Sunday, June 19, 2016

This is pure snow! It's everywhere! Do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is?



So, the gag and some background.

XKCD is a webcomic. It's geeky and typically pretty outstanding. Sometimes, however, it's even better than that. Ever now and again Randall Munroe, XKCD's creator, expands the boundaries of the stories that he wants to tell, pushing beyond the limits of the standard three- or four-panel webcomic format.

In comic 1608, a glimpse of which is shown above, Randall published what looked like a single panel, coin-gathering game with the lead character on a hoverboard. If the player, however, ignored the 'rules' and headed outside of the game board, the world became much more interesting, including references to dozens of other XKCD strips, Star Wars movies, Lord of the Rings, and lots, lots more.

Somewhere to the left of the origin area was a Washington Monument, 'climeable' with your avatar's hoverboard. At the top of the monument was the scene shown above, with two characters climbing the Monument with conventional ropes and one of them commenting that the top of the Monument is solid aluminum, and they're going to be rich.

See, I get that because of my material science time and learning. I've posted about the Washington Monument's cap before, and the aluminum cap certainly would've been enough aluminum to make any man rich - when it was first installed.

I, as always, recommend XKCD in its entirety (though there are occasional NSFW moments). There's also a parallel website called ExplainXKCD.com for when you (or I) don't get the gags. You can also get a full-comic image of 1608 on ExplainXKCD, too.

The post title is also a gag for those of you in the know.

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