I figure we might as well make it an ongoing thread because the subject keeps coming back up.
Anyway, my current confusion is over this strip: xkcd: Manual for Civilization
Can anyone explain the joke to me? Keep in mind my knowledge of the Animorphs book series is pretty much limited to knowing that it exists. But I do know who Brian Eno is and even have some of his albums.
Well, this might help. My take on the joke is how ironically faddish the book selection is.
I share the thoughts about the year 2000. For decades we were bombarded by predictions that began with “by the year 2000,” and when it finally arrived, it left us without a mental goal for the future, something to aim toward, serving as a sort of anchor to the future. “By the year 2100” just doesn’t have the same sense of importance.
I’ve also thought, over the decades, that more and more, much of the content of our lives is becoming disposable. Certainly pop culture is focused on the here and now, and there’s no reason why it needs to be.
But yeah, “Long Now” does seem rather trendy, in spite of itself, and short on content.
If you ever need an XKCD strip explained, this is a good resource. [citation needed]
Well that was amazing. It took something that initially seemed unfunny and lacking in any sort of interesting insight, and managed to make it seem even less funny and less insightful.
The point of that strip is that there are a lot (And I mean a metric shit-ton) of Animorphs books.
I was unaware that explaining a joke could have any other result.
If one didn’t get it in the first place, of course it can. Even if the explanation is unlikely to make you laugh, it should make you aware why you would have laughed if you had been smart or savvy enough. That explanation, after a thoroughly leaden, deadening account of what is quite obviously happening in the strip, then completely fails to explain how it would have been a decent joke if only I had got it.
Besides that, I suspect it is the wrong explanation, anyway. My feeling is that Lobot is more on the right track, but one would probably have to know a lot more about The Long Now Foundation (or even, perhaps, its book list, if there really is one) than even most smart, well informed people know, or even than is at Lobot’s link, for it to actually have a hope of being funny or pointed.
On second thoughts, maybe MrDibble has it, and the point is that, like a typical Long Now project, the Animorphs series seems to be designed to be unending. That has less of a satirical point, but is maybe not quite so ridiculously esoteric, if you are deep into geek/SF culture.
None of this, though, explains why it is given to Eno, specifically, to make the announcement. Surely his main thing is music. Nor how the bit about a whole wing devoted to book 26 fits in.
Eno delivered the kick-off “long term thinking” lecture event for the foundation.
I’m still now seeing it. Was there a point in using the Animorphs series specifically? Or could any other YA series have served as an equivalent punchline for this joke?
I thought the joke was that, despite it’s airy goals and high-minded rhetoric, the Long Now Foundation is just a geek pipe dream with no practical use, little different from other geeky obsessions, like, say, YA sci-fi literature.
Randall has a strong sense of nostalgia for the books, I suspect. I certainly remember a time when I’d crash my bike to get to the library in order to check out the latest in the series. I think it’s just that the books are patently inappropriate for being a manual to restart civilization.
Agreed. LNF is a completely geeky thing, so of course their book choice is going to be some narrow-topic geek thing. The joke could have been that the collection of TV shows was entirely composed of Dr. Who. It’s not specifically something about Animorphs.
That’s the first thing I thought when I read it. 
Funny thing is, I recall reading a short story in the 80s, either in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine or Analog about just this type of situation. It took place in a somewhat post-apocalyptic society, that was only slowly returning to any semblance of civilization. The protagonist, IIRC, was applying for acceptance at a university, where he hoped to learn to read, and later to read and provide the world with further understanding of the classics of Western Civilization’s Golden Age of Literature.
The twist was that “the classics of Western Civilization’s Golden Age of Literature” comprised all printed material that survived the collapse of civilization. Thus, the library had a couple of Shakespeare’s plays, right next to a series of children’s books, based on a pixie-like character who looked like a kewpie doll.
Wish I could remember the name of the story. I’ll go start a thread and see how long the geniuses of SDMB take to find it.
This was why I wanted an ongoing thread. So I can ask people to explain this joke to me without having to start a new thread: xkcd: Magic Words
I’d say the joke is related to poetic feet.
To elaborate, the stress in the syllables is in different places in the different sets of words. “STOry” vs. “disARM” vs. “POetry”.
What’s the relation of any of those phrases to feet?