Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD

Rob is having an online relationship with Lisa. However, he is suspicious that she may not be everything he imagines and asks her to take a test, presumably one for sexually transmitted diseases. However, the twist is that the test is actually a CAPTCHA test, which is intended to prevent automated computer programs from logging into websites and posting spam messages. Lisa fails this test because she is indeed a computer program and not a human.

Panel number two employs foreshadowing when Rob talks about Lisa mentioning products she likes. When the reader first reads this, they think nothing of it and assume they might not have similar tastes in consumer product preferences. However, when it is revealed that she is a spambot, it becomes clear that she was really interspersing advertising into their conversations.

Initially, the reader is shocked by the crude drawings of explicit sexual genitalia. However, the reader is somewhat calmed when it is apparent that they are academic anatomical diagrams. This calm is interrupted, though, when it becomes apparent that the images are being taken in a TGI Fridays restaurant on a dining table and that drawings of an erect penis would have been displayed if someone at the restaurant didn’t catch them, causing them to flee.

The author also notes that he thinks this may be how the anatomical photos on Wikipedia may really be taken, and that you can’t tell they’re in a place such a restaurant due to careful cropping of the photos.

This strip is a play on the popular “Most Interesting Man In The World” series of commercials for Dos Equis beer, except the man portrayed is instead uninteresting. The author displays this by showing the man in various situations that are common in today’s technologically obsessed males, which of course includes the author himself, and most likely the reader. Self-deprecation is a common theme of this comic strip as a whole.

This strip pokes fun at stereotypical Linux users for having a different set of computing priorities than most people. In this case, the Linux user places the ability of his computer to have many more central processing units than necessary over being able to watch funny videos on YouTube, which is something “normal” people would want. It is implied that Linux users are abnormal. Many readers of this strip are presumably Linux users and will find this humorous because they themselves would consider themselves more advanced than “normal” people when it comes to computing.

This strip is based on the “beer summit” in which President Obama chose to have a beer with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the police officer who arrested him so they could work out their racially charged differences. It starts out with Mr. Gates being arrested and placed in a jail cell. Mr. Obama then announces his intention to work things out with the men over beer. This is all based on real events.

However, in the strip, there is no beer available to drink at the White House, and they instead drink tequila because it was the only alcoholic beverage in the cupboard. The tequila causes all three men to behave erratically and get arrested, ending with all of them in jail. It is implied that while it is possible to drink beer responsibly, tequila will cause even the President of the United States to become so intoxicated he’ll be thrown in jail.

The target audience will relate to this strip because they’ve presumably gotten wasted on tequila on many occasions.

Another in the author’s “My Hobby” series, in which he lies about doing something he feels would be humorous.

For nearly every culture or class there exists a misconception about that group in the minds of those not included in it. Typography is no exception to this rule. Fonts that are commonly thought of as being “bad,” such as Comic Sans, Hobo or Papyrus are often made fun of by the uneducated in order to appear humorous, intelligent or discerning. For those within the group, these types of conversations or jokes are viewed as meaningless and sophomoric.

No one would ever label themselves as a Typography Geek - this is a label created by those who have nothing to do with the culture. If someone were to become physically agitated upon receiving a card from a friend that was not properly typeset, that person would need to evaluate their life choices.

Note: the dominant role of the agitated designer is portrayed by a female.

Background: “Can Not Reproduce”, “Could Not Reproduce”, or “Closed, Not Reproducible” are commonly status codes in bug-tracking systems used to mark a case where the engineer was unable to recreate the environment or situation where the bug occurred.

In this strip the female, in need of a small child to test on, decides to have unprotected sex with her male coworker. But as it turns out she does not become pregnant and is therefore unable to “reproduce”, both in the human sexual sense and in the technical bug-tracking sense.

This strip employs a homographic pun.

A man is laying in bed, following the time-honored anecdotal strategy of counting sheep to get to sleep. It seems he is having some difficulty, because he begins to count thousands and thousands of sheep. Continuing to count, he suddenly finds himself counting negative numbers. Frustrated, he adjusts his pillow and continues to count negative sheep.

The particular numbers are a reference to the “signed 16-byte overflow” limit. This number appears frequently in programming, particularly in older games and embedded systems which used 16-bit values to conserve memory. The “overflow” or transition from positive to negative numbers happens when the leftmost bit of a signed number is changed from 0 to 1 because of an carry. This is a well understood phenomenon but still serves as a “gotcha” for many novice programmers. Most programmers can relate to a time when they ran afoul of this behavior in their novice stage, which is presumably what the author was hoping to humorously connect with in his audience.

A simple C-program that demonstrates and explains integer overflow is provided here.

This strip is a commentary on the commonly-seen flashing ads on websites declaring that the viewer has won something extremely valuable (in this case a convertible sports car) and all that is required to claim the prize is to click the ad. Since most people browsing the internet have become increasingly jaded toward the deceptive tactics of internet advertisers, they usually ignore these ads outright, assuming it is a scam and that they’ll be taken to a site they have no interest in without ever receiving the promised prize.

The twist in this strip is that in this case the website actually was planning to reward a visitor with a car, but since it wasn’t claimed by the visitor the company’s CEO kept it for himself. The CEO is honestly puzzled as to why someone wouldn’t claim the prize, suggesting he is obviously oblivious to the fact that their ad resembled a common scam. (Or was he?)

This strip employs the common pattern of making the reader think everything is normal until the final frame where the punch line is subtly delivered (“It was flashing and everything!”). There are also hints of parallels between this situation and “the boy who cried wolf” wherein a certain action has proven to be deceptive on so many occasions that when it is actually legitimate no one will believe it.

A security question is a common safeguard many websites take in order to enable a user to still access their account even if they forget their username and/or password. The thinking behind this practice is that the questions asked are extremely personal, and therefore should only be answerable by the account owner. In this case, the person setting up the account has presumably committed a crime involving the disposal of bodies and the police are trying to catch him by planting a security question on an email account creation system. Their hope is that the suspect will think nothing of the questions since they are so common when setting up email accounts and that he’ll fill it out with the location of the bodies. The suspect begins to type out the location, but he catches himself and realizes it’s a trap, thwarting the plan of the police.