There's a tendency among bad internet reviewers (like me!) to make hyperbolic statements, especially in the openings. Please understand, it's only because we want love and affection (and also because most of us don't know how to write a real introductary paragraph). So please be aware that when I say "I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be an anti-joke or not", I am aware that it reads like a forced and poor attempt to be funny and quotable, but no really I seriously can't tell.
Let's do a brief thought experiment. Imagine you check XKCD one day, and the picture is of one stick figure punching another. The caption is "If you ever really want to make people made, punch people in the face." See? It just doesn't work. Like... yeah, I know that would make people mad, it's a shitty thing to do. I have almost the same reaction to that hypothetical comic as I do to this one. The difference is that face-punching has a fun slapstick element to it, whereas region-locking is cold and boring.
Please note that I'm 100% aware that a lot of region-locking is because of copyright restrictions. Please also note that I think current copyright law is almost universally bad.
Explainxkcd tells me that this might be a joke on people who use VPNs to access region-locked content. That's like, maybe funny, but it'd be funnier to actually see someone trying different regions and failing, and then we could see Black Hat chuckling to himself or something. The alt-text is kinda clever too - a flag being region locked, get it?! But it's alt-text and it doesn't count.
When I was a kid Ed, Edd, n Eddy, I was kinda confused when I saw the Paul Boyd memorial note after the ending of "Look Before You Ed". It seemed kinda weird to me, since I thought cartoons were for kids. I didn't get why they'd want to put his name on a cartoon instead of a park bench or something. I didn't get back then that when you really love someone, you want them to be remembered, and thought of, by as many people as possible, as much as possible.
My cat Munch had to be put down this week.
My family got her when I was in fifth grade, from a cousin who got her from a friend who got her from someone else. Because of this, nobody is really sure exactly how old she was. She was originally named "Munchlax" by one of her previous owners, since she ate a lot. I'm pretty sure that at some point in her life she was abused. She was missing a tail (if you felt the tip it seemed bent in a way that I don't think a naturally missing tail would be) and when we first got her the first thing she did was run into the basement and hide for hours. It took more than a year before before she'd let me pet her. But eventually she realized I wouldn't hurt her and she slowly became the snuggliest cat in the world. I would wake up with her sitting on my back or cuddled up to my chest, usually purring like a tiny lawnmower. Back when I was more into trying to play the piano, she would always jump on my lap and headbutt my arms.
She loved to climb people. She would meow at me to pick her up, which had her head roughly level with my shoulder, and she'd climb up onto my shoulders and ride me around while I did things. She especially liked if I wore my hoodie so she could sit in the hood and have her paws on my shoulder. She'd do it to other people to, hilariously annoying multiple members of my extended family.
She loved to lay down in a woodpile outside my old house, and she'd blend in to the point where you wouldn't see her if you weren't looking. When she was sitting up and the sun would hit her right, she would almost glow, all her fur catching the light like a halo around her.
When my family first got her, there were crickets in the basement, but she was such a good cricket hunter that they were all gone within a year. Even when she was getting older she'd jump up and catch moths between her paws and eat them.
Speaking as someone who is at best a C+ and at worst barely functioning as a human being, Munch was the perfect therapy cat. I would look at her and I'd think about how much I loved her even though she was missing her tail and how she used to be scared of everything but wasn't anymore, and feel better about my own future. She was super soft and fluffy, and she could purr loud enough to wake people up.
This is one of the last pictures I took of her. She was sleeping and I didn't want to wake her up by petting her.
Rest in peace, Munch (????-2018). You were the best cat, and you were the best at being a cat.
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