[Irregular Webcomic! #2305 Rerun](https://ift.tt/DiqKoE5)

I remember when I first read The Hobbit, I was really bothered by the fact that Bilbo found this ring, and he put it in his pocket instead of trying it on. It seemed obvious that if you find a ring, the very first thing you would do is try it on.

2022-06-04 Rerun commentary: When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! He could hear nothing, see nothing, and he could feel nothing except the stone of the floor. Very slowly he got up and groped about on all fours, till he touched the wall of the tunnel; but neither up nor down it could he find anything: nothing at all, no sign of goblins, no sign of dwarves. His head was swimming, and he was far from certain even of the direction they had been going in when he had his fall. He guessed as well as he could, and crawled along for a good way, till suddenly his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it. He put the ring on his finger almost without thinking; certainly it did not seem that there was anything else sensible to do with a ring. Immediately Bilbo was assailed by horrific visions and voices as the dark attention of Sauron turned to gaze through him and into his deepest and most secret terrors and fears. Unable to resist the incredible power of The One Ring - for that is what it was! - Bilbo descended into darkness, only metaphorical this time for he was still in quite literal darkness. With a fresh mind to corrupt, Sauron's influence drew Bilbo to the depths of Mordor to the deliver the Ring unto him, thus sealing the fate of Middle-earth and ending our story somewhat prematurely.

[Irregular Webcomic! #4765](https://ift.tt/u5Q6R7l)

When was the last time you saw a Lego minifigure bleed?

[Irregular Webcomic! #4764](https://ift.tt/vPWf1y4)

Gargoyles are monstrous creatures in Dungeons & Dragons, well known for their stone-like skin and their propensity to sit still and convincingly pose as statues. Of course this means that any player worth their salt will be immediately suspicious of anything that the Dungeon Master describes as "a gargoyle statue". Interestingly, descriptions of gargoyles are wildly inconsistent across different D&D products and editions. The most usual description is that they are carved from stone and magically imbued with the ability to move (and attack pesky adventurers), and that they need neither food nor water. However some official D&D products variously describe them as carnivorous, or even as natural biological creatures capable of reproduction. One possible way to think of them is that the original gargoyles were carved from stone and magically given life. And from there, they have gradually become capable of feeding and reproduction. Life... uh... finds a way.

[Irregular Webcomic! #4763](https://ift.tt/6HQ5CwN)

It's really hard getting a skeleton to hold a phone handset convincingly. (Try using that sentence out of context somewhere and see how people look at you.)

[Irregular Webcomic! #4762](https://ift.tt/R30nuaC)

I thought I'd written an annotation on badlands not long ago. Turns out I was right, it was just over a week ago on the rerun of strip #2298. Now I want to say the same thing here, but I can just point you at that instead. So let's talk about plains. The English word for the landform comes via the Old French plain from the Latin planus, meaning "flat", which is also the origin of the word "plane", meaning a flat or two-dimensional surface. The other common meaning of "plain", as in ordinary or unadorned, has exactly the same etymology. It comes from expanding the meaning of "flat" to refer not just to literal flatness of shape, but also to the metaphorical "flatness" of something that is unembellished or without decoration. The fact that English uses the same word "plain" to mean two divergent things led me to an embarrassing incident one time when travelling in Germany. I went into a chocolate shop, which had some delicious looking hand-made chocolates and bars of chocolate. My wife felt like some chocolate without any fillings or nuts or anything in it. In other words, some plain chocolate. I couldn't see any on display. I consulted my German phrasebook (this was in the days of printed phrasebooks, before translation became easy on a phone) and found the translation of "plain". And so I asked, in my very best German: "Haben Sie ebene Schokolade?" Now, anyone who speaks German is probably laughing at me already. For everyone else, my phrasebook had told me that the German word for "plain" was ebene. And so it is. If I'm talking about the landform. Yes, I was asking the shopkeeper if she had any "grassland/savannah/steppe chocolate". No matter how carefully or often I repeated my question, she had no idea what I was trying to ask for. I only discovered why some time later, after we had returned home to Australia.

[Irregular Webcomic! #4761](https://ift.tt/lgrjF6I)

I've kind of always wondered about this. Why does Qui-Gon try to deceive Anakin? Is he actually trying to deflect attention from his Jedi status? Is he making some sort of sick joke? Could this traumatic first encounter with the disingenuous ways of the Jedi have sown the seeds of Anakin's future?

[Irregular Webcomic! #2304 Rerun](https://ift.tt/nX0Aqlj)

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

- Alexander Graham Bell, who secured patent rights on the invention of the telephone. (Who actually invented it is the subject of a considerable amount of dispute.) He also said, with impressive prescience:

One day every major city in America will have a telephone.

