3051: Hardwood
| Hardwood |
 Title text: They may technically have been softwoods at some point, but they definitely aren't now. |
Explanation[edit]
Home remodelers, whether contractors or do-it-yourselfers, sometimes seek to remove layers of modifications to restore some previous condition. Flooring made of hardwood (oak, maple, etc.) panels, perhaps deprecated by earlier homeowners for comfort or style reasons, can be prized by later homeowners as tastes or fashions change. Hardwood floors are currently considered desirable in homes for durability, aesthetic appeal and other reasons, and may have been the original choice for the building, but aspirations constantly change and intermediate decoration may have overlaid carpetting or linoleum/vinyl at a time that this was considered more fashionable or practical.
In this comic Blondie has apparently explained geological strata to Cueball, who refers to finding a “hardwood floor” under these layers. The joke is that the characters are talking about the Earth's crust, rather than about a house. The “hardwood floor” is actually a fossiliferous coal seam from the Carboniferous period, 300-360 million years ago, that originated as woody plants and other material. The “layers” are overlying geological strata that are likely hundreds or thousands of meters thick, making it impractical, if not impossible, to tear them up, and making it unlikely that there is any aesthetic reason to expose the “hardwood” layer.
The title text refers to the fact that typical Carboniferous plants would all be classified as softwoods or even not woody at all; flowering plants (angiosperms), the principal source of today's hardwoods, would not appear on Earth in any significant numbers for another 220 million years. However, whatever it would be classified as in the beginning, it is now “hardwood” in the literal sense of wood that is hard, as it is now all coal and other rock.
Transcript[edit]
- [Cueball is looking down and pointing with a finger towards the floor in front of Blondie who is facing him. Behind her is a picture on the wall showing seven sedimentary layers above each other, assuming the top of the picture is air. Each layer has a different texture than the ones it borders but two are as white as the air at the top, including the bottom-most layer.]
- Cueball: So you're saying that if we tear up these layers, there's hardwood flooring under here?
- Blondie: ...I mean, sort of...
- [Caption below the panel:]
- Home remodelers learn about the Carboniferous
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- Agreed. I think that Cueball is the home remodeler. 172.70.57.179 09:29, 15 February 2025 (UTC)
Fact: this is not a Valentines special Caliban (talk) 12:34, 15 February 2025 (UTC)
Is it just me or did they change the incomplete template? Used to be cyan and slanted, I thought 172.69.70.165 17:26, 15 February 2025 (UTC)
- Yes that is likely correct. FaviFake has been looking into improving templates and I can see he just changed the incomplete template over the last few days. If this is a problem let us know, it can always be reverted to the original version. --Kynde (talk) 09:21, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
- No it's not really a problem, it was just something I noticed. It's fine either way tbf 172.71.30.98 16:50, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
It might be a good idea to incorporate 2840:_Earth_Layers into this explanation, given the similar topic. I'm not confident enough to do it myself. Magicalus (talk) 04:06, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
- Not sure that 2840 is any more thematically relevant to this comic than any of the 50 other comics in the Geology category. It is of interest, perhaps, that 13 of the 51 in this category were published in 2024, 19 of the 51 since the start of 2023. 162.158.41.95 07:49, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
It's unlikely to be at all any inspiration for this comic, but it reminds me of the two times when you do trivially peel back the floor in your 'house' in order to reach the strata below: Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. In DF, it's perhaps more "advanced player" self-imposed challenge (recreate the 'pit' type anandoned fortress most often discovered in Adventure Mode, though I long went through a phase of walling off a perimiter and carving down into/through the digable bedrock to leave behind an 'unconstructed' raw-rock set of buildings by subtracting all the bits around them, hoping that a bottomless chasm or underground river doesn't intersect your chosen volume of rock - these days, it's cavern layers that need to be anticipated), but the later Minecraft often had me set up as simple a mud(/soil) hut as I could, then immediately (with the wood of the first whole tree I had time to bash into my inventory) work to create ever deeper inner flooring and eventually almost a 'giant inverted mushroom of void' beneath my (maybe significantly improved, maybe still primitively soil-and-grassy) topside 'home', probably having set up both farm and forestry 'soil platforms' inside so I could create my cavernous chamber all the way down to the impenetrable bedrock and outwards well beyond rendering/chunk-loading limits. Encountering veins and clusters of not-boring-rock (in either game), or a particularly nice seam of marble/whatever (DF) would be dealt with according to the flexibility of the original plan and the