1900: Jet Lag

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Jet Lag
I had some important research to do on proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from "Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century."
Title text: I had some important research to do on proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from "Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century."

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a GUY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.
Jet lag is a psychological condition arising from changing one's longitude wide and fast enough that one's body clock is unable to adapt to the official clock. Symptoms include a sleep cycle which does not match the solar cycle as it usually would[citation needed].

Hairy has just woken up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and Ponytail mentions he must be still jet lagged (possibly from a recent trip). Hairy then accidentally public confesses that he has actually been up to some late-night Wikipedia browsing and reading about maritime disasters.

At the bottom, Randall confesses jet lag is a nice excuse for his usual sleep cycle altering behavior.

In the title text, Randall further mentions reading about proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from Wikipedia's "Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century." Randall has earlier illustrated this issue in 214: The Problem with Wikipedia.

Randall has previously discussed his sleep cycle in 320: 28-Hour Day, and has alluded to it more subtly in 68: Five Thirty, 92: Sunrise, and 776: Still No Sleep. We can thus see that this is a habit of Randall's that has persisted for more than a decade.

Trivia

Randall was doing events in Great Britain the week before this comic was published, the last of which was on October 2nd. This arguably makes this a rare comic featuring Randall.

Transcript

Ambox notice.png This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.
[Hairy is rubbing his eyes and facing Ponytail.]
Hairy: Sorry, I just woke up.
Ponytail: It's 3 PM! ...Oh, of course, you're still jet lagged.
Hairy: I-yeah, that's it! I definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia articles about random maritime disasters.
[Caption below the panel]
I love traveling, because my sleep schedule is as messed up as always, but suddenly I have an excuse.


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Discussion

I am very, very disappointed that this space does not yet contain a list of all the wiki articles he could have been reading according to the title text. Are we all still boggling at the list of cancelled skyscrapers? --Angel (talk) 13:52, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=proposed+interstellar+space+missions&fulltext=1&profile=default (No exact match found)

https://stats.nba.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_tall_buildings_and_structures

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_warfare_and_the_military_in_the_19th_century (78 articles referenced. Have fun!)

I corrected "Jet Lag is a psychological condition" to "Jet Lag is a physiological condition". I'll assume that was a typo, as one's body suddenly finding itself on the wrong side of the planet is definitely not a psychosomatic illness. 108.162.216.34 23:54, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Also… is Hairy supposed to represent Randall here? Unless I'm confused, he was in the UK a couple of days ago [though he'd have been travelling in the wrong direction to be waking up at 3pm], so could justify jet-lag (and could be just my perception but it seems this comic was posted later than usual, as if he overslept) --Angel (talk) 14:45, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

"rare comic featuring Randall", really? Just about EVERY comic features Randall, LOL! Some to a greater degree than others, but come on! This is a rare comic where Randall isn't represented by Cueball, though. As a fellow night owl in the Eastern time zone, I have additional insight: England is 5 hours ahead of us, so if this is Randall in the U.K., this is 10am our time, which would be somewhat late by Normal People standards. The other way around means he's waking up at 8pm U.K. time, which seems like even more messed up than usual. :) What's funny to me is that this weekend I've had to adjust to a normal schedule to accommodate attending events with normal people, and I've been waking up at 10am all weekend, LOL! NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:04, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Agree. It is not him in the comic just because he refers to himself in the caption/title text, so removed this. --Kynde (talk) 13:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
Oh, I feel this is most certainly Randall, but not that much more certainly than 99% of the comics, that it isn't explicitly declared, but very strongly implied. After all, we can very easily figure out Randall's inspiration for this one. I was questioning calling it "rare", it really isn't. And again, what IS rare is for him to have Hairy represent him instead of Cueball. NiceGuy1 (talk) 03:43, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Randall's schedule in the UK

The trivia section says that Randall's last event in the UK was on 2nd October. It was actually later than this - I went to see him talking in Ely (near Cambridge) on 5th October: https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/ely/randall-murray-thing-explainer/. I don't know if he had further dates after this, or not. 162.158.154.127 10:16, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Correct the trivia based on this info. --Kynde (talk) 13:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Added the title text in the transcript. --JayRulesXKCD what's up? 12:20, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Is the title text really necessary in the transcript? Typically the transcript is used so that the hand written text of the comic is readable to search engines and other programs (such as programs that read text for the visually impaired). Additionally the title text is in a program readable text with the comic, and it's not typically included in the transcript. Therefore I'm going to remove it from the transcript for now. 162.158.63.220 16:59, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
No. We never ever write the title text in the transcript. Can see it has already been deleted. --Kynde (talk) 13:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

I misread "Maritime" as "Marmite", and my mind boggled as to how there could be enough of these to warrant an article. Or even what one was... 141.101.99.47 11:44, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Not Marmite, but close... : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Do we have a list of all the cartoons in which Randall appears as himself?

I ask because this is the first time I've seen what could be a self-portrait?!? 141.101.107.48 20:13, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes we have, but this one should not be included, as this is no more Randall than so many other comics where he expresses his own opinion/experiences in the title text. The list is here: Comic featuring Randall. --Kynde (talk) 10:51, 12 October 2017 (UTC)