New [XKCD] Map of the Internet!

[Omniscient]

Love that Maru Gulf got it’s own spot on the Youtube continent. Oh, and Gondolin.

[GilaB]

@Omniscient

Can anyone explain what the stuff behind the “Great Firewall” is? I know China is feisty with the internet and all but I don’t get all the references on the map behind that line and I’m a little stumped why Happy Farm is straddling it.

I don’t know much about the Chinese Internet, but the Grass Mud Horse is a homophone (sort of, I’m not sure what the Chinese tonal equivalent is) for something profane. For a while, it slipped past the automatic censors, and references to it were a commentary on Chinese Internet censorship.

[JohnT]

nm

[Omniscient]

@GilaB

@Omniscient

Can anyone explain what the stuff behind the “Great Firewall” is? I know China is feisty with the internet and all but I don’t get all the references on the map behind that line and I’m a little stumped why Happy Farm is straddling it.

I don’t know much about the Chinese Internet, but the Grass Mud Horse is a homophone (sort of, I’m not sure what the Chinese tonal equivalent is) for something profane. For a while, it slipped past the automatic censors, and references to it were a commentary on Chinese Internet censorship.

Looks like the Wiki page you linked clears up quite a bit of it. Grass Mud Horse, Ma Le Ge Bi and the River Crabs all seem to stem from the same meme.

Baidu Baike and Hudong both are elucidated by Wiki as Wiki’s themselves with commenting functionality.

Jia Junpeng also is somewhat clarified on Wiki but I’m not sure I really get it. Obviously it was a lot of traffic though.

QQ is basically the Chinese AIM on steroids, and Happy Farm is the Chinese Farmville and attached to QQ.

You learn something new every day!

[drastic_quench]

@Iggins

I laughed that /b/ made up the balls of 4chan island.

@Shalmanese

4chan is shaped like a penis.

• shooting an archipelago of jizz!

[Ruby]

The man sacrificed goats when researching these stats. Are we SURE he’s not a Doper?

[digs]

@suranyi

@astro

On www.bigboards.com we rank # 422 in members and 60th in # of posts.

And yet it’s the only online community in which I participate regularly.

I am so unconnected.

Clearly the map does not indicate “Amount of Time-That-You-Can’t-Afford-To-Waste that you waste anyway”.

This place’d be huge…

[Darth_Nader]

Anyone remember NationStates? And the Sea of Cecil? It was near Farkistan.

[fuzzypickles]

Hmm…the tiny region of “Attractive Myspace Pages” apparently no longer exists.