XKCD: It's more than a comic

Snakes, huh?

It reminds me of something. When you write justified text in La Te X (it's the default) and it fails to do it sensibly, its default behavior for "giving up" is to write over the margin. If I set it to "sloppy", then it switches to the strategy used in the first panel of this comic. I wonder why is that.

edited 4th May '16 12:21:16 AM by petersohn

Personally I prefer hyphenation. But if snakes were an actual symbol, I'd be using those instead.

We can come to a compromise; hyphens stylized as snakes!

I prefer giving up, honestly.

Same here.

Hyphenation is good, it's just not always applicable.

I think we're ignoring the real problem. Why is anyone squeezing text into such narrow columns?

Mobile phones.

A better question is anyone would require double justification?

I've mostly seen it in newspapers, either in classifieds, or when they continue/finish multiple stories mushed together on one page.

In newspapers it is usual to split an article into multiple columns. It's easier to read that way instead of one very wide column, because you have to move your eyes less. The problem comes in when something makes a column even narrower than usual, for example because of a picture, or because they tried to squeeze as much text in a single page as possible. I actually saw something like the second example at least once, and hyphenation is quite common. No snakes though.

You could end up with narrow columns in electronic media too, for example if you read the text on a mobile phone, or for some reason you want to fit more windows on the same screen. Though web pages tend to simply left justify and not care about such problems.

Yeah, letter spacing is what newspapers usually do. It looks wrong to me and I prefer giving up.

Hyphenation is fine, you just need to decide on good places to put them. The example in the comic is pretty much intentionally the worst possible place.

It doesn't seem that bad to me. I can think of worse places, for instance immediately after the initial 'd'.

Contrails, aka another "My Hobby" meme comic. I suppose it's sort of like Penny Arcade's "penis well" — a standby joke for when you don't have anything better lined up.

"Chem trail" for those who don't know, is an allusion to a type of conspiracy theory.

It ain't a conspiracy theory if it's true...stop letting the Government spray our cornfields!

They're spraying the aliens.

edited 6th May '16 7:37:00 AM by DeMarquis

Exactly! Ever since first contact since the Roswell Incident, the aliens have been kept from ever reaching and communicating with the rest of the world's population by the Government, who wants to prevent the existence of their secret project, the oversized space station misidentified by some as an apocalyptic "Planet X", from being known. The reptilian factions present in several prominent organizations, which include the NSA and CIA, as well as the SCP Foundation, are in plain opposition of negotiating with the other extraterrestrials, which led to the great robot mecha wars of 1907, the subsequent shrapnel of which ended up causing the Tunguska Event and the subsequent "meteor strike" cover story that followed it. Bigfoot reservations housed in the area were destroyed, and so the local chubacabra population grew unchecked in the meantime and allowed for the recent increase in missing persons cases in the Tristate Area, which the Government has also been trying to censor on media stations, to no avail thanks to efforts of hacker syndicate Cicada 3301, whose recruiting enrollments begin next September with plans for lower income members. Your life is a lie, folks! Wake up, sheeple!

edited 6th May '16 7:59:46 AM by cake1

You forgot that even Da Vinci knew of the aliens and he tried to warn us, but we failed to notice it.

And all of these had been actually predicted by the Mayincatec, who were the descendent of the Atlanteans who escaped their continent before it was destroyed by the inhabitants of Mu.

Recent Searches

I get... a third of those, maybe?

Apparently, for some reason, he's searching for the most ridiculous ways to break his computer that he can possibly find.

Or at least, ways to do fun stuff with it, which inevitably end up breaking.

You mean Fun stuff.