Difference between revisions of "2332: Cursed Chair"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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(Closed businesses are probably not cursed. You never know though...)
(Fix release date in comic header data)
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{{comic
 
{{comic
 
| number    = 2332
 
| number    = 2332
| date      = July 14, 2020
+
| date      = July 13, 2020
 
| title    = Cursed Chair
 
| title    = Cursed Chair
 
| image    = cursed_chair.png
 
| image    = cursed_chair.png

Revision as of 03:42, 14 July 2020

Cursed Chair
The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."
Title text: The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by HERMAN MILLER. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.
Beret Guy informs Cueball that he purchased a cursed office chair. Cueball is skeptical of this, and of Beret Guy's claim that the store he bought the chair from was gone when he went to return it. Cueball suggests that maybe the shop was simply closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as is the case for wide variety of non-cursed[citation needed] businesses. Beret Guy takes this as proof that the chair somehow caused the pandemic, a claim Cueball meets incredulously. In the final panel, Beret Guy is doing battle with the chair, which taunts him. Cueball remarks that it would be simpler to shop at IKEA, a store famous for its minimalist flat-pack furniture.

The cursed chair and the boarded-up store are references to the stores that sell cursed items mentioned in 1772: Startup Opportunity.

In the title text, the Siege Perilous is the empty seat at the Round Table in Arthurian legend. Herman Miller is an American office furniture company that produced the Aeron chair, which is the basis for an artwork by Glenn Kaino called The Siege Perilous. Wirecutter is a website that evaluates and recommends consumer products.

Transcript

Ambox notice.png This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.
Beret Guy: Remember how I bought my desk chair from that mysterious shop?
Cueball: I think so?
Beret Guy: Turns out the chair was cursed.
Beret Guy: So I went back to return it, but the shop was gone! The door was boarded up!
Cueball: I think most of the shops are closed because of coronavirus.
Beret Guy: Oh no!
Beret Guy: The curse must have caused the pandemic!
Cueball (off-panel): What.
Beret Guy: If I destroy the chair, we can stop the virus!
Cueball: What.
Beret Guy: Die, plague-bringer!
Desk chair: Hee hee, I can not die
Cueball: Maybe you should just shop at IKEA.


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Discussion

why so pixelated? 162.158.34.206 23:06, 13 July 2020 (UTC) xkcd addict #40571

It is very pixelated, isn't it?
ProphetZarquon (talk) 00:15, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
I was hoping there was some kind of extra joke there, but I can't find it. --Draco18s (talk) 01:18, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
I'm glad someone put the 'pixelated' image as a postscript, since my last visit here, as the first time I read the above about it, it seems it was already fixed.
And, though I'd need to check on a desktop, it looks like the unaliased image might have been saved in two-tone (1-bit) colourspace pallette in that version, perhaps in a misclick error when intending to save as greyscale... 141.101.98.222 17:36, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure if he shops at IKEA he'd try to read one of the names and accidentally summon a demon. DanielLC (talk) 23:41, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether he's summoned a BLECKBERGET, or a HATTEFJÄLL.
ProphetZarquon (talk) 00:15, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't think I'd feel safe talking to White Hat without social distancing or face masks. Orion205 (talk) 01:32, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure that'd ever be sufficient. Yet more evidence that mundane things become what Beret Guy (not White Hat, at least I think canonically not the same) thinks they should become. I bet the chair was normal, and the shop it came from was normal, 'normally' closed for the duration. Now the chair is cursed and the shop's owner now finds they are in charge of an establishment that is doomed (or free?) to wander time and space... 141.101.98.222 17:36, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

This comic's alt-text wins "The Deepest Indirect References" award for sure. Cellocgw (talk) 10:38, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

---

"extremely very pixelated with no aliasing" should be "extremely very pixelated with no anti-aliasing"

In the original pic, I can see the aliasing effect and the ziggurat steps it creates just fine. Anti-aliasing is the thing that removes the aliasing ("pixelation") effect.

Kurkosdr (talk) 17:23, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

You just snuck that in, while I was pondering my guess about that whole issue in (two more levels of) reply to the top Talk comment. I wouldn't consider it pixelisation if the pixels were the same size all over (for a given resolution) and also not deliberately averaged out so blocks of n*n were obfuscated the same as the best available mean of that block. Randall doubtlessly downscales from his original art (at least from the x2 version of the image - if not a huger, normally unplublished, original) but normally the greyscale in 1*1 blocks makes it not 'look pixelated'. This time it was perhaps monochrome in the first conversion which 'aliased' it compared to how it should be.
(Most of the xkcd .png files, last time I checked, are greyscale. There are the occasional RGB, on at least one occasion with an (unused?) Alpha channel, and I've seen an Indexed pallette (blogofractal, IIRC, so maybe similar ones that have minimal but not monochrome/monoshaded colour spaces are that too). If reduced to a single bitplane or wrongly Indexed to black+white instead of all the basic-greys, I think that was the easy to explain blunder...) ((There are also .gifs, etc, but those usually for good reason, such as animation frames.)) 141.101.98.96 18:12, 14 July 2020 (UTC)