explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

573: Parental Trolling

2013-12-02T14:37:22Z

173.245.51.227: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 573
| date = April 24, 2009
| title = Parental Trolling
| image = parental trolling.png
| titletext = They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!
}}

==Explanation==
Set in the future, a daughter approaches her father playing a music video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". The daughter insults her father's generation's versions of playing pranks, specifically {{w|Rickrolling}}. The daughter refers to this as "trolling" (also in the title), which is popular jargon for trying to disrupt a person or community via an action to elicit an emotional response. The humour is in that the dad reveals he has 'trolled' his daughter, thus eliciting an emotional response which perfectly displays his prank.

The title text refers to the conflict between teenagers and adults over music and culture, with teenagers often listening to music such as dubstep which annoys their parents. 'Easter egg' is a term used to describe a hidden inside joke or feature inside software. Here, the daughter is the software.

==Transcript==
:The Future
:[Cueball is sitting at a futuristic desktop computer, and a girl is standing behind him with a portable ultra-thin screen.]
:Girl: Hey dad, look at this old music video.
:Video: We're no strangers to love...
:Cueball: Wow, you got me.
:Girl: Did your generation really use this to troll people? SO lame. Your generation sucked at pranks.
:Cueball: Did we? I once raised a kid with conditioning so her speech centers shut down when she was upset.
:Girl: What? No, you couldn't have bleegle warble yargle arggh!
:Cueball: Teehee.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Internet]]

Talk:1290: Syllable Planning

2013-11-13T06:42:18Z

173.245.51.227: thats what she said

I remember my father telling me when I was a teenager about a scholarly paper that described this exact topic, namely the rules governing where 'fucking' can be injected into multi-syllable words. I still remember discussing the options for "fantastic" and "government". Decades later I had a dream about words like "uninstallable" (which can either mean something that can be uninstalled or something that can't be uninstalled), and discovering that someone had written a paper about that very subject (http://www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/engsv/papers/vikn08b.pdf). [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.127|199.27.128.127]] 06:00, 13 November 2013 (UTC) Toby Ovod-Everett
: Think you mean "... can be uninstalled or .... can't be installed". --[[Special:Contributions/173.245.51.227|173.245.51.227]] 06:42, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

1289: Simple Answers

2013-11-11T21:22:37Z

173.245.51.227: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1289
| date = November 11, 2013
| title = Simple Answers
| image = simple answers.png
| titletext = 'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete}}
This is [[Randall]]'s commentary on some of the baseless skepticism and equally baseless optimism directed at new technologies. (Related: [[1215: Insight]].) While it's always healthy to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of cutting-edge tech before blindly diving in and adopting it, it's not healthy to base that evaluation on unrealistically high standards and expectations. New developments will have pros and cons, and it's hard to tell whether they make the world a better place or not.

Randall has set up a Q&A for this kind of questioning. Most of the them are straightforward, but we'll provide some commentary on selected questions.

''Will [ ] destroy whole industries? Yes.'' A widely adopted technology usually causes another to gradually phase out, and industries will rise and fall as technologies do. This is a bit of a loaded question because "destroy industries" sounds negative, and only covers half the effect—instead of merely destroying them, we're also {{w|Creative destruction| creative destruction}} replacing them with something (hopefully) better.

''Will teens use [ ] for sex? Yes. Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes.'' Sex is pretty important to almost everyone, so it'll find its way into most generic technologies. Hormone-crazed tech-savvy teenagers are a particularly strong intersection of the two. Parents fearing teen sex might be worried about how their kids would use the technology, but the second question refutes these concerns quite concisely. This might also refer to {{w|Rule 34 (Internet meme)|Rule 34}} which states that if something exists, it will also be used inside porn as well.

''Will [ ] destroy music/art? No.'' Every new technology for reproducing musical and artistic works (such as [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/03/wicked-player-piano player pianos] and [http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/01/18/thirty-years-before-sopa-mpaa-feared-the-vcr/ video cassette recorders]) has been accompanied by warnings that it will destroy the industry that supplies it content. The reality is a special case of the "destroy industries" question - old business models will fall but new ones will arise in their place, and art and music as a whole will survive.

''But can't we go back to a time when- No.'' Elderly people [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhenIWasYourAge express their disapproval] of today's technological luxuries, nostalgically longing for a time before Foo or Bar came around. That's just how the stereotype goes, but there is a large helping of truth to it. Usually, their sentiments are not a fair judgement, but an emotional attachment to the olden days and a [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheyChangedItNowItSucks resistance to change].

The final answer is a depressing and strangely beautiful comment on human nature: ''Will [ ] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated.'' Skeptics may be concerned that a new technology will make people's pleasures and interactions more artificial and shallow; Randall comments that this is already something well known in our society.

==Transcript==
:The '''simple answers''' to the questions that get asked about every new technology:
:{|
|Will [ ] make us all geniuses?||No
|-
|Will [ ] make us all morons?||No
|-
|Will [ ] destroy whole industries?||Yes
|-
|Will [ ] make us more empathetic?||No
|-
|Will [ ] make us less caring?||No
|-
|Will teens use [ ] for sex?||Yes
|-
|Were they going to have sex anyway?||Yes
|-
|Will [ ] destroy music?||No
|-
|Will [ ] destroy art?||No
|-
|But can't we go back to a time when-||No
|-
|Will [ ] bring about world peace?||No
|-
|Will [ ] cause widespread<br />alienation by creating a world<br />of empty experiences?||We were<br />already<br />alienated
|}

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]