Late-Night PBS
by Jeff
Image text: Then it switched to these old black-and-white tapes of Bob Ross slumped against the wall of an empty room, painting the least happy trees you've ever seen. Either PBS needs to beef up studio security or I need to stop using Ambien to sleep.
Here's what you need to know to understand this one:
PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service and is a American TV channel that is (somewhat) supported by the viewers themselves through pledge drives.
"Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego" was a computer game series in the mid-80s. The series moved to a game-show TV series in the early from around 1990 to 1995. The point of the series was to learn about geography and the world while playing a game or watching a game show. Carmen Sandiego was a mysterious character that you tracked around the globe, attempting to find clues and find out where she was headed to next.
Mogadishu is a battle-torn city in Somalia, where there was the aptly named "Battle of Mogadishu" in 1993, which would coincide with the airdates of "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego" game show.
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970-1975).
The reference to "A Bookshelf in a Dutch Apartment" is a reference to Anne Frank, who was a Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis in a Secret Annex hidden behind a bookshelf in an apartment in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She wrote the famous novel, Diary of Anne Frank.
Good lord, I hate acapella, but Rockapella was the acapella (keeping up the tradition of punny names for Acapella groups) group which sang the theme song to "Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego".
And lastly, in the image text there is a reference to Bob Ross, who is the famous painter who had a painting show on PBS called "The Joy Of Painting" that amazingly ran for 12 years.
Anything I missed? Did that help explain it for people who missed the references?
Game AIs
by Jeff
Image text: The top computer champion at Seven Minutes in Heaven is a Honda-built Realdoll, but to date it has been unable to outperform the human Seven Minutes in Heaven champion, Ken Jennings.
This explanation got really long, so I'm placing it after the jump.
Delta-P
by Jeff
Image text: If you fire a Portal gun through the door of the wardrobe, space and time knot together, which leads to a frustrated Aslan trying to impart Christian morality to the Space sphere.
This comic was posted late and now I'm late and I'm at work so I can't do as much explaining as I usually do, but I'll do my best. That's also why we have the best comment section on the Internet.
The basic idea of the formula and the comic are based on the books and movies of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which a giant wardrobe contains a portal to a world known as Narnia. In the comic, someone connects an anchor to the wardrobe and throws it into the ocean which means that a steady stream of water at a velocity of 200 m/s will flow into Narnia.
The White Witch, the antagonist in the books and movies apparently won't know what hit her according to the caption.
The image text references the video game "Portal" in which you fire a portal gun into walls and etc to make "portals" that can open holes in other places so that you may portal through.
The image text also references the fact that CS Lewis wrote the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe books as a thinly veiled allegory of Christ's crucifixion with Aslan, the Lion in the title, playing Christ's part. (Spoiler alert! Sorry!)
This is a classic xkcd based on the intersection of literature, math and video games.
Heaven
by Jeff
Image text: If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.
This comic is a reference to the video game Tetris, in which you use different shaped pieces to fill in lines to score points. The more lines you fill at a time results in more points.
In this comic, Heaven is when you get the perfect piece in Tetris that fills out all the empty space you have on the board.
In the image text, ennui means a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest.
I love Tetris.
UPDATE: As Mr. I and Phoenixx have pointed out in the comic, this is a direct opposite of the xkcd "Hell" Tetris comic.
Headache
by Jeff
This comic is about 10 images so that it can present the 3D effects, so head over to xkcd if you have not already to check out the comic with the 3d effects. (UPDATE: I have placed a screenshot above.)
Image text: I'm only willing to visit placid lakes, salt flats, and painting exhibits until the world's 3D technology improves.
This comic is probably a reference to the new Nintendo 3DS handheld video game system that has a 3D effect if you put your head in the right place for the handheld device. Also, it is a reference to the proliferation of 3D movies. The 3D movies and 3D games make your eyes work harder which can cause headaches in some.
In this comic, Cueball is using the excuse that 3D gives him a headache to get out of going outside, where obviously, everything is in 3D. Instead he stays inside and looks at his 2D computer monitor. In the image text, he says he will only go to places with little 3D motion.
On a side note: Megan is wearing her helmet and practicing safe bike riding. Way to go Megan!
UPDATE: Thanks commenters - because today is April 1st, all of the xkcd comics are in 3D, so go back and check them out. Which one is your favorite in 3D?
