2532: Censored Vaccine Card

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 22:46, 22 October 2021 by 162.158.62.56 (talk)
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Censored Vaccine Card
CVS's pharmacies are fine, but I much prefer their [censored]s.
Title text: CVS's pharmacies are fine, but I much prefer their [censored]s.

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a B[Censored]T - 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.

This comic is loosely related to a series of comics related to the 2020 pandemic of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.

The comic hinges on sharing photos on social media of vaccination cards as proof that the user has been vaccinated (in this case, gotten a booster shot). Such cards contain personal identification that should probably not be made public. The irony is that the user has censored some impersonal lines, such as the instructions that are identical on all vaccination cards, and many easy-to-guess lines, while not censoring any of said personal information. The fourth line, labelled "other" is probably completely blank (as the third dose was on the current date), but is completely blacked out.

The caption indicates that his intention is to "seem more mysterious". This is best exemplified by blanking most of the word "clinician" to leave "CIA".

Transcript

Ambox notice.png This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.
[Profile picture with three unreadable lines on it's left:[Censored]

Check it out, I just got my booster!

[Picture of a vaccination record attached on a media post]

COVID-:[Censored] Vaccination record card

[Solid line]

Please keep this record card, which includes :[Censored] About :[Censored] Por favor, guarde esta tarjeta de registro, que incluve :[Redacted]

[Censored] sobre :[Censored]
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Discussion

Huh,his birthday was a week ago. Happy belated brithday!162.158.48.115 04:03, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

What if this card is from the future and Cuedall is legitimately censoring his fourth dose. 162.158.255.43 22:38, 22 October 2021 (UTC) Running Gazelle

Numbers: Patient number is digits of pi after 3.1; 1138 and 2187 seem to be Star Wars references; 5309 is...Jenny? and 1729 is the Ramanujan-Hardy number. Clam (talk) 23:16, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

I should be used to it by now (several decades of personal exposure to it) but I *still* have to double-take at dates in the illogical MM-DD-(YY)YY format. 162.158.155.161 23:34, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. This "mixed endian" format makes no sense.172.68.133.105 19:43, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, I prefer D-YY-M-D-Y-M-Y (for example, for January 13, 2021, I would put 1-20-0-3-2-1-1) 172.70.211.193 04:41, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

This is timely for me, I'm getting my booster tomorrow. Barmar (talk) 00:32, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The date of birth corresponds to the date formerly on Randall's Wikipedia article, which never had an acceptable citation (only a now irretrievable wiki). The year is cited there, but not the rest. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:42, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The sleuths at English Wikipedia retrieved the wiki. The context does make it highly likely that this is Randall's real birth date. --108.162.219.105 21:04, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Randall's pretty young. I wonder (it's none of my business, of course) whether he got a booster because his wife is a cancer survivor. Nitpicking (talk) 03:05, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

"This is the first comic including a sentence in Spanish." Well, it includes most of the sentence in Spanish, but it not a complete Spanish sentence, because it is heavily redacted. So there has not actually been a Spanish sentence in XKCD yet. Nutster (talk) 04:15, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I've added the rest of the text to the transcript, but someone who knows wiki markup and/or transcript convention better than me should definitely revise the formatting. Esogalt (talk) 07:46, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I was wondering why is Randal still using CVS, surely by now he has migrated to git? 162.158.159.105

Don't know if this is a joke about code repositories or not, but CVS is a pharmacy chain in the US. 172.69.34.87 09:21, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
I've added this to the explanation. Esogalt (talk) 09:36, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

This feels very SCP-esque. 172.69.214.17 17:31, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

[REDACTED] 172.69.68.106 23:23, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

It's interesting that the censor bars are parallel to the card, rather than the photo of the card, implying either a painstaking attention to detail (not implausible for Randall), or that he has actually physically blacked out the information on the card itself. Esogalt (talk) 17:37, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The entire image of Randal's card is a drawing, BTW. These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 04:05, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, my analysis was "in character", so to speak. Esogalt (talk) 05:02, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Doesn't that say "Clinician #5309"? that would not refer to the store, but to the employee who administered the shot. Nitpicking (talk) 02:43, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to describe it as a redacted vaccination card rather than censored? Barmar (talk) 13:45, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

If it has been wafted through the purifying smoke of a thurible (there's no indication it hasn't!) we could say it has been censered..? 141.101.107.81 15:37, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I dislike that the explanation is taken the comic extremely literal. In several places it refers to Randall and seems to identify Randall with the author of the comic, for instance when pointing out a place of living not mentioned in the comic. This is in particular crucial when it comes to the date of birth, which coincides with the date of birth typically assigned to the author of the comic. However, the English Wikipedia sees insufficient evidence in the public record to name his birthday. --162.158.93.214 05:42, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

I mean, Randall Munroe is both the name on the card and the author of the comic, but I would agree(?) that xkcd Randall is more of a fictionalisation of Real Life Randall. I don't see a problem with comparing the locations though -- what would a less literal interpretation look like to you? There was some back-and-forth on the birth date thing, and I think someone took Randall's page on this wiki as a reliable source, which isn't proper (though it's an entertaining example of citogenesis).
There was already a mention of the last line being blank; yours felt a bit easier to read so I've attempted to merge them. Esogalt (talk) 07:30, 26 October 2021 (UTC)