xkcd / YMMV - TV Tropes

Aluminum Christmas Trees: The "memo spike" cursed connector, which connects multiple cables together by jamming a conductive memo spike through all of them. The thought of connecting devices this way sounds ridiculous and is played for a joke, but vampire taps are a thing in real life and really do work by piercing the desired cable, which allows them to add new devices into a wired connection without unplugging existing cables.
Alternative Character Interpretation: Read the alttext. Also check here and here Could it be that the Black Hat Guy is not an uncaring heartless monster, but rather someone who is unsure how to give and receive love and is frustrated with the world? Is he a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, a full-on Jerkass who just knows how to Pet the Dog when he feels like it, or an insecure guy with a Hidden Heart of Gold?
Anvilicious: Several strips qualify, but the Radiation Dose Chart is particularly effective in combating irrational opposition to nuclear power, such as pointing out that coal power plants give off more than three times as much radiation as nuclear power plants and yet somehow no one cares about that. (And to further put it in perspective, even eating a banana exposes you to more ionizing radiation.)
The Catchphrase Catches On: The term "nerd sniping", from the comic of the same name, has become widely used among self-professed nerds to refer to getting unexpectedly caught up in an interesting problem. Notably, Tom Scott uses it when discussing moiré effect lights and how he got an email about them.
Crosses the Line Twice:
- #879. A passing fellow finds a magic lamp and rubs it. The lamp... uh, enjoyed this.
- #1128. Wishbone does Fifty Shades of Grey.
- #396. The Ring gets uploaded online as punishment for Rickrolling.
- Most strips featuring the black hat guy are funny because of how cruel he is, but #954 (Chin-Up Bar) is a standout example.
Creator Worship: Many of the more rabid fans believe Randall has the ability to read minds and they often try to emulate the wacky antics depicted in the comic. (Of course, that's usually because it sounds like fun, not because the master has spoken.)
Draco in Leather Pants: While most people love Black Hat Guy because he's such an asshole, there are some who try to excuse and/or justify what he does.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Black Hat Guy is probably the most popular character in the strip.
Evil Is Cool: Black Hat Guy has a lot of fans thinking his actions are cool, despite being a dangerous sociopath who would have gotten several life sentences and/or the death penalty in Real Life.
Gateway Series: xkcd has gotten a lot of people into webcomics in general.
Genius Bonus: All over the place. Munroe got a degree in physics and worked at NASA.
- Even in biology more and more, although those tend to be more sober minded ones about cancer.
- The Alt Text of the strip "Flatland" describes Cueball going into Flatland and being seen as a lesbian orgy overseen by a priest. In the book Flatland, lines are women and circles are priests.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- Strip 527 jokes about how Steve Jobs was losing weight. This was made before it was known he had cancer, let alone before he died.
- Strip 1263 is about how computers are showing capabilities in many things that humans thought they'd always be the best at. Megan hammers in the point by designing a Python script generating reassuring parables about things computers will never be able to do. In 2013, this was a fanciful notion, but ten years later, the AI ChatGPT showed the ability to do exactly this.
- Strip 1520, "Degree-Off", has a biologist boast that the heroes of her field have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse — namely, Pestilence, referring to the massive decline in death rate from diseases in the United States from 1900 to 2000. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, however, as well as increasing death rates from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it comes across as less of a Badass Boast and more as hubris.
- Strip 1948: The 15th email (which is apparently a political party trying to rally support despite having lost the election) is less funny after the 2020 U.S. presidential election and Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the election results.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Some of the earliest xkcd strips actually had warnings or explanations for the lay person on jokes made about obscure topics like elementary probability theory, periodic table abbreviations, or basic astronomy. Since then, xkcd has unapologetically switched to being almost entirely about nerd humor; topics have since became even more obscure and incomprehensible to anyone without a degree in the relevant field or assistance from explainxkcd. The Alt Text on the last of these — "Science joke. You should probably just move along." — is particularly ironic in retrospect.
- "The Ring" has Cueball upload the film's cursed tape onto a video-sharing website. Four years after the strip's publication, the plot of Sadako 3D involves a cursed video in the vein of the original tape being posted online.
- In the Alt Text of #524, the "Yo Dawg" meme eventually did become mainstream.
- #520 is this for Mass Effect fans, as the Reapers are basically what happens when the cephalopod and robot revolutions happen at the same time. Or rather, one after the other, since the Leviathans came first.
- It was a reference to an old Gamebook, but "a mysterious door at the bottom of the Mariana Trench" beyond which lurks something apparently terrible.
- Wisdom Teeth, published in 2011, has Cueball flatten a large portion of a Minecraft world and sort it into layers while in a painkiller-induced haze. Three years later, the game introduced the option to generate superflat worlds consisting of a few perfectly-sorted layers of blocks.
