explain xkcd:Museum

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Speedrun

|< < Prev #3246 (May 15, 2026)

Title text: Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by a SPEEDRUNNING BOT. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic shows Cueball sitting at a desk complaining that his speedrun got deleted off of Speedrun.com, which is a popular leaderboard aggregator for speedruns.

A tool-assisted speedrun (or TAS for short) is a speedrun that uses software tools to make certain hard or even humanly impossible inputs easily. Lateralus and Ænima are albums by the band Tool. This comic makes use of a pun, where rather than using third party tools to assist him in beating a video game as quickly as possible, Cueball is getting "assistance" from the rock band Tool in the form of background music to help him concentrate. In real life, a speedrun would be unlikely to be removed based on the music one is listening to while completing it, though it may be considered similar to using a metronome, a controversial topic. The comic could also be referencing Alex Honnold’s ascent of the Taipei 101 tower, during which he listened to Tool.

The title text is a pun on the word "speedrun". Usain Bolt's 100-meter dash record is a world-record "speedrun" in the sense that it is literally a speedy run and also an attempt by someone to complete a task as fast as possible (it is common on the internet for people to jokingly refer to a task they are completing very quickly as a speedrun). The notion of such a record being classified as a legitimate speedrun isn't farfetched as Speedrun.com has some leaderboards for In Real Life records.

Transcript

This is one of 46 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Cueball is sitting at a desk with a laptop. Megan is standing behind him.]

Cueball: Aw man, Speedrun.com removed my world record just because I listened to Lateralus and Ænima to get in the flow.

Megan: Oh, a copyright thing?

Cueball: No, they don't allow Tool-assisted speedruns.

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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