491: Twitter

Twitter

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Title text: If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave

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Explanation

This comic plays off of an old shaving cream product's Burma-Shave advertising campaign employed on American highways from 1925 to 1963. These ads used short poems, each line arranged sequentially on a sign along a highway, the last line always being "Burma-Shave," the name of the shaving cream. Originally, these ads only described the product, but others included driving safety messages. This notorious advertising gimmick could be considered an "ancient meme", having ended more than a decade before the term meme was even coined.

Twitter is a text-based social media service where posts are restricted in length (originally 140 characters, though the limit would be doubled to 280 characters from 2017 onward), so to get a longer essay sent, you will need to break it up in smaller fragments — like the Burma-Shave messages, although the whole of the text of this comic is considerably less than 140 characters and would not actually need to be broken up on Twitter. (Long after the release of this comic, Twitter would be acquired by Elon Musk and later renamed to X. The platform is still commonly referred to as Twitter, though, including in its Wikipedia article.)

Cueball gets five messages from Twitter on his device that give the following message: "On Twitter feeds - An odd regression: - Ancient memes - Find new expression - Burma-Shave." Thus the "ancient meme" of Burma-Shave advertisements is revived in the form of a broken-up Twitter thread.

Firefox 2 had a long-standing annoying bug where only the initial part of the title text was shown as a tooltip, preventing you from seeing the rest of the text unless you right-clicked show-property, which would let you see a sideways scrollable field of the title-text in the properties for the image.

This bug is also still mentioned in xkcd.com's About page:

Why can't I read the whole comic mouseover text in Firefox?

They can be read with extensions like Long Titles, or by right-clicking on the images and going to 'properties', then clicking and dragging to read the whole thing. This is a bug in Firefox, Mozilla Bug #45375. It has been outstanding for many years now.

Note: It looks like it's been fixed in Firefox 3.0. Now, as an added tweak, to keep the tooltips from expiring while you're reading, you can use this.

—Randall Munroe, About xkcd

Transcript

[Cueball with a handheld device sits on an office chair.]

Device: Beep beep

Device: On Twitter feeds

Device: Beep beep

Device: An odd regression:

Device: Beep beep

Device: Ancient memes

Device: Beep beep

Device: Find new expression

Device: Beep beep

Device: Burma-shave

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Discussion

Just end every sentence in Burma Shave Spongebog (talk)

Never tried this/It could work/I just need an idea/Wait, crap./Burma-Shave 108.162.216.34 (talk) 14:36, 3 December 2019 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Are we sure that Cueball is typing? It seems to me that he is getting a series of texts (or a series of tweets), because of the "Beep Beep" sound: cell phones typically don't beep when typing. --Troy0 (talk) 09:25, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

I have to agree, add in that the zig-zag is used for external text usually, like the other end of a call. 173.245.56.154 20:35, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

The transcript was accordingly edited. --Troy0 (talk) 04:05, 25 July 2014 (UTC

I don't think the title text explanation is correct. He's not suggesting you upgrade to "Burma Shave" - he's saying, "Upgrade from Firefox 2". Burma Shave just follows. I'll edit it. --108.162.216.54 12:55, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

This comic not appearing for me on the xkcd.com website, anyone else? 162.158.122.6 20:24, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

For sale: baby shoes, never worn
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