Monday, May 30

An incredibly nerdy injoke that made me laugh out loud.

Today's Dinosaur Comics are funny in and of themselves -- but there's a buried metajoke that just floored me.

Ryan North always puts title tags on the comics, to give a little injoke or commentary on the day's comic. Today's is "s/owned/pwned/g".

Yup -- it's commentary on a joke, relying for its humour on an understanding of Unix command-line tools (sed/awk in this case), internet-gaming lingo ('pwned' as a variant of 'owned', which means "beaten in a comprehensive way"), and the level-confusion of the application of that lingo to a part of the real world that's almost exactly antithetical to internet gaming (making anarchic art shows in parks). OK, so it's incredibly narrow. But I get it! And that's almost the funniest part!

The funniest part is that I care enough to post about it, too!

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