Title text:
In 1899, people were walking around shouting ‘23’ at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3184/
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8675309
67 sneaking onto the ‘funny numbers’ list is hilarious—teens are basically a standards committee now.
“Now, my story begins in nineteen dickety two. We had to say dickety 'cause the kaiser had stolen our word twenty….”
They left out 86 and the more recent variant 8647
Needs to add my favorite number: 8647
Missing “about three-fitty”
I’m not a mathematican, but
I was reading Wikipedia about the origins of 23 and came across this neat tidbit:
On the RMS Titanic there was a watertight door on E Deck numbered 23 which was informally called the “skidoo door” according to the testimony of the Chief Baker Charles John Joughin.
I feel like (6, 7) should definitely be a tuple
6’7" is a non integer measurement.
It’s got nothing to do with height. It’s a Chicago police code for murder. The rapper whose song this was taken from is from Chicago and the the context in which it appears in those lyrics make it clear it’s also about murder.
The 6’7” thing was made up by people trying to find reason or rhyme as to why a shibboleth they didn’t know would be said at a basketball game and inventing that it had to be connected to the height of one player.
For millennials, like me: 1337 means “LEET” which is short for “Elite”.
Millenials pwnd the n00bs with the best of the genX back in the day, but I think leetspeak was a lot more niche than say 67 is, it was very gamercoded/nerdcoded when that wasn’t cool.
Source: am millenial who had a leetspeak AIM handle back then
back when the internet was not cool
Also for geeky Gen X
Sorry, what? I’m a millennial, this is common knowledge for anyone who played a videogame in the last quarter century.
I was going to say, I think the perpetuation of leetspeak and most of its use falls squarely into the millennial generation’s early 90s into the early 2000s.
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I’m confused as to where you fit in the Millennial demographic for you to have not known this already
It seems, I’m on the older side.
i installed a kali linux vm and nmap, wireshark, tcpdump, and metasploit cuz i wanna be teh 1337 h4x0r i wanted to be when i was a 15 year old in 2001
Had a friend who wrote his french oral presentation out in 1337, he was allowed notes but not the word for word presentation. He showed the teacher beforehand, she said that’s fine, looks like gibberish.
I did that too, but back then it was called Backtrack Linux. I bought a special Atheros chipset WiFi card for my laptop’s PCMCIA slot. The built-in 802.11b WiFi card worked under Linux but only by using the Windows ME driver in NDISWrapper, which didn’t support promiscuous mode.
The Atheros chipsets could be configured (by flashing the firmware with a blob I got from a BBS, if I recall) to capture the traffic from nearby wireless networks. In particular, I wanted to pick up the signal from when a device first connects. There was a bug in Windows XP that could cause the WiFi to drop briefly, then promptly reconnect. By triggering that bug over and over I could capture a lot of reconnect packets in a short time frame.
Then I’d save the data to a big file and pipe it to Aircrack and extract the Wired Equivalent Privacy password.
I was a 1337 H4XX0|2 B-)
Tap for spoiler
Well, that’s how the tutorial said it would work anyway. I actually never could get enough packets captured. The signal strength was too low
Just to toss this in there, it totally wasn’t a bug, you were sending a deauth packet to force them to reconnect then recapturing their auth sequence until you had enough packets to crack the WEP key. A pretty fun demo back then was to setup a wireless bridge between an open public network and a rogue AP (usually we’d just use a pcmcia WiFi card bridge to the internal WiFi adapter); then (due to pretty much no https anywhere), you could follow peoples browsing habits, log into their MySpace/LiveJournal/DeadJournal/GeoCities/etc (passwords were pretty commonly passed in plaintext), etc.
It was never done nefariously, but allowed us to learn a lot.
Same, but I was 15 like 15 years later lol
What the h311 is wrong with you? Us millennials invented 1337!
Nope. Source: am gen X.
Y2K
Yep I think pops here has this one, us Millennials grew up with leet speak, it already was a thing in the 80s.
People get confused because leet speak had a resurgence around 1997 or so.
Yeah it was common on BBSes late 80s at least. Also am gen X.
That’s the first time anyone called me pops! NOW I feel old!
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Y35!
1337 h4x0r
Hack the planet
Ragebait. Millenials are like 40 and have back pain.
84CK P41N
D0/\/'7 m4k3 f|_|/\/ 0f /\/\y 84(k
I can confirm you can in fact get back pain before the age of 40
Batman can confirm too.
Source: Knightfall.
I’m still disappointed that 27 never managed to get on this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2-7CqYFi64
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It’s in the panel
Doh!
Teens in different countries have different funny numbers too funny enough. There is a thing influencing multiple civilizations to do this.
What about Schfifty-Five?
Fourteen-teen
Shiggity Schwat
Girlfriend’s age?
My IQ
Three fiddy?
Tree-fiddy came so close to making the list I think but it feels right that it didn’t.
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Nazi dog whistles do not go on the fun numbers board.
That one isn’t funny.
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