explain xkcd:Explanation Improvement Project/Successful nominations
- See also the /Unsuccessful nominations.
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This is an archive of past discussions about explain xkcd:Explanation Improvement Project and is kept for historical purposes. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current discussion page. |
Criteria
The Explanation Improvement Project is primarily focused on improving existing explanations while also helping create new editors. Ideal candidates for This Week's Explanation for Improvement are:
1. Needing of improvement, with expansion opportunity. Short explanations (view list of shortest pages) are often the most ideal for improvement, but longer explanations can also be good candidates if they are poorly written or do not explain the joke well. Good short explanations about quick and straightforward jokes should remain short. Regardless of the length of an explanation, consider its overall quality.
2. Interesting to the general public or otherwise ideal for new editors. The edit-a-thon format of the project (a concentrated collaborative effort for a few days) is best suited for comics about topics that most people can relate to. Explanations about more niche or technical jokes usually belong in the Incomplete explanations backlog instead. Explanations that have remained in the backlog for a long time, as well as those detailing the inner workings of the comic rather than its joke, are almost never nominated.
3. Old or out of date. The comic should preferably (but not necessarily) have been published before the creation of this wiki or be in need of an update. This wiki was created after 1079, so comics released after July 2012 were featured on the Main Page for multiple days and are generally higher-quality as a result. Particularly, comics released in the last few years are almost never nominated.
Past successful nominations
2026
September 2026
| 331: Photoshops | |||||||||
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Explanation
This is another comic in the My Hobby series. It plays on the then-popular internet meme "This Looks Shopped". Adobe Photoshop is a popular image editing application that was first launched in 1990, and it reached its peak in popularity around the 2000s as the industry standard for editing graphics. The verb "photoshop" (as in "to photoshop") is a verbalization/denominalization (informally known as verbing) of the noun "Photoshop", referring to the act of using editing software to digitally alter an image, often to make the image look more appealing, dramatic, or to trick people online. Its derived adjective "photoshopped" and its shortened version "shopped" are applied to an image that has been manipulated in this way. One particular popular usage of Photoshop is image compositing: combining two or more images together into a single, seamless picture. This allows the digital artist to create humorous and/or falsified scenarios, like making someone who does not hold a rapier hold one. Adobe Photoshop is still considered a prominent image editing service, but has since lost its monopoly in the market. Cueball insists that real-life items can be digitally manipulated, even though it is generally not possible to do this to actual physical objects outside of a computer.[citation needed] Megan claims that the sabre she found is a 19th-century heirloom, but Cueball is insisting for fun that the sabre is in fact photoshopped, presumably for fun or to rile Megan up. He then goes on to cite the wrongness of the shadows as why the sabre is photoshopped. This is an especially bizarre claim to make, because real world objects generally cannot cast wrong shadows, unlike a photoshopped image might. Alternatively, calling the artifact "photoshopped" could be Cueball's unique and strange way of suggesting it's a fake. The joke could also refer to the paranoia some internet users have when trying to discern whether images online are real or edited, suggesting that this behaviour might extend into real-life situations, mistaking actual physical objects as "photoshopped" because of how petty such people can be. This comic also unintentionally (probably) foreshadowed the rising and unavoidable presence of AI image creation and editing on the internet, several years after its publication. However, manipulating images on social media to create misleading content has been and still is very commonplace. Today, people would often accuse content creators or websites of using images generated by AI, as creating visual aids and content this way is considered lazy and minimizes the purpose of human artists. Identifying both photoshopped and AI images both follow the same base principle of examining minute details for inconsistency. With photoshopped images, it can include inaccurate shadows (as mentioned by Cueball) and differences in quality in sections of the image;[actual citation needed] with AI, the best tell is inconsistencies with reality. The title text contains the second part of the internet meme, the complete text of which is: "THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME." Most people have seen this from the popular image file format JPEG, which uses an image compression algorithm that works by converting an image's color data into small blocks, changing those blocks into cosine frequency patterns, rounding off details human eyes cannot see easily, and packing the final data tightly. This works remarkably well, but can sometimes leave artifacts (noticeable distortions or errors in the image) that are visible when zooming in far enough. Cueball is treating Megan's eyes as literal digital images on a screen, claiming that he can tell that he and Megan are "wrong for each other" based on the supposed JPEG artifacts and pixels her eyes are made of. Seeing in someone's eyes that you're wrong for each other is a common poetic/clichéd expression for the experience, during intimate moments, of recognising from something unidentifiable about someone's expressions or wider demeanor that there is a lack of personal chemistry between you. It is not usually based on the physical appearance of their irises. Transcript
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Very short, and only does a surface graze of the topic. Parallels to AI image editing, anyone? 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 06:03, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
- This is a great one! I was about to say the same thing, it can be updated by better explaining the reference and to add modern parallels. FaviFake (talk) 19:36, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Archived but marked as still incomplete. Unfortunately it still needs some serious copy-editing. FaviFake (talk) 16:44, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
August 2026
| 380: Emoticon | |||||||
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ExplanationA basilisk, originating in Greco-Roman antiquity, is a legendary creature reputed to have the power to kill, or turn to stone, any living creature with a single glance (a useful idea for metaphor, as in Shakespeare's Richard III, in which a widow wishes her eyes, praised for their beauty by her husband's killer, were basilisks and could "strike [him] dead"). In this comic Cueball doesn't appear to be turned to stone, he simply appears to have died. 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: The username "BSLSK05" is, of course, the word "basilisk" without vowels and with appended numbers. Most systems disallow the same username for different users, so users often append digits to their name in order to create something unique. These may be digits that have some significance to them, or simply an arbitrary string. The myth of the basilisk has been adapted into many places in popular culture which the comic may be referencing, rather than the original myth directly. In this comic, Cueball is explicitly not referred to as Rob, since his username implies that he goes by "Nick" (possibly short for "Nicholas") and has a family name starting with "M". This may be a reference to the character Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, also known as "Nearly Headless Nick", from the novel and movie series Harry Potter. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a basilisk is let loose in Hogwarts School of Wizardry, and Nearly Headless Nick 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 messaging shorthand for requesting information about someone — specifically 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). However, in some contexts, the question was considered creepy, inappropriate or disruptive. For people who were only interested in talking with existing friends or talking about a specific topic, dealing with unsolicited private messages asking "A/S/L?" was generally an annoyance. Such people may have wished for a way to make the questioner go away, though most would not have resorted to petrification to do so. The term has largely fallen out of use 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. The type of chat system pictured may 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 Transcript
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, some cross-platform software development frameworks used to create graphical user interfaces, such as QT's UTF-8 encoder, let it through anyway. QT's qtextdocument (i.e. the container for richtext formatted content) uses U+FDD0 as non-printable text frame delimiting character. When this is appended to a QTextDocument, which is a container for structured rich text documents that provides support for styled text and various other types of document elements, the internal counters used to keep track of depths of embedded content have been incorrectly adjusted, to the degree that it eventually may crash the software using it. 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.
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This is amazing! It has a relatively deep but simple joke, a weak explanation, and a reference to an old internet custom! FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Archived. FaviFake (talk) 11:03, 6 September 2026 (UTC)