2022-05-29 Rerun commentary: Sometimes the other door that opens is a secret door, detectable only by a Difficulty Class 18 Wisdom (Perception) check. And it's trapped, with a trap that requires a DC 20 Wisdom (Perception) check to detect and a DC 25 Dexterity check using thieves' tools to disarm it.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2303 Rerun](https://ift.tt/S7aIpyo)

It says something interesting about the modern world that I can very easily make a joke that is easier to understand for people of a foreign culture than to people of my own culture.

The only reason I know about Fig Newtons at all is because of imported American TV shows. They don't exist here in Australia, and I've never seen one, let alone eaten one.

Yet I can come up with a comic like this, off the top of my head. Just stop for a minute and think about what that means about society and culture today.

2022-05-28 Rerun commentary: Checking now what Fig Newtons look like (I actually had no idea until a few minutes ago), it seems that we do have a roughly similar sort of biscuit here in Australia: Arnott's Spicy Fruit Roll. Although reading the ingredients list, there are no figs in it - the fruit filling is sultanas, currants, raisins, and mixed peel. I actually had to search for the name as I didn't remember what the official name was - nearly everyone calls them "fruity pillows". At least in my experience.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2302 Rerun](https://ift.tt/aPyxF1z)

Mmm... Swiss chocolate.

2022-05-27 Rerun commentary: I first encountered Switzerland's reputation for cleanliness in Asterix in Switzerland, which has long been one of my favourites of the Asterix series. It also has fondue, which is delicious too.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2301 Rerun](https://ift.tt/s8rgyYM)

The word "literally" has in recent years been downgraded in meaning in a lot of people's minds, especially those young whippersnappers of the younger generations (who should take their awful music and get off my lawn).

In many places, especially online, you will see people use the word "literally" simply as a metaphorical intensifier, something like "very much so":

OMG, it was so embarrassing, I literally died!

Well, no, you see, if you had literally died, you would be dead, and you wouldn't be around to tell me how embarrassed you were.

Of course this is one of those cases where usage drifts out of touch with the established meaning of a word. Language purists and, generally speaking, older people, think "literally" means "in actual fact", and many will declare any other usage as "wrong". But the people who are using the word "literally" just to put emphasis on their metaphors don't think it means that, and the people who are reading or listening to their usage mostly understand that they intend "literally" to mean "metaphorically, with emphasis". Communication happens, and the communicating parties are happy.

Fight it as much as we want to, us old fogies are not going to win. Language evolves. Fifty years from now, "literally" will primarily mean "metaphorically". There is no fighting it. If you think it won't happen, think about what "gay" means today, compared to 50 years ago.

This raises the problem of what we will say when we literally do mean "literally"...

2022-05-26 Rerun commentary: Coincidentally, as this rerun goes live, this very week I will be teaching an online class for kids on critical thinking, and the topic we'll be discussing is the meanings of words and how language evolves over time. It's a fascinating topic, made more fascinating by the fact that I understand that language evolves and there's nothing wrong with that, but it still annoys me.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2300 Rerun](https://ift.tt/8J2XbsD)

I originally wrote this without the word "patented" before "immortality treatment". But I thought the idea of the Martians having a patent office was too funny to pass up.

Hey, I work with patents at my day job. The very idea of patents can be amusing to people who have to deal with them a lot. Trust me.

2022-05-25 Rerun commentary: I now find patents even funnier now that I no longer have to work with them. Take from that fact what you will.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2299 Rerun](https://ift.tt/zAPHtQO)

I'm sorry. I'll try to stem the tide in future.

2022-05-24 Rerun commentary: And thus we get to the root of Quercus's relationship with the others.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2298 Rerun](https://ift.tt/lxDgBXj)

There are some things for which time rifts are actually the more plausible explanation.

And just to add more mystery to your life, here is a Wikipedia article I ran across today. I'd never heard of these mysterious numbers stations before. The world truly is a stranger place than you can imagine.

2022-05-23 Rerun commentary: That looks very fertile for badlands. Badlands got their name because they are literally "bad lands" to travel through (via a cqleu from Canadian French, which originally used the term les mauvaises terres à traverser, meaning "bad lands to travel through"). Sometimes the simple explanation is the correct one.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2297 Rerun](https://ift.tt/wEZf9un)

I'll just note that the very first line Colonel Haken ever had in Irregular Webcomic! was:

So, Dr. Jones, we meet again.

