ABCD
Active Ingredients Only

Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?
Worrying Scientist Interviews

They always try to explain that they're called 'solar physicists', but the reporters interrupt with "NEVER MIND THAT, TELL US WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUN!"
Real Estate

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.
Thread

Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins.
USB Cables

Tag yourself, I'm "frayed."
Obsolete Technology

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!
What to Bring

I always figured you should never bring a gun to a gun fight because then you'll be part of a gun fight.
xkcd Phone 6

We understand your privacy concerns; be assured that our phones will never store or transmit images of your face.
Still in Use

'Which one?' 'I dunno, it's your house. Just check each object.' 'Check it for *what*?' 'Whether it looks like it might have touched a paper towel at some point and then forgotten to let go.' '...' 'You can also Google to learn how to check which things are using which resources.' 'You know, I'll just leave the towel there and try again tomorrow.'
Two Down, One to Go

The third row will probably have to wait until 2034, and maybe longer. If I see a daytime supernova, I'll replace the meteor storm with that and consider it 3/3.
Typing Notifications

Over the years I've decided I'd rather have them on than not, but I'm glad there aren't "has opened a blank note to compose a reply to you" notifications.
Ensemble Model

I'm in talks with Netflix to produce an alternate-universe crime drama about the world where sliced bread was never re-legalized, but it's going slowly because they keep changing their phone numbers and the door lock codes at their headquarters.
Ringer Volume/Media Volume

Our new video ad campaign has our product's name shouted in the first 500 milliseconds, so we can reach the people in adjacent rooms while the viewer is still turning down the volume.
Supervillain Plan

Someday, some big historical event will happen during the DST changeover, and all the tick-tock articles chronicling how it unfolded will have to include a really annoying explanation next to their timelines.
Color Models

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.
Drone Training

The joke will be on him in a few weeks when animal control shows up and takes custody of his Roomba.
Eclipse Review

I watched from a beautiful nature reserve in central Missouri, and it was--without exaggeration--the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Eclipse Birds

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'
Earth Orbital Diagram

You shouldn't look directly at a partial eclipse because of the damage that can be caused by improperly aligning the solar-lunar orbital plane with the orbital bones around your eye.
Eclipse Science

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.
Eclipse Searches

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.
Computers vs Humans

It's hard to train deep learning algorithms when most of the positive feedback they get is sarcastic.
Geologic Faults

I live on a torn-bag-of-potato-chips-where-the-tear-is-rapidly-growing fault, which is terrifying.
Email Reply

I would be honored, but I know I don't belong in your network. The person you invited was someone who had not yet inflicted this two-year ordeal upon you. I'm no longer that person.
Backup Batteries

If it falls below 20% full, my bag turns red and I start to panic.
Bun Alert

Since buns range from crepuscular to nocturnal, it's recommended that you enable the scheduled "Do Not Disturb" mode on your phone to avoid being woken by alerts about Night Buns.
Emoji Movie Reviews

There's this idea that emoji are bad for communication because they replace ambiguity and nuance with a limited set of preselected emotions, but it doesn't really survive a collision with real-world usage of the thinking face or upside-down smiley.
Positive and Negative Reviews

This restaurant is great! I was feeling really sick, but then I ate there and felt better!
Eclipse Flights

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.
Physics Confession

"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens." "Why does tha--" "No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing."
Russell's Teapot

Unfortunately, NASA regulations state that Bertrand Russell-related payloads can only be launched within launch vehicles which do not launch themselves.
Wifi vs Cellular

According to the cable company reps who keep calling me, it's because I haven't upgraded to the XTREME GIGABAND PANAMAX FLAVOR-BLASTED PRO PACKAGE WITH HBO, which is only $5 more per month for the first 6 months and five billion dollars per month after that.
City Nicknames

This place has so many demonyms. Northlanders. Fair Folk. Honey Barons. Lake Dwellers. Treasurers. Swamp Watchers. Dream Farmers. Wellfolk. Rockeaters. Forgotten Royals. Remote Clients. Barrow-Clerks. The People of Land and Sky.
Screenshots

For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.
Particle Properties

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.
Quantum

If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis.
Communicating

You're saying that the responsibility for avoiding miscommunication lies entirely with the listener, not the speaker, which explains why you haven't been able to convince anyone to help you down from that wall.
Sports Knowledge

I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!
4th of July

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.
Emoji Movie

Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.
Existence Proof

Real analysis is way realer than I expected.
Telephoto

I was banned from the airliners.net photography forum by concerned moderators after the end of my lens started brushing against planes as they flew by.
Refresh Types

The hardest refresh requires both a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard as a security measure, like how missile launch systems require two keys to be turned at once.
Once Per Day

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.
Election Map

Luckily for my interpretation, no precincts were won by the Green Party.
Magnetohydrodynamics

Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations. It's so straightforward physicists add "relativistic" or "quantum" just to keep it from getting boring.
Air Force Museum

I had fun visiting the museum at Dover Air Force Base, unless they don't have a museum, in which case I've never been to Delaware in my life.
Decades

In the 90s, our variety radio station used the tagline "the best music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s." After 2000, they switched to "the best music of the 80s, 90s, and today." I figured they'd change again in 2010, but it's 2017 and they're still saying "80s, 90s, and today." I hope radio survives long enough for us to find out how they deal with the 2020s.
Glacial Erratic

"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over."
Dubious Study

Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.
Drone Problems

On the other hand, as far as they know, my system is working perfectly.
State Word Map

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.
Voting Systems

Kenneth Arrow hated me because the ordering of my preferences changes based on which voting systems have what level of support. But it tells me a lot about the people I'm going to be voting with!
Opening Crawl

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
Anti-Drone Eagles

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.
Who?

Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.
Genetic Testing Results

That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for a lot of things.
Doctor Visit

According to these blood tests, you're like 30% cereal.
Machine Learning

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.
Rental Car

Technically, both cars are haunted, but the murder ghosts can't stand listening to the broken GPS for more than a few minutes.
Okeanos

WHEN I WAS ON A BOAT I DROPPED MY PHONE CAN U LOOK FOR IT
Random Obsessions

I take the view that "open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches, but all other physical objects are.
Lunch Order

GO FOR LUNCH, REPEAT, GO FOR LUNCH.
Code Quality 3

It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.
Photo Library Management

A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage.
Here to Help

"We TOLD you it was hard." "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard."
ISS Solar Transit 2

Most people don't realize it, but they actually launch a new space station every few weeks because this keeps happening.
Geochronology

'The mountains near here formed when the ... Newfoundland ... microplate collided with, uhh ... Labrador.' 'Ok, now you're definitely just naming dogs.' 'Wait, no, that's actually almost correct.'
ISS Solar Transit

I guess it's also the right setting for pictures of the Moon at night.
Survivorship Bias

They say you can't argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that? If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.
Birdwatching

No, tell the park rangers to calm down, it's fine--I put a screen on the front. I just want to get the birds a little closer.
7 Eleven

Really, the only honest 24-hour stores are the ones in places like Arizona and Hawaii, and many of them are still wrong in certain years.
Identification Chart

Be careful—it's breeding season, and some of these can be *extremely* defensive of their nests.
Hottest Editors

Elon Musk finally blocked me from the internal Tesla repository because I wouldn't stop sending pull requests for my code supporting steering via vim keybindings.
Existential Bug Reports

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun. WORKAROUND: None.
Incinerator

My trash can broke recently and I had to get rid of it. When I picked it up, I suffered a brief but harrowing existential crisis.
Security Advice

Never give your password or bank account number to anyone who doesn't have a blue check mark next to their name.
Sweet 16

Every year I make out my bracket at the season, and every year it's busted before the first game when I find out which teams are playing.
Rayleigh Scattering

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.
Incognito Mode

They're really the worst tech support team. And their solutions are always the same. "This OS X update broke something." "LET'S INFILTRATE APPLE BY MORPHING APPLES!"
Mispronunciation

I pronounce epitome "EPPY-tome", but EpiPen "uh-PIE-pen".
Flag

There's a compromise bill to keep the notification bar but at least charge the battery.
Color Pattern

♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫
Vomiting Emoji

My favorite might be U+1F609 U+1F93F WINKING FACE VOMITING.
Onboarding

'So we just have a steady flow of metal piling up in our server room? Isn't that a problem?' 'Yeah, you should bring that up at our next bismuth meeting.'
Best-Tasting Colors

I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.
Chat Systems

I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.
xkcd Phone 5

The phone will be collected by the toll operators and mailed back to you within 4-6 weeks.
Hacking

The dump also contains a list of millions of prime factors, a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit, and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code.
Listening

Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing.
Borrow Your Laptop

If used with software that could keep up, a scroll wheel mapped to send a stream of 'undo' and 'redo' events could be kind of cool.
Unpublished Discoveries

If you must know, I'm currently researching how to save this emailed tax form as a regular PDF so I can print and sign it. Our work isn't a lock for the Nobel, but we're in the running.
Video Content

"So, like, sexy news videos?" "No, people have tried that--it's still just video content. We need to actually inform people THROUGH making out. I would call it 'Mouth Content,' but I think that's already the title of a Neil Cicierega album."
Location Reviews

Google and Yelp keep deleting my scathing reviews of the Mariana Trench, the Chernobyl reactor core, the jet stream, and the equator.
Phone
![[*disables social networking accounts*] [*social isolation increases*] Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/phone.png)
[*disables social networking accounts*] [*social isolation increases*] Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?
Decision Paralysis

Good point--making no decision is itself a decision. So that's a THIRD option I have to research!
Chess Notation

I've decided to score all my conversations using chess win-loss notation. (??)
Bad Map Projection: Time Zones

This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Box Plot

You have to be careful doing this. Sometimes, when you push the whisker down, dynamite explodes.
Stardew Valley

I have accidentally watered virtually every person and object in Pelican Town.