immediate desirability of the resources discovered. Magma chambers/tubes in DF would have to be worked with/around, accordingly (usually side-tapped, carefully, to power magma-workshops, and have to start worrying about magma-crabs, etc), whereas Minecraft had the far easier option of just storing bucketloads of it in chests, as I gradually extracted the layers and pools to safely dig down further, until such a time as I might find a good use for them elsewhere (decorative/defensive magma-falls, etc). Though it's been a long time since I've Minecrafted (I got annoyed with the new Endermen, though water (or magma!) filled double-outer-wall boundaries at least managed to stop them creating surprise holes through which creepers might eventually scuttle), and my playstyle in DF is less "giant pit" than it once was (thieving birds, for starters, led me to entirely roof over any 'open air' inner-fortress void, anyway, and imminent changes might result in the long-suggested ability of sieging enemies to dig/deconstruct, which might mean I start to properly use the magma-filled wall idea in DF, instead!)... But, in both cases, I've definitely spent many an hour (of my own, and/or my on-screen avatars) removing 'floor' to get to strata. 172.70.86.63 08:33, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
- You can even obtain actual wood in Dwarf Fortress, just by digging down far enough then going and cutting trees in the caverns. The nice thing about finding lignites and coals is that you can bypass the need to char it before use. 172.69.60.171 05:43, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
- When I last played, yes there was wooden 'supports' in the mini-spider-infested mineworkings (presume that's what you're refereing to, probably still a thing, though I see reference to many other NPC 'sites'/features/biomes in more recent write-ups), but my general plan in such circumstances was always to bash down at least enough trees, top-side, to get a sapling or two in my inventory, plus enough other 'starter food' (including grass seeds), then 'turtle down' (finding coal quickly was always a plus, to save me from the pure-wood method of creating torches) and establish a near-surface base of operations with soily bit (and enough headroom) to grow things that could defer my need to poke my head out as I went ahead and hollowed out (often down to bedrock) in whatever was the systematic method I was employing on that attempt. If I had a particular yen for sand (perhaps for glass), then I may have later popped up in/near a desert to strip-mine the surface away (could often be done without obviously changing the landscape, just by taking one (above sea-level) layer of sand away), or establish a sea-floor 'doorway' to let me harvest from there (I understand there's more dangers down there, now, than just drowning - it was just harmless squid, when I was doing it; and keeping an eye on the bubbles was easy enough, prior to the currently crafted potions that I think makes that irrelevent). Otherwise, I had a whole subterranean empire to dig out, with standard contingencies for all the mobs (or more awkward geology) that I might stumble across whilst doing so. Pretty much had it all down pat, but then I'd spent a lot of time doing this in Solo Survival Mode, with nothing but a few savegames and maybe some screenshots to show for it. I then probably got obsessed with something else, instead, and moved on. ;) 172.71.178.78 09:22, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
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- When I last played, yes there was wooden 'supports' in the mini-spider-infested mineworkings (presume that's what you're refereing to, probably still a thing, though I see reference to many other NPC 'sites'/features/biomes in more recent write-ups), but my general plan in such circumstances was always to bash down at least enough trees, top-side, to get a sapling or two in my inventory, plus enough other 'starter food' (including grass seeds), then 'turtle down' (finding coal quickly was always a plus, to save me from the pure-wood method of creating torches) and establish a near-surface base of operations with soily bit (and enough headroom) to grow things that could defer my need to poke my head out as I went ahead and hollowed out (often down to bedrock) in whatever was the systematic method I was employing on that attempt. If I had a particular yen for sand (perhaps for glass), then I may have later popped up in/near a desert to strip-mine the surface away (could often be done without obviously changing the landscape, just by taking one (above sea-level) layer of sand away), or establish a sea-floor 'doorway' to let me harvest from there (I understand there's more dangers down there, now, than just drowning - it was just harmless squid, when I was doing it; and keeping an eye on the bubbles was easy enough, prior to the currently crafted potions that I think makes that irrelevent). Otherwise, I had a whole subterranean empire to dig out, with standard contingencies for all the mobs (or more awkward geology) that I might stumble across whilst doing so. Pretty much had it all down pat, but then I'd spent a lot of time doing this in Solo Survival Mode, with nothing but a few savegames and maybe some screenshots to show for it. I then probably got obsessed with something else, instead, and moved on. ;) 172.71.178.78 09:22, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
