And, yet, Guy In Beret managed to make it so simple, it couldn’t be misunderstood, where Guy In Hat, and Girl completely failed.
There’s always another way to say something, even if it involves grabbing someone’s hand and physically showing them what you mean.
Nothing in this strip does, but he is one of XKCD’s recurring characters. Whereas black hat guy is always evil, Beret Guy is harmless, but just kind of off.
I took the message as more of a “consider your audience”. The first listener clearly doesn’t speak the same language as the first speaker, since he can’t understand such a simple message; and I agree that the speaker most likely should have picked up on that and tried a different approach, rather than continuing to speak in a language the other guy doesn’t understand.
Also, I was distracted by that weird triangle over the pit. Is that a caution or yield sign or something? I couldn’t quite figure out what the markings or writing is in the middle of the triangle, maybe there’s some way I can view it at higher resolution but I couldn’t figure out how.
On a related note, was anyone brave enough to try the Holistic Browser? It takes you randomly to one of the urls someone else entered, but I’m not risking being taken to a shock site/virus dump/rick roll.
My assumption was that the different people are not all speaking the same language.
Something vaguely similar once happened to me when I was in Japan, and an old woman attempted to warn me about…something…that would happen if I continued walking down the path I was on. My Japanese was only good enough to establish that walking down this path wasn’t forbidden, I just had to be careful because of…something. She was gesturing and everything, but to this day I’m unclear as to what she was trying to tell me. My best guess based on her gesturing is that she was saying there were bugs in the trees and they might get in my hair, but I’m really not sure. After she left I did continue carefully down the path and didn’t encounter any bugs or other trouble, although it’s possible I was just lucky!
On preview I see **KidScruffy **has said basically the same thing, but without the pointless personal anecdote. 
I know the thought balloons are conversations but I lose track of what they are trying to say.
“Show don’t tell”.
European Traffic Caution sign (link goes to Wikipedia)
Triangle with exclamation point in it
A triangle with an exclamation point in it is a standard warning sign. So common, in fact, that Windows uses it for several ‘problem encountered’ messages.
And there’s a version of it just up there 
Yes! When I first tried it, it didn’t work, but I retried it. First I put in this message board and got a *Basic instructions *webcomic. Then I put the NZ metservice in and got the site for RTE, an Irish news service. Finally, I put in the Google result for ‘Define holistic’ and got and got the site for arduino (an electronics thing that I remember was in one of his old comics, which I always wondered about.)
so so far, so good.
LOL, oh, yeah. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. :smack:
I’m glad I came across this thread, the cartoon went completely over my head when I first looked at it. In addition to failing to grasp that there were two pits, I thought the girl and guy were using the pit as a place to hook up in panel 11. I literally scratched my head for a few seconds, and admitted defeat.
I’m laughing out loud, because this whole thread, due to the comic’s obtuseness, is a great example of what the comic was trying to convey. 
As was, of course, the comic itself.
Yes, but was it on purpose? Awesome consonance, or a shitty comic? Hmmm…
No, it was not self-referential; it was merely zen.
This is the first xkcd in a long time that made me weep.
Exactly. Notice that everyone only understood what it was they saw.
One other point. This isn’t the regular hat guy character. That character wears a black hat. This character is wearing a white hat.
I wonder if one of the reasons this cartoon is near-impenetrable is the fact that Randall cheated. The thought balloons use standard cartoon symbolism to show that the speaker is agitated, but the cartoonist does not use those same conventions in the “reality” frame to show that the speaker actually is agitated. We’re forced to assume that the listeners are misreading the attitude of the speakers.
That would be fine, but I think it adds some unnecessary confusion and slightly undermines the intended message of the comic. If the speakers had been portrayed as agitated, I think it would have been more obvious that the listeners are paying attention only to the presentation, not the message. As it is, it’s pretty opaque since the listeners are responding neither to the presentation nor the message but instead to some weird assumptions about the speakers. This suggests that some listeners won’t be open to anything you try to communicate since they’re locked up inside their own worldview, which I don’t think–per the mouseover text–is what Randall was trying to get across.
Hat Guy and Girl have both traversed the entire distance between the two holes without meeting up with Beret Guy and Roundhead, who are also between the two holes. How did that happen?