this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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xkcd #3088: Deposition (imgs.xkcd.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Title text:

P.S. If you have time travel, come to my birthday party Saturday!

Transcript:

[Cueball approaches Ponytail, chiselling a rock on a shoreline next to a river with shallow rolling hills in the background]
Cueball: What are you doing?
Ponytail: This river empties onto a passive continental margin.

[Cueball and Ponytail stand talking, Ponytail holding several flat rocks, in an otherwise empty and frameless panel]
Ponytail: If I chisel notes onto these rocks and throw them into the sea, they might be incorporated into some shale cliff in the distant future.

[Silhouetted scene of Ponytail as she throws multiple rocks off frame to the right, Cueball watching from behind her]
[From off-panel, sound effect of a rock hitting water:] PLOP

[Two 'bug-eyed aliens', sitting in personal 'hover-saucers' look rightwards at an exposed rock-face. A pick and shovel are left stuck in the ground, and one of the 'saucers' sports a mechanical arm currently holding a loose fragment of rock]
[Panel label:] 100 million years later
[Text originating from the held rock fragment:] This bedrock inspected by No. 5

Source: https://xkcd.com/3088/

explainxkcd for #3088

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

The explanation page doesn’t have anything yet, but this feels like it has references to the Futurama episodes “The Late Philip J. Fry” and “Lethal Inspection”, with just a hint of Slartibartfast from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

[EDIT: After making this comment, I noticed that those two Futurama episodes happen to be back-to-back with each other. xkcd must be in the middle of watching the series]