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Nostalgia Content

|< < Prev #3256 (June 8, 2026)

Title text: Gen-Z got a chunk of the Carboniferous, and now all their memes are about how pathetic and small today's dragonflies are.

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Explanation

This comic is a joke about nostalgia content. In it, a database for creating nostalgia content has accidentally included some Early Devonian features in it. These features, while certainly being old, are far too long ago for anyone to be alive at the time,^{[citation needed]} let alone remember it, hence defying the purpose.

In the example in this comic, Cueball puts the more new creations of Pogs & Tamagotchis (previously the subject of another comic) with the Devonian Prototaxites and armoured fish - with the ridiculous age comparison between them part of the joke. (Pogs became a fad in the early 1990s, and Tamagotchis came into production in 1996, while the Devonian period ended 359 million years ago.) Prototaxites (here formerly referred to as Parataxites) were huge fungi that lived during the Devonian. The armoured fish Cueball speaks of are from an ancient class known as Placodermi, which appeared during the Silurian and Devonian. Placoderms were among the first jawed fish, and the first fish clade to have pectoral fins. Devonian placoderms include Dunkleosteus, Titanichthys, Bothriolepis and Rhamphodopsis. Silurian placoderms include Xiushanosteus, Anglaspis, and Poraspis. There was also Sacabambaspis from the Ordovician.

The title text shows another example of nostalgia content warped by the accident, where Gen Z memes got a chunk of the Carboniferous in their nostalgia database. During the Late Carboniferous, species such as Meganeura were prolific, which resemble today's dragonflies, with the notable difference of having wingspans of up to 65 cm long, which would obviously dwarf modern dragonflies. However, this change happened over millions of years, and in Gen Z's time the dragonflies are as small as ever, hence the ridicule.

Transcript

[Cueball is standing, with his arms out, in front of a Prototaxite (incorrectly referred to in this comic as a "Parataxite") towering over a mossy landscape. To his right, a Tamagotchi (bottom-left) and milk-caps (referred to in this comic as "pogs", top-left) appear. The 3 milkcaps that can be seen show a skull with a snake through its eyeball, a figure 8 & a star (3 more milkcaps are also shown, but have obscured pictures).]

Cueball: Who else remembers pogs? Tamagotchis? Vast forests of Prototaxites towering over the mossy landscape as armored fish stir in the deep?

[Caption below the panel:]

Due to a database error, millennial nostalgia now includes a portion of the early Devonian.

Trivia

Cueball has incorrectly refered to the huge fungi as Parataxites. They are actually called prototaxites.

The text in the comic on xkcd's site was later corrected to read "prototaxites".

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