FPS Mod
by Jeff
Image text: Wait, that second one is a woman? ... wait, if that bothers me, then why doesn't ... man, this game is no fun anymore.
This one is not very deep. FPS is "First Person Shooter", which is a type of video game (like Halo or Duke Nukem) which you are looking at the world from the first person perspective of the character. Cueball mods the game which is short for "modify".
When Cueball uses this modification, it makes the game more sad because you are presented with facts about the characters you are killing in the game.
Wisdom Teeth
by Jeff
Image text: I heard the general anesthesia drugs can cause amnesia, so when I woke up mid-extraction I started taking notes on my hand so I'd remember things later. I managed 'AWAKE BUT EVERYTHING OK' before the dental assistant managed to find and confiscate all my pens.
In this comic, Cueball decides it is finally time to play the game Minecraft (which is quite addicting) because he is getting his wisdom teeth out. Minecraft describes itself on its website as: "a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens." In the fourth frame, we see that instead of building anything, Cueball has flattened the continent out. I'm not sure what the block item in the lower right hand corner of the 4th frame is because I haven't played Minecraft. Anyone have any ideas?
Cueball makes a strange choice to flatten the continent because of all the painkiller drugs he is on after the wisdom teeth extraction. In the image text, because Cueball fears amnesia and memory loss from the anesthesia drugs, he writes information on his hand similar to the way the protagonist does in the movie Memento.
The Carriage
by Jeff
Image text: I learned from Achewood that since this poem is in ballad meter, it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Since then, try as I might, I haven't ONCE been able to read it normally.
This is a quote from the first three lines of the Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I Could Not Stop For Death". In the second frame, what seems to be Emily Dickinson is using the "Y" button from Grand Theft Auto to "carjack" Death from its carriage.
Achewood referenced in the image text is another webcomic.
Frogger
by Berg
Image Text: I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.
In case you’ve been living under a rock your entire life, Frogger is a classic video game in which you, the frog, are trying to cross a freeway (or a swamp). Your crossing is fraught with danger, so you’ve got to dodge traffic in order to make it across safely. It’s a simple game, and doesn’t deal with the real world consequences of stepping out in front of a truck, as today’s xkcd does.
When the comic starts, everything’s fine. There’s a frog on the side of the freeway, and he’s not bothering anybody. When he hops out to make his crossing, however, the driver of the semi swerves to avoid him, causing the sedan to his right (more on that in a moment) to slam into his cab, causing a pretty severe traffic accident. The frog then retreats back to the side of the freeway, though whether or not he’s fleeing carnage or a guilty conscience is up for debate.
Now then, concerning the truck driver. There’s a large grassy area off to his left, and yet he chooses to swerve to his right, into traffic. Given that we can see the freeway at a resolution fine enough to make out lines on the road and that the frog seemed to have no barrier to hop onto the freeway, we can presume there’s no guard rail preventing the truck driver from swerving left. Even if there was, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which this truck driver is risking more by going through a guard rail than he is by swerving into traffic. The most plausible explanation is that the grey car was in his blind spot. Our truck driver is in this way redeemed, for rather than making an illogical choice to swerve into traffic when he didn’t need to, he’s made a logical choice to keep his truck on the road by merging into what he thinks is an empty lane. This way, he minimizes damage to his truck and any interruption to traffic flow. Of course, he’s miscalculated, and carnage ensues.
…or does it? The image text adds another layer to the reality here, suggesting that what we’ve been watching isn’t real, but a hyper realistic Frogger game being presented for evaluation. Apparently, the memo to make it “more realistic” was misinterpreted. Konami had wanted better graphics, not a more real simulation of what would happen if a frog jumped out in front of a truck. Of course, that’s not even a real Konami- it’s a fake Konami that exists in the xkcd universe, which is of course a series of scenarios imagined in Randall Munroe’s mind. And even Randall Munroe might not exist as more than a mental illusion, produced by some sort of coordinated data parallax put on the web, but if THAT was the case then he’d be-
You know what? I’m gonna go gargle with Thorazine and call it a night.
Birth
by Jeff
Image text: All those GTA marathons during the pregnancy were a bad idea.
This is comic that is a parody of all the studies and news stories about the effect of video games on children. If they play too many violent video games, do they act like the video games in real life? Most of the news stories are based on one case or anecdotal evidence. This comic takes this to the next level and imagines what effects video games have on an unborn baby.
My only question is this: how the heck did the gun get in there?