this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
1011 points (99.1% liked)

xkcd

8968 readers
186 users here now

A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

https://xkcd.com/2869

Alt text:

Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago (1 children)

QAnon: “Looks like sound reasoning to us.”

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Now you know what kind of books these people read as kids

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You think these people read as kids?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

They self banned books

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People who know how to read don't end up in Qanon

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but other people read them too and didn't go absolutely nuts

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Now, I don't want to be the asshole that shits on a nearly 40 year old classic movie... but why would the Goonies' map, written in Spanish, rhyme when translated to English? And why would it translate into "Olde English" with a bunch of "ye" this and "ye" that?

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My head cannon is that it’s being interpreted by Mouth who is adding his own artistic flair to the text. So the “ye” this and that are just him playing around with the words.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Him playing around makes sense the first time he's translating the Spanish in the attic. It makes less sense when he keeps doing it after they're running for their lives from the Fratelli's, dodging booby traps and are facing yet another trap that is a full pipe organ made of human bones. And he's clearly scared when he translates it. But, maybe he just has weird defense mechanisms, I don't know.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe he was just committed to the bit by that point.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

We've all been guilty of carrying the bit too long before

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Also "ye" in olde English is just pronounced the. It's wasn't a y it was used for the letter thorn which made the th sound. They never said ye. So there's no way the Spanish would translate to fake old english

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Ish.

There's ye as in "hear ye, hear ye". That's a y. It's an inflected form of you, much as they had both thee and thou.

Then there's writing þe as ye.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

The dead pirate captain's name is literally a penis joke. I don't think anything in that movie is supposed to be legit.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Batman forever: Something like "It was left by a Mr E.... Mystery! And another word for mystery? Enigma!.... Mr E. Nigma...Edward Nigma!"

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Goteem? You mean Gotham.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

The clues were a series of riddles that had 13, 1, 8, and 5 somewhere in their text. Try letters of the alphabet, you wind up with MAHE. What if 1 and 8 was 18? 13, 18, 5 is MRE. "Mister E." "Mystery!" "And what's another word for mystery?" "Enigma!" Mister E. Nygma. Edward Nygma."

Which manages to be extremely basic yet such a stretch at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

nigma balls

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It helped me understand what the hell was going on with Batman Forever when I realized that the whole thing was riddled with tributes to the Adam West Batman.

Once Jim Carrey gets up a head of steam, he is doing a full on impersonation of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. Look at Gorshin in this scene. Carrey is doing an incredible Gorshin act.

Now I don't want that and I don't appreciate it, but once I understood where all of the camp in Forever came from it didn't make me quite so angry.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“It was left by a Mr E… Mystery!

Yea, but im pretty sure this is intentionally bad, instead of bad writing

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

It was a callback to Batman from 1966, that's how they solved all the crimes lmao. The Schumacher Batman movies were supposed to be "90s camp", which I can totally see now through my nostalgia goggles.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Futurama did a great take on this with their Da Vinci Code parody episode.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Animatronio mentioned a fountain. That's a statue of Neptune, god of water. The number of points on him trident is three, or trey. The "u" in his name is written like "v". Trey, "v". Trevi! It's the Trevi Fountain. There can be no question!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

"but what about--?"
"There can be no question!!"

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I watched all of Futurama, but I don't remember that episode. Which one was it?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

This reminds me of national treasure so much. Literally just random jumps until you fall into the obvious answer.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I remember a book I read in elementary school (in the Cam Jansen series, IIRC) where the main conflict was a mean older brother put a password on the new family computer (a huge deal in the early 90s), and the younger hires the kid detective to find the password. The password is “hot dog”, ultimately determined because the desktop BG was a picture of ketchup and mustard.

I recall being not super satisfied with that ending.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I can imagine you going *"Why didn't they just hit [Esc] to bypass the password prompt, open a DOS prompt and delete the password files in C:\Windows.pwl?"

(Yes, that was actually a thing you could do on early 90's Windows 3.0)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Same with Windows 95 and Windows 98. Those operating systems were not really designed with a proper concept of 'user accounts'

The password box wasn't supposed to prevent system access, it was to capture user credentials for networking, like remote fileshare access.

Pressing escape is just choosing to continue anonymously.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

You didn't even need to do that. You could hold down the shift key to bypass some passwords, and just click cancel on others.

Early Windows had awful security.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Password guessing is always like that in popular media too. Oh he loved houses so his pw is obviously "Stallion"

Uhm no, it was probably zkl+7+:$(89?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Well. Cyber security professionals wish it were that way. Instead it's usually 1234 or their kid's birthday or some shit. Having a connection in your mind between houses and horses and then using that to remember something like Green4Stallion8 would actually be more secure than most people's passwords. It's even more better if you can remember a nonsense word that phonetically matches and change up the capital like, kreeN4stauLion8.

Of course most people don't need to worry about social hacking. Black hats aren't going through random social media profiles when they have millions of password and email combinations they ripped from a few websites. So unless you're the CEO of LifeLock or dealing with abusive family the above password would totally work even if everyone around you knew you loved Horse Cottages.

Just don't forget to change it in 30 days...

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Even if the password was "stallion" they probably would have made it Stallion1, Stallion!, $tallion, etc. The password always ends up being a single word, all lowercase, no numbers, no special characters.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This is what it's like to watch Detective Conan in America. They will even have commercial segways where they say "hey, remember this important clue!" And then not even use that clue in the English dub's edit. They still present it as a mystery the viewer can solve, but then the solution is always some convoluted BS using clues the audience was never shown lol

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Alright kids. Who wants to dig up grandma?"

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NO, NO, we are not violating the dead.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

You don't understand, she gave us the clue. It has to be this way.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

"G? As in Good God please don't!"

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

Did she want for only to Biker Bob to find it, but Cop Charlie found it first?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had one friend who was obsessed with these idiotic "lateral thinking" puzzle books, because she'd read them to us and then pretend like she had figured out the completely ridiculous scenarios from the start.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›