2022-05-22 Rerun commentary: The German word for "doctor" is indeed "doktor", although interestingly that word only carries part of the meaning of the English "doctor", and it may not be the part that you expect. In German, a Doktor is someone with a doctoral degree, such as a Ph.D. On the other hand, a medical practitioner is an Arzt. Calling your German general practitioner a Doktor would be incorrect in most cases. But an archaeology professor would most certainly be a Doktor.

[Irregular Webcomic! #2296 Rerun](https://ift.tt/w38rFEX)

Back in the early 80s, roleplaying games pretty much were all about killing monsters and looting treasure. Which is fine if that's what you're after.

The most important part of having fun with a game is matching the expectations of the players to what the game will really be like.

2022-05-21 Rerun commentary: Now, here in the 2020s, roleplaying games have evolved a lot, and are very different to the early games of the 1980s. Many encourage character backgrounds, detailed descriptions, and active roleplaying in character. However, there are also a lot of games that seek to recreate the "monsters and loot" feel of early games, but with more modern and streamlined rules. There is a whole movement dedicated to this, called the Old School Revival (or "Renaissance", but I prefer "Revival"). There are some games which are termed retro-clones. These are very close, sometimes 100% compatible clones of the old Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert rules. Examples of these games include OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Dark Dungeons, and Old School Essentials. Games with different rule systems but which aim to recreate the feel and mood of old school roleplaying include Dungeons Crawl Classics, Dungeon World, The Black Hack, and Maze Rats, among many others.

[Irregular Webcomic! #4760](https://ift.tt/1uAMe28)

Now you know where they got all those ideas about dominating the human species...

[Irregular Webcomic! #4759](https://ift.tt/TJpXdHM)

I kind of anticipated this strip with the annotation to strip #4748. But picking up the story with Queen Elizabeth I: The line of royal succession following Elizabeth was not clear, and remained uncertain throughout her reign. She never married and is conventionally assumed never to had any children. Similarly to Henry VIII and Edward VI before her, she had some power to nominate her own successors, but she declined to do so. Historians consider it likely that she feared that once she named a successor her own life would be in danger, from whoever it was trying to... accelerate the process of becoming the next monarch. Henry's will had stated that if none of his children produced heirs—and neither Edward VI, Mary I, nor Elizabeth I had children—then the Crown should bypass the line of his eldest sister Margaret Tudor in favour of descendants of his younger sister Mary Tudor. The reason for this was that Margaret had married James IV of Scotland, and thus had given birth to the heir of the Scottish throne, James V. Being both Catholic and Scottish, Henry considered her descendants traitorous and unworthy of inheriting the throne. Mary Tudor was the grandmother of Lady Jane Grey, who we met in the previous annotation. Henry's will is why Lady Jane was briefly considered by some to be the Queen of England after Edward VI's death, before she was ousted after 9 days in favour of Mary I. But after Henry's own descendants ran out with the deaths of Mary I and Elizabeth I, the succession was open to some question again. If we follow Henry's wishes, the next in line to the throne would have been the 22-year-old Anne Stanley, later Countess of Castlehaven, a great-great-granddaughter of Mary Tudor, and cousin-twice-removed of Lady Jane Grey. For some time her father, Ferdinando Stanley, the 5th Earl of Derby, had been considered the likely successor of Elizabeth (after his mother Margaret Clifford), but he predeceased Elizabeth (and his own mother) in 1594. This left two women (Margaret Clifford and her granddaughter Anne Stanley) as the next successors of Elizabeth, which meant potentially well over 100 years of queens with no kings. 16th century England not being particularly known for equal opportunity, the tide of opinion began to turn to putting a male back on the throne, and attention turned to Margaret Tudor's Scottish descendants. The family tree is as follows, with the succession marked with blue arrows: James V and his daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, were Catholic, but her son James VI had been brought up Protestant, which removed one of the major objections to having him on the throne of England. So after the Earl of Derby's death in 1594, a polite and highly secret correspondence was set up between James VI and the English Parliament, exploring the possibility that James could be granted the throne of England following the death of Elizabeth I. With some years to complete the negotiations, an agreement was reached, and when Elizabeth finally died in 1603, James VI was declared King James I of England, uniting the Crowns of the two countries. Anne Stanley never got a say, and she made no protest, choosing not to put forward her claim to the throne. And so began the reign of the House of Stuart, which ruled England until the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Interestingly, if you trace the lineage of Anne Stanley, assuming that she was in fact the legal Queen of England following the death of Elizabeth, you conclude that the current monarch of England would be Lady Caroline Child Villiers, the only child of the first marriage of George Child Villiers, 9th Earl of Jersey. And Lady Caroline doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.