Not only does Flatland not really put much thought into the worldbuilding of a 2-D world, but the misogyny is so thick as to be utterly stifling.
Yeah. I found it interesting to read as a teen, but the misogyny was incredibly striking.
Seconded, I recall it as being pretty good.
That would make the sample acquisition a bit more challenging.
When will it be dis-splayd?
I read the first couple dozen pages, and the classism is way more striking to me. The misogyny is just that typical Victorian stuff about the delicate (but dangerous!) women-folk. But it’s rather amusing how they put everyone on an explicit scale with class equivalent to side-count, with isosceles triangles at the bottom (and scalene so deformed as to be non-persons), with the higher classes being squares, hexagons, etc…
But it’s a satire anyway. We aren’t meant to sympathize with the world. I guess it seems a little over-the-top now, but that’s a function of having progressed a bit since then.
Yeah. I read it many decades ago but even then I read it as a satire of the misogynism and classism of the mores of its time. While it was wonderful illustrating how we of three spatial dimensions would interact with objects of greater dimensions, the concept was more to mock our silly hierarchies. The physics, biology, and technology of two dimensions was not its point. At least as I recall, but again, it was a long time ago read.
It doesn’t even depend that much on the star movements-- If you draw the new lines on the current star positions, it still looks fairly tyrannosaurian regal.
I mean, are we going to pretend that any constellations actually look like the things they’re supposed to be?
The Big Dipper kinda looks like a Dipper. But that’s not a constellation, so I guess that doesn’t count. Well, Crux, the Southern Cross, definitely looks like a cross.
Many of the the HA Rey depictions do an OK job, but the problem is many possible groupings and pictures can be made.
Brian
You could check out other cultures’ constellations that don’t hew to the Babylonian/Greek tradition Europeans inherited via Ptolemy.
I was using “accent” generally. I momentarily forgot where I was. 
A schooner without foresails like here would be badly balanced. At least completely unable to tack, and probably tend to leeward even with agressive rudder. But at least you have a good excuse to fire your cannon all the time.
Wait no, I got that reversed. With mainsails only it will tend to windward.
I have to say of all the obscure vocabulary I have, I really never expected to see any form of “kedge” in an xkcd. That was the surprising thing to me about this episode.
It’s also funny (and no doubt deliberate) that of all the Olde Tymey sailing ship designs, he drew one of the ones most capable of sailing to windward.
@Chelonaut’s completely legitimate quibbles about lack of foresails aside. Of course if they did have conventional jib(s) rigged off the bow and bowsprit, that would interfere w the cannon. He had to leave empty foredeck space in the third panel to draw the teeny people firing the cannon.
Judging by the shallow angle of the kedging chain, they’re sailing (well, kedging) over very shallow ground. Common wisdom when anchoring smaller vessels is to have attached chain+rope = 5 x depth of water.
It might not have had a mast in the front, but it DID have a boom.
Oh, and also,