Monday, September 21, 2009

There are two Internets

It has recently come to my attention that there are at least two disparate universes which the Internet spans, with some kind of gateway that connects them and translates messages as they come across it.

I came to this conclusion not, as you might expect, by reading political debates, but by a simpler means. Apparently, in this other universe, xkcd isn't funny. There was no other explanation for the comments I sometimes saw from people talking about how unfunny it was; they must perforce be reading a different xkcd than I was.

Which universe are you in? Is the above comic side-splittingly funny or does it make you scratch your head in puzzlement?

At first, I felt very sorry for those people, stuck in a world where xkcd wasn't funny. Just think of all they were missing out on, and didn't even know it! But then it occurred to me that it might work both ways. Maybe in their universe lolcats are funny. It would explain so much. (In my universe, they're just pictures of cats with misspellings over them.) So maybe I'm the one who's missing out on an entire universe of sublime humor!

3 comments:

drscorpio said...

I think xkcd requires a certain level of mathematical/technological literacy. I recall having to ask you to explain a few strips where my lack of up-to-date programming language experience left me in the dark.

litlfrog said...

I find most of them funny, and many of them VERY funny. "sudo make me a sandwich" remains one of my favorites. But there will certainly be individual strips that leave me befuddled. As a man who spans many Internets, I assure you that in some of them lolcats are indeed funny. (See, the cat looks like it's riding a bicycle, but it's invisible!)

Tyler said...

There are any number of internets -- and cable-spheres and so on -- depending on a person's background and tastes.

People who spend all their time on ESPN.com and related sports forums have an online experience very different from participants in Something Awful, say, or EN World.