Talk:705: Devotion to Duty

This is very clearly a Die Hard parody. -- ‎70.12.4.193 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Indubitably --JSekula71 (talk) 23:36, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Oh man. This needs some reworking. --Quicksilver (talk) 03:10, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

This entire entry has to be a troll... We may need an ExplainExplainxkcd for those who don't get it. 108.162.249.155 05:15, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

108.162.250.203 10:33, 26 April 2014 (UTC) In Die Hard, the terrorists used a chainsaw to cut the telephone trunk cables. Try repairing that damage.

Never underestimate the dedication of a truly devoted sysadmin! -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 04:57, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

> terrorists used a chainsaw to cut the telephone trunk cables. Try repairing that damage. I've cut a 25-pair phone trunk with a masonry hammer-drill. And fixed it same night. --PRR (talk) 19:43, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

The title text is highlighting the absurdity of the sysadmin's devotion to duty by contrasting the forces of darkness (very serious) against a blog describing the daily activities of your cat (trivial). ---BD (talk) 07:36, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Why are there so many parentheses in the explanation? I think that needs to get fixed. Vince7778 (talk) 23:09, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) 05:15, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

It is 2024 - Where can I get the T-Shrt? 172.70.247.171 (talk) 14:39, 21 May 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The XKCD store was shut down years ago - 162.158.167.192 19:57, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I wonder how they managed to read the sentence without understanding it's no longer available? --FaviFake (talk) 16:48, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

do we really need that last part about sysadmin references in title text if you can scroll to the bottom to find the sysadmin catagory? User_gamer (talk) 23:05, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Two different purposes, technically.

The added membership of a category is for the benefit of that category page in which (although some have been given extensive narrative listings of the members-so-far, which may or may not be excessive) you mostly expect to find the autopopulated list of pointers to every page that is a member, including the one we're looking at here.

Links out from the page towards other comics for shared qualities are, even if that quality is a Category-created one, a technically more discerning linkage, which doesn't involve leaping to a Cat-page and then wikiwallking from there.

There may be significant overlap, especially when the Cat has only two or three members and all (the rest) of them get directly namechecked+linked on each member-page, but it needn't be. Such "<foo> is also found <elsecomic>" statements may be of the form "the most recent prior time we saw <foo> was <specificcomic>", or pointing at the first, or (once there is one) the next for easy reference. And more narratively than doing the InfoBar thing used to navigate the Blog-order or April Fools category-set.

Also see the practice of pointing to the likes of the Cueball page upon the first in-article mention of Cueball. It either might seem redundant if you suggest that Category:Comics featuring Cueball does the same job of providing a link (first to the Cat page, then click on the Cat page's link to the Character Page... or any other comic that features Cueball, if that's what will more satisfy your curiosity about this character), or else look like something that needs a new Infobar to navigate to the first/last/prior/next instances in the Cueball 'series'. But, I'm fairly sure, the direct link to the character-page (where notable enough) is both a sufficient and not excessive addition to the specific Category-membership about this that gets rendered at the end.

Or, in other terms, if you're right to suggest that we don't need this Sysadmin information effectively (pre)repeated like this, then there are many more very similar, or worse, anomalies out there in Explanation-land. If you think it's worth discussing this kind of prosaic layout-style element, then it probably needs more than a query here in this page to rectify any of this apparent oddness in content.

...My opinion being that it is an acceptable (even expected) redundancy of 'category-membership navigation'. But I wouldn't have thought to try to word why it is, without you asking this question an making me actually think about it. 81.179.200.152 23:50, 24 June 2026 (UTC)