Comic 1090
by Jeff
This is a placeholder since I won't be able to get to this until the weekend.
Converting To A Wiki
by Jeff
When Mike and I first started this adventure back in 2009, we went with the blog format since it was the most familiar to me and very easy to set up. Fairly quickly as people began actually reading the site, the blog format proved to be way too much of a top down approach, especially with my limited time to go back and chat in the comments, edit and update each post when they were incorrect or incomplete.
We had an idea last year to have you all, our trusty readers and commenters, to email your explanations for comics and this worked well and we got a ton of great submissions, but still required time from me to check the explanation, format and place on the blog. I tried to work on it for a few weeks, but ran out of time.
I feel like I'm a fairly smart person, but I cannot and will not know every reference in XKCD. I do my best to research when I don't know the reference, but that doesn't always work out for the best and sometimes I do not even have enough time to do the proper research I should. Life gets in the way. I appreciate all of the (constructive) feedback received on how to make the site better.
For a while, we realized that the wiki is a much better approach and at last we have it installed and configured. It is not fully filled in yet even with the content from the blog (I'm working backwards putting content in from the blog and I'm at mid-April 2012), so there is plenty of glory to be had and plenty of my mistakes to correct! Head over to http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki and register for an account to start submitting your own explanations or editing others.
With a ton of comics in xkcd, there is room for multiple interpretations, please don't bulldoze other interpretations for your own. There is room on each page for different interpretations.
That being said, the wiki is a huge site and we will need additional admins for the wiki to help us police, format and oversee the site. If you want to be an admin on the wiki, let us know at explain@explainxkcd.com with the subject "I Want To Be An Admin" (without the quotes). Let me know what your real name is, your account name that you have set up on the wiki and your Explain XKCD blog commenting name. I'll grant about a handful to help keep the site clean and tidy.
We have enough wiki admins for now. Everyone can contribute and upload files though!
Also - the placeholding graphic I have for the wiki is tremendously bad. If you are a wizard with Photoshop (or Photoshop-like software) please email explain@explainxkcd.com with a better logo and I'll use the best with full credit on the main page of the wiki.
Going forward, all explanations are going to be in the wiki and I'll keep this post on top and put explanations below it, which will be simply links to the wiki.
TL; DR - We have a wiki - http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki
Five Years
by Jeff
Image text: 'Well, no further questions. You're hired!' 'Oh, sorry! I'm no longer interested. There's a bunch of future I gotta go check out!'
This comic is a take on the common and cliched job interview question "Where do you see yourself in 5 years". The interviewer is attempting to see where the job seeker would like to take their career and also what their hopes and dreams are etc.
In the comic, instead of explaining where he would like to be in 5 years, Beret guy appears to advance time 5 years while they are both still sitting in the same spot and exactly still.
The image text is a continuation of their conversation in which Beret Guy turns down the job because he wants to find out what happened the last 5 years while they were both sitting in that room.
Cirith Ungol
by Jeff
Image text: My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'
The comic here is a mash up between the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books and movies and the novel and movie "Charlotte's Web".
The title Cirith Ungol is a reference to Lord of the Rings where, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee were led to Cirith Ungol by Gollum to the lair of the ancient spider Shelob.
And therefore in this comic, Frodo (by himself) is being led into the laid of the spider, Charlotte. We can tell by the "Some Pig" writing in the spider web on the lower right hand corner which is a direct reference to the story of "Charlotte's Web".
In the image text, syntactic ambiguity is a property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing. However, I don't see the syntactic ambiguity there, I only read it one way. Maybe I know the "Charlotte's Web" story too well. Do you see it?
Eyelash Wish Log
by Jeff
Image text: Ooh, another one. Uh ... the ability to alter any coefficients of friction at will during sporting events.
This comic is based on the situation that when someone's eyelash falls out, that person can make a wish on it. This comic appears to be a page from the fictitious Wish Bureau in charge of granting said wishes. And of course the Wisher is The Black Hat and he has quite a few wishes, most of them based on the previous wish.
Feburary 12th's wish seems to be a reference to the unlimited breadsticks offered at Olive Garden.
March 7th's wish is a reference to Nate Silver, who is a former writer for Baseball Prospectus working on predicting baseball players' stats and now writes for Five Thirty Eight in which he predicts the outcome of elections based on polling data.
And April 22nd's wish is a reference to the cartoon and video game, Pokemon.