2284: Sabotage

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Sabotage

Title text: So excited to see everyone after my luxury cruise home from the World Handshake Championships!

Explanation

Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food.

They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life. Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can’t afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives.

When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently… Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they’re fucking terrible animals.

Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio… There’s a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn’t want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother’s anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn’t helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury… should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.

Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet.

Transcript

[Cueball is seated at a desk, typing on a laptop. The top half of the image is the text he is typing in a reply message:]

"I see you're still getting together today! I'll be there, doing my spoken-word Baby Shark karaoke all evening.

We'll also be setting up a petting zoo for the kids. We've spent all week trapping wild skunks!"

[Below the text is a white-on-green "reply" button.]

[Caption below the panel:]

In the coronavirus era, desperate times call for desperate measures.

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Discussion

I don't entirely understand this comic (else I wouldn't be here), but I don't think that the current explanation is on the right track. It doesn't fit with the title, Sabotage. My reading is that some people are planning to get together IRL, and Cueball is threatening to sabotage their event with Baby Shark and skunks, presumably hoping that they'll call it off. [Edit: Fixed now.] TobyBartels (talk) 05:19, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

+1! John.Adriaan (talk) 05:48, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

My Impression is that upon observing some group of people ignoring the social distancing stuff, he's attempting to scare them off actually having their gathering by piling up a long list of things you wouldn't want to be around. Doing an especially-annoying spoken word version of an especially-annoying song for long periods of time(Possible); Bringing a large number of wild skunks (unlikely); claiming to have just come from a cruise ship after several recent cases of mass-infections on cruise ships, making him seem like a high risk person to be around(probably lying); further claiming to have come from an event involving close, physical contact with a large group of random people, again making him seem like he's highly likely to be infected (almost certainly lying).

In other words, trying to sabotage their gathering so that nobody shows up... in order to keep their stupidity/ignorance/arrogance from potentially spreading the virus to everyone present. -Graptor 162.158.186.78 05:54, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Shouldn't this comic be about BHG? Seems more up his alley. Cellocgw (talk) 12:26, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Who or what is "BHG"? 172.68.222.124 12:30, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

I guess Black hat guy. --Lupo (talk) 12:31, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Since black hat usually has sinister motives, this wouldn't be his kind of thing. Cueball here only claims to do these things to help others by persuading them not to attend. So in the end he's really the good guy. Bischoff (talk) 15:11, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

not necesarily. see e.g. 322: Pix Plz. But I agree. Black hat would more likely just set up the skunk thing and other things to ruin peoples gatherings, instead of just pretending to. --Lupo (talk) 15:51, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Ok, I've seen this several times now by different users. Do you all know xkcd so well, that you can just come up with these precise examples? Bischoff (talk) 07:45, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

I seem to have a mind made for remembering random stuff like that. plus I once had a very boring internship, and one of the few interesting pages that wasn't blocked there, was xkcd.com - so I used to go through the comics (back then the first ~1200)a lot, and ever since regularily look for new ones, and click random from time to time. the search function here + the transcripts really help finding the one you are remembering then. For this one e.g. my random keyword to search for was just "EMP". --Lupo (talk) 07:59, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

I like to think this more as poking fun at the uncountable idiots who still find it necessary to loudly complain (online) against alleged public meetings, or ones that took place a week ago, or sports meetings that have not been officially canceled, when there is no chance that they will be held anyway.

And since this is not our clever and ever sabotaging black hat guy, I find my interpretation more likely. --162.158.94.186 08:33, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

The Baby Shark reference also alludes to some saying the proper hand washing duration is equivalent to singing "Baby Shark" through the Daddy Shark verse. 172.69.68.69 04:17, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

what other ways can we sabotage events?

for example: pin the tail on the donkey, but the donkey has sensors that make a TON of noise! WON'T THAT BE FUN!? HUH!? WHAD DID YOU SAY!? I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF SCREAMS! -- Willlbrwillbr (talk) 18:24, 20 January 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)