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Network Configuration

Title text: If you repeatedly rerun the development of technological civilization, it turns out that for some reason the only constant is that there is always a networking utility called 'netcat', though it does a different thing in each one.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a NETCAT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

In this comic, Cueball claims he messed up his network configuration and needs to rebuild it from scratch. However, he uses a double meaning of the word "rebuild" to take the idea to an extreme. Instead of just rebuilding his network settings - starting fresh with a clean setup - he is reconstructing the entire history of human civilization each time.

As this originally took multiple millennia, doing it for every network packet would make communication extremely slow; in modern networking, we send and receive thousands of packets every second.

In the final frame, Cueball looks shaggy and dirty, with a grub hoe behind him, as though he had been performing these tasks in real life just to get his network working again. He says the network packet was stuck in the Neolithic era, the final period of the Stone Age that marked the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of settlement. Apparently Cueball had to go through the effort of inventing farming, one of the developments of the Neolithic Revolution, to keep communicating with Ponytail.

Randall Munroe is familiar with the popular creative nonfiction topic of what it takes to rebuild civilization, the subject of a book he blurbed on its cover, How to Invent Everything, by Ryan North, fellow cartoonist.

The title text discusses netcat, a simple utility to make a tcp connection which comes in annoyingly incompatible nc.traditional and nc.openbsd varieties. This is likely a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide series which states that 85% of civilizations developed a drink that sounds like "Jynnan Tonnyx" (Gin and tonic) before inventing interstellar flight. The drinks are only related by their name and have nothing else in common.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Ponytail is sitting on an office chair at her computer with a headset on. A zigzag line indicates what is shown on the computer screen]

Ponytail (typing): Ugh, your connection is so laggy.

Computer: Yeah, sorry.

[Cueball is sitting on an office chair at his laptop]

Cueball (typing): It's because I messed up my network configuration and now I have to rebuild a separate civilization from scratch for each packet.

[Ponytail at her computer]

Ponytail (typing): Huh?

Ponytail (typing): What are you talking about?

Ponytail (typing): ...Hello?

[Beat panel]

[Cueball, with dirt on his head and around him, is at an old computer setup with an agricultural tool resting on his now non-office chair]

Cueball (typing): Sorry, got stuck in the Neolithic that time.

Cueball (typing): Inventing farming takes forever.

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