Parts of it remain indecipherable without the social context, however, as the writer explicitly assumes a mutual knowledge of some set of unspecified rules.

this was in 2015 btw
not that it’s super important, just in case someone reads it as a contemporary news headline rather than fun historical trivia

bobby hill managed to make perfect cell double over in pain, so I’m pretty sure he could annihilate namek-era goku

that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish

part of the appeal is how bad I am at both the gameplay and the lore

Probably Wayne Gretzky? I don’t even know anything about ice hockey and I know he’s supposed to be the most dominant player of any sport. Like he and his brother have the record for highest combined goals of any pair of brothers: 2,857 by Wayne, 4 by Brent. If you take away all his goals, he’d be the highest scoring player of all time on assists alone. There have been 13 times when a player has scored over 100 goals in a season in NHL history: Lemieux (once), Orr (once), and Gretzy (eleven times in a row). He retired last century and still holds 57 records. I’m not gonna keep picking out examples but there’s a bunch more facts like this that sound like the old “chuck norris facts” meme but are actually true.

“If you don’t know anything about ice hockey why do you have all these facts on hand?” - I remembered seeing this kind of list before so I did a quick Google.

Edit: I’m seeing some different exact figures for some of these, but the general principle stands and I’m not invested enough in hockey facts to nail down which numbers are exactly right.

Super late, but I figured it out because it happened again in a more recent comment. Lemmy seems to automatically change the links to https instead of http, even when http was explicitly included in the url. Somehow, xkcdsw is a completely different site on https than on http. If you copy the link into an external browser and remove the s, the link works as intended. I can only assume this is a behavior of the lemmy app(s), which is why it didn’t affect some users. Were you using jerboa?

I was going to say that’s actually a G K Chesterton quote, but it turns out it’s more complicated than that. Neil Gaiman himself said it was from Chesterton (when quoting it at the start of Coraline), but he wrote it from memory and didn’t double check, so the original is worded differently. At least, that’s how my quick googling claims the paraphrase happened. The misquote is pithier than the original so… is it now a Gaiman quote, even though it originates as an attempted Chesterton quote?

As far as I can tell, the passage he was thinking of was:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

• G K Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

they probably fell into an empty enclosure one day and the zookeepers just rolled with it and put up a sign

Are capybaras as chill as their reputation suggests, or is that more a feature of cases that are used to captivity? If the memes/images/videos are to be believed, I’d expect to be able to just wander up to one in the wild and have it respond like a well-socialized pet dog.

“Inconvenience” would be the verb for causing an inconvenience. So in the sentence you’re going for, “inconvene” would have to be replaced with the passive “be inconvenienced” (“we’ve gotta be inconvenienced and grovel to google a bit”). I don’t believe we have a separate word for “endure an inconvenience”, although it seems like the kind of thing some languages might have a single word for. Stylistically I’d probably restructure the sentence to “we’ve gotta put up with the inconvenience” rather than just using the passive verb, but yeah.

I think you’d most often see this verb in the stock phrase “Sorry to inconvenience you”.

Pro wrestling is fake (or, is all just fiction, like a TV show or a theater performance). Wrestling and boxing are not fake.

Do you have any additional info about the changes they’re making to the mission? I didn’t see that in the article

Well you can start here, then spend a few decades reading and thinking about it, and get back to us when you’ve figured it out

Weird - I’m seeing that now too. But I wasn’t at the time that I copy and pasted the links, and you can see from the other replies around 8 hours ago that other people were also seeing a site hosting edited versions of xkcd comics. I guess it has suddenly changed, after years of being up, in the few hours after I posted it? I have no idea what happened there.

I could have sworn there was an xkcdsw exactly like that, but there doesn’t seem to be. Some of them are a bit happier though

E.g. http://xkcdsw.com/3968 , http://xkcdsw.com/2485 , and others if you click “browse by source” at the bottom and search for “spirit”

Meanwhile in English we just borrow things from other languages and forget what they mean. For example, porpoise, from old French porpois, from Latin porcus marinus, meaning… ah, yes: sea pig.