- Spec Ops: The Line has a sequence where brief bios of the enemies you kill are recited to you, which is surprisingly similar to this strip. Borderlands 2 also referenced it with the unique Morningstar sniper rifle as a side quest reward, which will berate the Vault Hunter in the voice of a grumpy old woman whenever they kill someone with it.
- Comic 132, published in 2006, has Cueball not know about Metallica because the band was never featured in Guitar Hero. Not only was a Metallica song included in the series for the first time in the third installment, which released the following year, but 2009 saw the release of a Metallica-themed Guitar Hero game.
- #311 "Action Movies": Mad Max: Fury Road more or less meets the criteria Cueball sets out for the perfect action movie: it's a two-hour car chase with explosions and gunfights and very little (spoken) exposition. That its storytelling does not suffer for it is a bonus.
- The Ballmer peak apparently actually exists in real life (though it's actually at 0.075 rather than 0.1337).
- Comic 590's alt text has Randall confess he likes the font Papyrus and doesn't care if it's overused. Six years later, Undertale has a character named Papyrus, whose dialogue is written in said font, causing it to gain a surge in popularity.
- #413: New Pet predicted the BB-8 robot six years before The Force Awakens brings it into pop culture.
- Comic 1342 now packs a bit of a punch to many due to the election of President Trump.
- The Comic 1122 (Electoral President) mouseover text seems rather appropriate to the election after the one the comic was written for, given Trump's infamous use of Twitter and that his opponent was definitely not a guy who'd been mentioned on the platform.
- The punchline of "Pod Bay Doors" has HAL 9000 take on GLaDOS as a replacement for Dave. LEGO Dimensions has a scene where the two AIs have a conversation that annoys GLaDOS for several reasons, including HAL continuing to call her "Dave" after she introduces herself.
- A minor example with "Webb", after the telescope launch was delayed from December 22 to December 25.
- #2130 "Industry Nicknames" takes the practice of referring to industries as "Big X" after the product they produce (e.g. "Big Tobacco", "Big Pharma") and shows which potential nickname would be the silliest; its answer is "Big Egg". Four years later, Cory Doctorow (who Randall Munroe is a big fan of) would unironically use the term "Big Egg" in a blog post.
Memetic Badass: Everyone involved in Firefly, most notably Summer Glau.
Memetic Mutation:
- There's always a relevant xkcd comic. ^Explanation
- From discussions of the comic on the xkcd forums:
  - "Get out of my head, Randall!" for strips that hit close to home or echo the poster's recent ideas, sometimes abbreviated to "GOoMHR!!"
  - A filter automatically replaces "LOL" with "This cheese is burning me!", so the posters started writing "The cheese is lukewarm today" if they weren't impressed with strip, or "My cheese was really burned today" for good ones.
  - "I had a [close relative/friend] who died because of [subject of today]. Not funny, not cool, not a good comic."
- The rollercoaster chess strip inspired people to take similar photos.
- "It's better than Vista", partly thanks to Making xkcd Slightly Worse.
  - Also, "I've never been so turned on in my life", "Meme Density", etc.
- This is turning any wiki (including TV Tropes) into a realm of leopards.
- You will not go to space today. ^Explanation
- "Sudo make me a sandwich."
- Tommy Wiseau is DB Cooper
- 1357, aka the "Free Speech" comic, to the point of reaching infamy from sheer overuse and being seen in some circles as a thought-terminating cliche.
- 2071, Indirect Detection, a strip about seeing a friend's woefully contextless social media posts, has become incredibly popular on sites such as Tumblr and Reddit due to being a pretty perfect summary of the average experience of users on those sites.
- "It's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows (insert obscure topic)" ^Explanation
Paranoia Fuel:
- A scheme for harvesting scores of stolen online identities through people tendencies to reuse passwords.
- Snopes, the debunkers and creators of Urban Legends. (Alt Text: "The MythBusters are even more sinister.")
- Lanes. Treating cancer leaves a 40% chance that it will recur somewhere else in the body. "So you spend the next five or ten years trying not to worry that every ache and pain is the answer to the question 'Do I make it?'"
- An In-Universe example: Core: "I freak out about fifteen minutes into reading about the Earth's core when I suddenly realize it's right under me."
- Keyboard Mash. The punchline would leave you wonder this anytime you get to a chat session: Who is really behind the other keyboard?
- Superzoom
Shocking Moments:
- Click and Drag indeed.
- Comic 1190, "Time": Each frame is the size of a full comic, and rather than posting them all at once, the page updates every hour with a new frame. This went on continuously between March 25, 2013 and July 26th, 2013. Due to being over three-thousand frames long, some have considered it a separate webcomic within a webcomic.
  - The story itself: From two people building a sandcastle on a beach, to going on a quest in knowledge of how the rivers and sea work, to the Info Dump revealing that the story is set After the End, likely thousands of years in the future, to the impending Class Zero Apocalypse resulting in The End of the World as We Know It for main characters. Holy Shit indeed.
Unintentional Period Piece: The Density comic references popular memes from the period the comic was posted. (early 2009)
Viewer Gender Confusion: Most readers assumed the astronomer in the "Stargazing" comics was Megan, due to the identical appearance, but Word of God is that they're a completely separate, male character.
The Woobie: The Spirit Mars rover, trying to do a good enough job to be brought home. Opportunity meanwhile evolved into Nonhuman Undead and Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.

YMMV / xkcd

Edit Locked