573: Parental Trolling

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 15:14, 30 April 2013 by 131.187.75.137 (talk) (This is 573. 'Swine Flu' is 574.)
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Parental Trolling
They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you.  Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!
Title text: They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!

Explanation

Set in the future, a daughter approaches her father playing a music video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". The daughter insults her father's generation's versions of playing pranks, specifically Rickrolling. The daughter refers to this as "trolling" (also in the title), which is popular jargon for trying to disrupt a person or community via an action to elicit an emotional response. The humour is in that the dad reveals he has 'trolled' his daughter, thus eliciting an emotional response which perfectly displays his prank.

The title text refers to the conflict between teenagers and adults over music and culture, with teenagers often listening to music such as dubstep which annoys their parents. 'Easter egg' is a term used to describe a hidden inside joke or feature inside software. Here, the daughter is the software.

Transcript

The Future
[Man is sitting at a futuristic desktop computer, and a girl is standing behind him with a portable ultra-thin screen.]
Girl: Hey dad, look at this old music video.
Video: We're no strangers to love...
Dad: Wow, you got me.
Girl: Did your generation really use this to troll people? SO lame. Your generation sucked at pranks.
Dad: Did we? I once raised a kid with conditioning so her speech centers shut down when she was upset.
Girl: What? No, you couldn't have bleegle warble yargle arggh!
Dad: Teehee!


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Discussion

Given the other places Cueball is identified, Dad here is Cueball, yes? Mark Hurd (talk) 10:02, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Having read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", how hard would it be to achieve this conditioning? 70.24.167.3 23:24, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I notice that Cuball's monitor is more curvy than usual and is missing a stand, further implying that this is in the future. JohnGabrielUK (talk) 19:17, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

You *do* realize it says 'the future' in
the first panel, right?141.101.98.253 05:44, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

'"Teehee" could also be a reference to NigaHiga's YouTube channel.' Relevance? 108.162.216.106 00:11, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Hey, I like rickrolling people in 2018.Who's with me? 172.68.146.80 15:11, 9 December 2018 (UTC)