may seem unusual, but she has done this before in 982: Set Theory.
Title text references how now with rise of LLMs it is possible to use AI to review bomb something. This would make Ponytail's activity easier and not require humans; hence, students would not get this experience.
Transcript
- [Ponytail is teaching a class to Cueball and Megan. Ponytail is holding a pointer.]
- Ponytail: Welcome to Geology 201.
- Ponytail: Today we'll be review-bombing an Applebees.
- [Ponytail points toward a map on the wall.]
- Ponytail: Tomorrow we'll do Costco and Sephora.
- Megan: Why?
- Ponytail: If we cut traffic to the Northgate Shopping Center, it will go to the East Plaza instead.
- [Zoom-in to Ponytail pointing to the map of the city, with several roads and intersections marked.]
- Ponytail: This will push the state to cancel the North Bridge project and shift funds to the Highway 3 extension...
- [Back to a wide view of the class.]
- Ponytail: ...creating new roadcuts through Triassic shale.
- Megan: I like Applebees.
- Ponytail: Then you should have told the city to approve my dig permit.
This Week's Explanation for Improvement
As part of the Explanation Improvement Project, each week the community selects one older, neglected, or otherwise stagnant explanation to expand and polish together. This week's pick is 380: Emoticon; please help us improve it! To get involved with the project, you can also nominate an explanation or vote on current nominations!
| Emoticon |
 Title text: U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it. |
Explanation
|
Welcome to This Week's Explanation for Improvement! Anyone is encouraged to help explain comic 380: Emoticon; 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: |
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A basilisk, originating in Greco-Roman antiquity, is a legendary creature reputed to have the power to kill any living creature with a single glance, or in other mentions, by turning the victim into stone (Shakespeare, in his play Richard III, uses the basilisk as a metaphor for something that kills). In this comic Cueball doesn't appear to be turned to stone, he simply appears to have died.
In this comic, Cueball, who goes by "NICKM", chats online with a user named "BSLSK05" via instant messaging. He quickly learns, much to his dismay, that he is chatting with an actual basilisk, who kills him by texting him a smiley emoticon (a colon and a closing parenthesis: :)), suggesting that the basilisk's power can extend beyond actual physical eye contact and is effective even with a mere visual representation of a pair of "basilisk" eyes as keyboard characters. This is humorous, as this parallels the power of the basilisk. Apparently, Cueball is merely killed rather than being turned to stone.
The username "BSLSK05" is, of course, the word "basilisk" sans vowels and with appended numbers. Usually, appended numbers in a username denote the last two digits of the year for when the user was born, which in modern internet settings usually refers to years in the 21st century. The numbers could also just be a random string of digits users often add to their usernames when their initial choice has already been taken, since most websites disallow the same username between different users.
This comic is possibly a reference to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, of the novel and movie series Harry Potter, in which a basilisk is let loose in Hogwarts, School of Wizardry. The character going by "NICKM" could refer to the character Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, also known as Nearly Headless Nick, a ghost who, in the story, becomes a victim of the basilisk's gaze. However, since he is a ghost and has already died, he is instead rendered immobile, or in the book, "petrified".
Another possible reference is the Basilisk monster from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Here, the Basilisk is a monster with the special ability "Petrifying Gaze".
Cueball's question, "A/S/L?", is an online texting shorthand for requesting information about someone, such as their age, sex, and location. This was commonly used when first meeting someone online in text-only mediums, especially in determining how they might wish to continue to converse with their correspondent - whether it might lead to online flirting or finding some other interesting topic of conversation. The term has fallen out of style since the comic, with the introduction of avatars, profile pictures, and other methods of presenting a user's identity up front. Modern dating sites such as Tinder have built-in algorithms that automatically connect people whose preferences match, skipping the basic introduction stage of a first-time interaction entirely.
Some more modern chat-only platforms, such as Emerald Chat, have birthed new introductory questions such as 'M or F' to ask a person's gender.
The type of chat system pictured may likely be Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the earliest popular system used for instant messaging, as most IRC clients share the use of formatting usernames with surrounding angle brackets and prefixing event messages with "-!-".
The title text refers to the Unicode character at code point U+FDD0, which is a non-character — this specific one is permanently reserved for internal application processing rather than regular text, meaning no font sets support the character. If you attempt to render the non-character in a text field or editor, it would either not show up or would display as an empty rectangle (🯄) or an invalid/missing character box (�). Unicode does, however, have many characters for representing images and icons/symbols, such as ✉ (Envelope), ☎ (Telephone), ✏ (Pencil), ✂ (Scissors), ⚙ (Gear), ★ (Star), ancient Egyptian glyphs, and (most popularly) emojis. The title text jokes that U+FDD0 is actually the character for the eye of a basilisk (which does not exist), but is not rendered by any fonts because it may kill anybody who looks at the character, i.e., for safety reasons.
Transcript
- [Cueball sits at computer, typing. The computer screen reads as follows:]
- ~!~ Opening Chat with BSLSK05
- <NICKM> Hi!
- <NICKM> A/S/L?
- [The next panel is unframed, with two smaller frames within it.]
- <BSLSK05> :)
- [Cueball looks stunned, flies backward.]
- [The two smaller frames focus in on BSLSK05's emoticon, implying rotation to show a smile and two open eyes.]
- [Cueball at computer slouches in chair, dead, crossbones above his head.]
- [At the remote computer, a basilisk is looking at its screen, pleased with its endeavours.]
Trivia
The unicode character used as the eye of the basilisk, U+FDD0 did in fact kill at least one chat client, Konversation (and presumably any other Qt-based chat clients using QTextDocument). This was because U+FDD0 is one of the 32 non-characters located in the block “Arabic Presentation Forms-A” used "to make additional codes available to programmers to use for internal processing purposes". According to the Unicode FAQ they are reserved for internal (private) use.
However, QT's UTF-8 encoder let it through anyway. But QT's qtextdocument uses U+FDD0 as text frame delimiter so when it is appended to a QTextDocument, counters run wrong and eventually it crashes.
D-bus closes the connection and crashes the client when it encounters illegal UTF-8, and KDE's notification system works through d-bus.
The problem was fixed after the xkcd "report" and Konversation now handles unicode normally.
In this comic, Cueball is explicitly not referred to as Rob, if his username is to be taken at face value.
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