Comic #3060

Back to the Future was released in 1985, so it's not that surprising that Young Adam and Jamie haven't heard of it.

By contrast, Planet of the Apes was released in 1968* and The Time Machine was released in 1960*.

* Let's just ignore the remakes of both of these films.


2026-03-11 Rerun commentary: All three of these films were favourites of mine. You can't go past a good time travel movie.

Comic #3059

A reader suggested a joke along these lines a long time ago. I really liked it, but it's taken me something like 7 years to actually use it.


2026-03-10 Rerun commentary: If you're wondering what Draak is eating, it's clearly a plum pudding.

Comic #3058


2026-03-09 Rerun commentary: I wonder how long it would take modern cryptanalysts with computer systems to break the Enigma code. Searching... I found a story about this! An expert says that modern technology could crack the Enigma code in a few minutes. Back in 2017, researchers actually cracked the Enigma code from scratch in less than 13 minutes, and recent technology advances would just make this faster. Potentially bringing it down to seconds.

The List of Shame

Mar. 9th, 2026 04:22 am[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_advocacy
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
People frequently ask us about whether their specific US state is trying to enact a social media age verification law so they can call their state representatives and yell at them about it! I have had "build a system that will let me easily update this without having to do so manually, categorizing these bills by status, what problems they have, and what we'd do about them if they pass" on my want-to-do list for a really long time, but until I can, here's the current list of bills I know about.

This (very long, sigh) list is accurate to the best of my knowledge as of 8 March 2026, but it may not include every bill that's been introduced in every state. (I've used a few different lists plus my own "searching until I got too depressed to continue" to assemble it, excluding laws I think have absolutely no chance of passing but including laws where I think there's still even a slight chance.) If you know of one that isn't on the list, please let me know in the comments!

These are state laws only. I'm concentrating on those because you can find lists of bad federal bills more easily, but all the lists of state bills I know of are industry-gated or limited-distribution. If you don't have a preferred source for finding out about bad federal legislation about the internet, Bad Internet Bills (from Fight for the Future) and the EFF Action Center are a great place to start!

This list is only counting social media bills; I am not including bills that don't apply to us because they're modeled on the app store/OS age signal model legislation or bills that deal with age verification for other services like chatbots or "AI companions", because I'd go completely off the rails and resort to just screaming incoherently when the list passed a hundred items. I will try to update this at least quarterly, or whenever the Magic 8 Ball says there's a rapidly moving bill that you need to yell at people about.


The Current Hall of Shame )
Comic #3057

This is the good thing about time travel stories. You can do all the setting up and gathering of the party beforehand, then when the action begins you just jump right into the thick of it.


2026-03-08 Rerun commentary: Imagine if The Lord of the Rings was written this way. You could skip over all of Book One and the Council of Elrond, and go straight to entering Moria. And then have Gandalf go back in time to organise everything after the Balrog thing. Wow... now I want to see that version.

Comic #3056

The price is, however, your sanity!!!!


2026-03-07 Rerun commentary: Wow. Imagine someone who's never read any other Irregular Webcomic! strip seeing this as their first example. "Here, read this! What do you think of this comic strip? Yeah, they're all like that! Cool, isn't it?" Maybe try it with someone near you and let me know their reaction.

Comic #3055

I was looking for some sort of historical nexus trope, but this will have to do.


2026-03-05 Rerun commentary: Oh, look! There they are! (Sometimes I really should read ahead when writing these rerun annotations. But that's like work.)

Comic #3054

This conversation is similar to some conversations I have with my friends when we're discussing some esoteric bit of knowledge.

In fact we may have had this exact conversation.


2026-03-04 Rerun commentary: We still have conversations like this. Honestly it's one of the highlights of having crazy friends with esoteric interests.

Victory in Virginia!!

Mar. 3rd, 2026 08:17 am[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_advocacy
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
On Friday, the judge hearing our VA case issued a preliminary injunction preventing the state from enforcing Virginia's SB 854 against any Netchoice member (which means us!) while the lawsuit proceeds. Judge Giles's ruling is a little technical in places and covers a number of legal issues that I keep meaning to get around to explaining someday so folks can have a better grasp on the kind of things they'll see argued in cases like these, like strict scrutiny and associational standing, but the end result is still pretty clear, I think: the judge agrees Netchoice has made a strong enough showing right from the start that the law is unconstitutional to block the state from doing anything to enforce it until the full case can be heard.

This is only the beginning of that particular fight and we still have a ways to go, but it's great news for us, for all our users from Virginia, and for the internet as a whole. Three cheers for the Netchoice team and the outside litigation counsel, who are Clement & Murphy for this one! The full docket in RECAP: NetChoice v. Jason S. Miyares, 1:25-cv-02067, (E.D. Va.).
Comic #3053

It'd be nice to have a watch that tells you the time in your home time zone, whatever time zone you happen to be in currently, and whatever time period you happen to be in currently. I guess it'll be standard gear for time travellers.


2026-03-03 Rerun commentary: I've set up the clock app on my phone to display the time in nine different time zones. Mostly accumulated over various trips where I wanted the local time handy.

Comic #3052

I was writing this strip and wondered what an elf might actually eat in a pseudo-medieval setting. Meat and ale seems a bit too... dwarvish. Surely an elf would eat something a bit more green and healthy.

I bet elven muesli would taste pretty good.

And yes, of course dwarves eat gumbo. It's made from everything.


2026-03-02 Rerun commentary: Is the foreshadowing in the first panel too subtle? Dwarves might eat salad too. Potato salad. With bacon. Lots of bacon. Potatoes optional.

Comic #3051

"Tarry" is a good verb. I must remember to tarry more often.


2026-03-01 Rerun commentary: If you fell into a pit in La Brea, you might tarry because of being too tarry.

Comic #3050

A kenning is a type of metaphorical construction in which a compound noun phrase with a figurative association invoking the image of a simple noun replaces that simple noun. For example, "sky candle" as a phrase referring to the sun, or "sea steed" as a phrase referring to a ship.

Kennings are associated with Old Norse, Icelandic, and Old English, particularly because of their use in sagas. A particularly poetic kenning which I've liked ever since I heard it is "whale road", which refers to the sea. This kenning appears in Beowulf:

In the end each clan on the outlying coasts beyond the whale-road had to yield to him and begin to pay tribute.
Combining this lucid and beautiful imagery with more modern literary imagery produces the extremely poetic line uttered here by Paris.
2026-02-28 Rerun commentary: With a galaxy-wide sports league, the road trips for away games must be pure hell.

Comic #3049

Clearly Ishmael had good history teachers.


2026-02-27 Rerun commentary: I actually think I learnt more about World War II from one of my English teachers, than in history classes. He was obsessed with WWII, and we studied multiple novels about it, as well as the Diary of Anne Frank.

Comic #3048

I did only one year of computer science at university before moving on to physical science. Several of my friends continued on to computer science degrees, so I often had occasion to visit them in the computer science department. And indeed it seemed that all they ever did in there was play games on the computers.

I guess I missed out on all the fun.


2026-02-26 Rerun commentary: These were on mainframe computers, accessed by terminals distributed throughout the computer science building. They'd be playing games where they each controlled a spaceship and went around having combats against the other players. Over in the physics department, we had mainframe terminals too, but as far as I know nobody ever played games on them.

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