ABCD
Sourdough Starter

Once the lockdown is over, let's all get together and swap starters!
Garbage Math

'Garbage In, Garbage Out' should not be taken to imply any sort of conservation law limiting the amount of garbage produced.
Coronavirus Charts

Adding data for South Korea but with their cases scaled to match the population of Japan and the land area of Australia, and vice versa.
RIP John Conway

1937-2020
Thermometer

I hate how many times you have to press it to get to the system normal people use, degrees Rømer.
New Sports System

Under my system, boxing and football suffered, pair figure skating still worked but had to adapt by dropping some moves, and pro wrestling was actually completely unaffected.
Homemade Masks

I'm going to change the sign so the pole is horizontal and the sign is mounted on the front like a plunger, so I can carry it around like a lance to gently push people back if they try to approach.
Scenario 4

Remember, models aren't for telling you facts, they're for exploring dynamics. This model apparently explores time travel.
Collector's Edition

I'm sure you can find some suitable worldbuilding material if you scavenge through the archives.
Pathogen Resistance

We're not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.
6-Foot Zone

Technically now it's a 34-foot zone.
Recurring Nightmare

Oh thank goodness, I forgot my clothes, so now everyone's looking embarrassed and backing away.
Sabotage

So excited to see everyone after my luxury cruise home from the World Handshake Championships!
Exa-Exabyte

To picture 10^18, just picture 10^13, but then imagine you connect the left side of the 3 to close off the little bays.
Coronavirus Worries

Offscreen, bottom left: Whether the custom :coronavirus: Slack react emoji you just added was public domain or whether you should have put a Creative Commons credit somewhere
Coronavirus Research

"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."
2010 and 2020

2030: "I just bought a house for one bitcoin. No, it's the equivalent of a dollar. Houses are often transferred for a nominal fee because the buyer is taking responsibility for containing the holo-banshees in the attic."
Symptoms

This medicine says it may cause lightheadedness, dry mouth, and blurred vision, but my head feels incredibly heavy, water is pouring from my mouth, and I can see individual hummingbird wingbeats, so I think I'm fine.
Scientific Briefing

"I actually came in in the middle so I don't know which topic we're briefing on; the same slides work for like half of them."
Business Greetings

We have email and social media now, so we probably don't need to keep exchanging business cards by pressing them gently against each others' faces with an open palm and smearing them around.
Self-Isolate

Turns out I've been "practicing social distancing" for years without even realizing it was a thing!
Coronavirus Name

It's important to keep the spider from touching your face.
Stargazing 3

If we can destroy enough of the lights in our region, we may see more comets, but that's a risk we'll have to take.
Truck Proximity

See also: Farm animals and dinosaurs. I am so confident that there exists children's media that involves dinosaurs driving trucks on a farm that I'm writing this without even Googling to check.
Ringtone Timeline

No one likes my novelty ringtone, an audio recording of a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface.
Grandpa Jason and Grandpa Chad

The AARP puts the average age of a first-time grandparent close to 50, and the CDC has some data. But I don't have first-parent age distributions for specific names, or generational first-child age correlations, so the dotted line is just a guess. Still, let's be honest: No further research is really *needed.*
Picking Bad Stocks

On the news a few days later: "Buzz is building around the so-called 'camping Roomba' after a big investment. Preorders have spiked, and..."
Phylogenetic Tree

And I was kicked out of my March Madness pool because I wouldn't shut up about the evidence for NBA/ABA endosymbiosis.
Further Research is Needed

Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.
Blockchain

Blockchains are like grappling hooks, in that it's extremely cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution, but it happens way too rarely in real life.
Leap Smearing

Some people suspect that it started as a "No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day" excuse that got out of hand.
Tax AI

I ended up getting my tax return prepared at a local place by a really friendly pretrained neural net named Greg.
Satellite

If you're going to let it burn up, make sure it happens over the deep end of the bathtub and not any populated parts of the house!
Cicadas

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.
Parker Solar Probe

It will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the "bottom" (the Sun's surface) which seems pretty far when you put it that way, but from up here on Earth it's practically all the way down.
Worst Thing That Could Happen

Before I install any patch, I always open the patch notes and Ctrl-F for 'supervolcano', 'seagull', and 'garbage disposal', just to be safe.
Reaction Maps

If Google Maps stops letting you navigate to (Clay County District) A in West Virginia, you can try Jump, OH -> Ina, IL -> Big Hole, TX.
Networking Problems

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE
Solar System Changes

"Actually, Jupiter already has a very impressive ring system!" --someone who knows Jupiter is within earshot
Unsubscribe Message

A mix of the two is even worse: 'Thanks for unsubscribing and helping us pare this list down to reliable supporters.'
Bad Map Projection: South America

The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.
Tattoo Ideas

The text ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US with a lengthy footnote explaining that I got this tattoo in 2020 and not, as you may assume, 2001, but offering no further clarification.
JPEG2000

I was actually a little relieved when I learned that JPEG2000 was used in the DCI digital cinema standard. I was feeling so bad for it!
Star Wars Voyager 1

There's some flexibility depending on your standards for measuring runtime and the various special editions. If you still want to have a party, I'm sure you can find some combination that works.
Parenthetical Names

I never got around to seeing that movie about the battle (of Midway).
Alignment Chart Alignment Chart

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."
OK/okay/ok

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."
I Love the 20s

Billboard's "Best of the 80s" chart includes Blondie's 1980 hit "Call Me." QED.
New Year's Eve

"Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse.
Weird Hill

I'm compromising by picking a weird hill to lie on.
Christmas Presents

"The parasitism might be mediated by a fungus!" exclaimed the biologist who was trying to ruin Christmas again.
Edible Arrangements

Any arrangement is an edible arrangement if you're hungry enough.
Thumbtacks And String

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt
Star Wars Spoiler Generator

The heroes seem to be gaining the upper hand until Darth Juul manages to flip the switch on the car wash control panel from 'REGULAR' to 'PREMIUM.'
Ground vs Air

Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.
Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect

I love Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect; I saw them open for Correct Horse Battery Staple.
Timeline of the Universe

Not actual size, except technically at one spot near the left.
Data Error

Cyanobacteria wiped out nearly all life on Earth once before, and they can do it again!
Flu Shot

"Wait, how often are you getting bitten by snakes? And why are you boiling water?" "Dunno, the CDC people keep showing up with complicated questions about the 'history of the property' and 'possible curses' but I kinda tune them out. At least one of them offered me the flu shot."
AI Hiring Algorithm

So glad Kate over in R&D pushed for using the AlgoMaxAnalyzer to look into this. Hiring her was a great decisio- waaaait.
Is it Christmas?

We've tested it on 30 different days and it hasn't gotten one wrong yet.
Group Chat Rules

There's no group chat member more enigmatic than the cool person who you all assume has the chat on mute, but who then instantly chimes in with no delay the moment something relevant to them is mentioned.
How To Deliver Christmas Presents

Building codes in hurricane zones rely on studies of how easily flying debris can break residential windows. If you're looking for a science fair project idea and you hate your neighbors, I'm sure they could always use more data!
Aurora Meaning

The astro-ph.SR arXiv servers are simultaneously being overwhelmed by electronic requests and actual electricity.
Hotel Room Party
![[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/hotel_room_party.png)
[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"
The Time Before and After Land

According to Google, "the time for Beeland" is apparently whenever you're looking for delicious honey in Spillimacheen, British Columbia or a hexagonal chalet in the Savinja valley in Slovenia.
Versus Bracket

Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.
Rey and Kylo

We're like 10+ movies in and the focus has been almost entirely on the WARS half.
Machine Learning Captcha
![More likely: Click on all the pictures of people who appear disloyal to [name of company or government]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/machine_learning_captcha.png)
More likely: Click on all the pictures of people who appear disloyal to [name of company or government]
Transit of Mercury

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter
Recombination And Reionization

These signals seem to be pre-star-formation but post-Malone.
Voting Referendum

The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.
Software Updates

Everything is a cloud application; the ping times just vary a lot.
Screen Time

These new Bluetooth socks are great, but it's troubling to learn that I average almost 14 hours of Shoe Time a day.
Terminator: Dark Fate

I was sent here to stop the robot that was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to destroy the robot that was sent here to vacuum the floor.
Emulation

I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.
Imagine Going Back in Time

I wonder what the trendy adults in 2019 who are too cool for Pokemon will be into. Probably Digimon!
Earthquake Early Warnings

I was fired by the National Weather Service five minutes after they hired me for going into their code base and renaming all the tornado warnings to "tornado spoiler alerts."
Wardrobe

If you'd just agree to hold your meetings in here, you'd have PLENTY of time to figure things out before the deadline.
53 Cards

Well, there's one right here at the bottom, where it says "53."
Percent Milkfat

"So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out."
Faculty:Student Ratio

They managed to briefly hit the top of the rankings when they rejected everyone except one applicant, published 5 billion research papers that just said "Hi," and hired one of their graduates for $50 trillion/year (then fired them after 10 microseconds.)
Chemistry Nobel

Most chemists thought the lanthanides and actinides could be inserted in the sixth and seventh rows, but no, they're just floating down at the bottom with lots more undiscovered elements all around them.
How Old
![We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/how_old.png)
We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]
Cell Phone Functions

... tazer ... fire extinguisher ... bird feeder ... toilet paper ...
Hours Before Departure

They could afford to cut it close because they all had Global Entry.
College Athletes

Their signature play is the three-point combinator, a recursive offense which is guaranteed not to halt and continues accumulating points until the buzzer.
Fresh Pears

I want to sell apples but I'm still working on getting the machine to do the cutting and grafting.
Drone Fishing

Today's consumers who order their drones off the internet don't know the joy of going out in nature and returning with a drone that you caught yourself, whose angry owners you fought off with your own two hands.
Math Work

I could type this into a solver, which MIGHT help, but would also mean I have to get a lot of parentheses right...
Mavis Beacon

There are actually lowercase-like 'oldstyle' forms of normal numbers with more pronounced ascenders and descenders, which is why some numbers like '5' in books sometimes dangle below the line. But the true capital numbers remain the domain of number maven Mavis Beacon.
Types of Approximation

It's not my fault I haven't had a chance to measure the curvature of this particular universe.
Ksp 2

"The committee appreciates that your 2020 launch is on track, but the 'human capital/personnel retention' budget includes a lot more unmarked cash payments than usual. What are th--" "Public outreach."
Prescience

Lots of people called their ships unsinkable before the Titanic. Voicing your hubris doesn't make failure more likely, just more memorable.
Earth-Like Exoplanet

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.
Foucault Pendulum

Trust me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of the paramilitary enforcement arm of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.
Unreachable State

ERROR: We've reached an unreachable state. Anything is possible. The limits were in our heads all along. Follow your dreams.
Cryptic Wifi Networks

They actually showed up on the first scan by the first WiFi-capable device.
Throw

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to
Game Show

Eventually they agreed to "an auto-retracting dog leash with one end clipped to your house, so you can press the button on the handle and water-ski home."