Песец

Yep, he's done it again!  See also my previous post on Mr. Munroe's work from 2008, which also involved a writing style with dire portents, then commentary on some grammatical feature.  I just like that sort of thing!

I suspect that this kind of incident is quite rare in actual control rooms for nuclear power plants, which would be more the sort of place for Homer Simpson jokes.  The phrase "cool trick I learned" might sound geeky and oddly out-of-place, causing the other nuclear technicians to run for their lives on general principles.  But it's an amusing Gedankenexperiment.

Is this enough text to ensure wrap-around at the bottom of the cropped image?  Click through to see the original Monrovian artistic glory, brought to you no-extra-charge courtesy of The Internet.  If you find his work moving (see asteroid 4942 Munroe), he has coffee mugs and T-shirts for sale.  But seriously, it's quite far-fetched to imagine that the "Amazon package containing fireworks" would actually be placed under the control console, just to have set up this joke.

"Even if a network administrator does not wish to ban, say, role-playing games outright, there is value in saying that such uses of the network should not interfere with real work like reading XKCD."

--- link (talking about the Linksys WRT54GL wireless access point with custom Linux firmware).

Does today's xkcd comic make you feel stupid because you just can't get the joke?  Are you annoyed that the first page of Google results for "higgs excitation" are spam-sites trying to attack your computer for having the nerve to read xkcd?  Click here.  It's a pun!

My favourite part is the blood spatter that just happens to be covering the spot in the comic's text where a serial comma isn't, and this becomes important four lines later.

When I went to Wikipedia to get that reference for "serial comma", I half-expected to see a trivia item about xkcd's mention of it today, because xkcd is more notable than are serial commas.  But no, and I didn't feel like adding it.
(What?  You wanted more "Mass. Trip of Doom" posts?)

At least, I *think* they're bon mots:



But why curse Emacs for having absolutely every command imaginable?