Title text:
In 1899, people were walking around shouting ‘23’ at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3184/
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“Now, my story begins in nineteen dickety two. We had to say dickety 'cause the kaiser had stolen our word twenty….”
Needs to add my favorite number: 8647
They left out 86 and the more recent variant 8647
Missing “about three-fitty”
I’m not a mathematican, but
I was reading Wikipedia about the origins of 23 and came across this neat tidbit:
On the RMS Titanic there was a watertight door on E Deck numbered 23 which was informally called the “skidoo door” according to the testimony of the Chief Baker Charles John Joughin.
I feel like (6, 7) should definitely be a tuple
6’7" is a non integer measurement.
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It’s in the panel
Doh!
I’m still disappointed that 27 never managed to get on this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2-7CqYFi64
For millennials, like me: 1337 means “LEET” which is short for “Elite”.
Millenials pwnd the n00bs with the best of the genX back in the day, but I think leetspeak was a lot more niche than say 67 is, it was very gamercoded/nerdcoded when that wasn’t cool.
Source: am millenial who had a leetspeak AIM handle back then
back when the internet was not cool
Also for geeky Gen X
Y35!
Sorry, what? I’m a millennial, this is common knowledge for anyone who played a videogame in the last quarter century.
I was going to say, I think the perpetuation of leetspeak and most of its use falls squarely into the millennial generation’s early 90s into the early 2000s.
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I’m confused as to where you fit in the Millennial demographic for you to have not known this already
It seems, I’m on the older side.
i installed a kali linux vm and nmap, wireshark, tcpdump, and metasploit cuz i wanna be teh 1337 h4x0r i wanted to be when i was a 15 year old in 2001
Had a friend who wrote his french oral presentation out in 1337, he was allowed notes but not the word for word presentation. He showed the teacher beforehand, she said that’s fine, looks like gibberish.
I did that too, but back then it was called Backtrack Linux. I bought a special Atheros chipset WiFi card for my laptop’s PCMCIA slot. The built-in 802.11b WiFi card worked under Linux but only by using the Windows ME driver in NDISWrapper, which didn’t support promiscuous mode.
The Atheros chipsets could be configured (by flashing the firmware with a blob I got from a BBS, if I recall) to capture the traffic from nearby wireless networks. In particular, I wanted to pick up the signal from when a device first connects. There was a bug in Windows XP that could cause the WiFi to drop briefly, then promptly reconnect. By triggering that bug over and over I could capture a lot of reconnect packets in a short time frame.
Then I’d save the data to a big file and pipe it to Aircrack and extract the Wired Equivalent Privacy password.
I was a 1337 H4XX0|2 B-)
Tap for spoiler
Well, that’s how the tutorial said it would work anyway. I actually never could get enough packets captured. The signal strength was too low
Same, but I was 15 like 15 years later lol
What the h311 is wrong with you? Us millennials invented 1337!
Nope. Source: am gen X.
Y2K
Yep I think pops here has this one, us Millennials grew up with leet speak, it already was a thing in the 80s.
Yeah it was common on BBSes late 80s at least. Also am gen X.
That’s the first time anyone called me pops! NOW I feel old!
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1337 h4x0r
Hack the planet
Ragebait. Millenials are like 40 and have back pain.
84CK P41N
D0/\/'7 m4k3 f|_|/\/ 0f /\/\y 84(k
I can confirm you can in fact get back pain before the age of 40
Batman can confirm too.
Source: Knightfall.
Teens in different countries have different funny numbers too funny enough. There is a thing influencing multiple civilizations to do this.
What about Schfifty-Five?
Fourteen-teen
Shiggity Schwat
Girlfriend’s age?
My IQ
Three fiddy?
Tree-fiddy came so close to making the list I think but it feels right that it didn’t.
all the older ones at least had some kind of meaning behind them, this new shit is actual brainrot.
Some kind of meaning behind them, huh?
Let me ask you something.
Can you count…
All the way…
To shfifty-five?
But this isn’t even a fair comparison because that’s literally a whole ass song with an animation compared to a dumb kid in some viral video saying six or seven
Shwam.
Doo.
Two and helf.
Scheven.
Schfourteen-teen.
Shwenty One.
Shwenty-Seven and Helf
27
37
WHAT YOU SAY?!!
I have said “schfourteen-teen” about once per week for the past 20 years
…I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten the reference
What’s the meaning of 42? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
It’s the answer
But what is the question?
That is the real question!
It was Jackie Robinson’s number
What did 23 mean? I thought the post was pointing out it meant nothing? 69 is a position, 420 smoke weed, boobs, 42 was a nonsense joke that meant nothing as well. They just defined it as the meaning of life for no reason from what I know… so 23, and 67 seem about the same, running closely behind 42
42 is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. They built an enormous computer called Deep Thought that was the most powerful ever built to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The computer, after 75 million years of processing, came up with 42. The confused crowd that gathered to hear the answer did not understand. Turns out, 42 is the correct answer, but what is the question?
So after that, they decide to build another computer, which is planet Earth, to figure out the question.
It was still calculating when it was destroyed by the Vogons to make space for a hyperspace bypass.
Yeah I remember that, saying 42 is the answer to everything was what I called nonsense, as I could just as easily say 42 meaning everything is is the product you get from, 6 7 (meaning nothing). Poof, now everything is a multiple of nothing, and at the end of the day none of it made any sense or had any meaning
Funny enough, there’s a point in a later book in the series where they suggest the “ultimate question’” that 42 is an answer to could be “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”
Which works in base 13!
Additionally, while technically imbued with ‘meaning’, even the number 420 itself is somewhat meaningless and was originally used to delineate those who knew from those who don’t. It’s just that it got famous enough that we now almost all know.
In that sense I would argue it filled more or less the same function as 67.
I’d like to add that that’s called a shibboleth :)
I’ve heard it said that 420 referred to the time 4:20 pm, when a group would come together to smoke, but that sounds contrived.
420 can also refer to the birth date of Adolf Hitler, which makes 420 a bit darker than just “haha, smoke.”
23 is from the movie of the guy escaping from the number 23 I think?
Oh shit I forgot that movie, that was a Jim Carrey movie wasn’t it
I think so
Thank you. I didn’t know what 23 was about
23 was before my time, but it is 1/3 of 69, so there’s that.
Ni
Ni’s NaN though and they no longer say it.
Japanese would argue otherwise, 二 is certainly a number.
That number is just an example of a specific category of absurd humor. It’s rare to see that sort of thing applied to numbers though. In other situations, we’ve all seen it. Just repeat any dumb thing a hundred times and suddenly it becomes funny. You could look at pretty much any TV comedy. Pick any decade, like 60’s, 70’s, 90’s or whatever. The rule is very simple: Just repeat it and it becomes funny at some point.
You could also say that the seeds of brain rot are older than we dare to admit. The 2020s just distilled it to its purest form yet.
What’s funnier than 24?
25
67 is the police code for a homocide. Kids just didn’t understand it and thought it referred to something else.
I thought that’s 187
In California it’s 187.
And now I gotta listen to sublime
What
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Nazi dog whistles do not go on the fun numbers board.
That one isn’t funny.
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