Comic 884: Porn names and nostalgia

Alt-text: We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.

First things first - the joke is about the 'algorithm' used to create your porno/stripper name, which is:

Porn name = name of first pet + street you grew up on.

For instance, if you had a pet killer whale named 'John' while you were growing up on Holmes Street, your porn name would be 'John Holmes'.

Secondly, if like me you didn't grow up in the US, Mr Rogers was a soft-spoken, well-loved children's entertainer, and 'a symbol of compassion, patience and morality'. This was despite having the comically villainous middle name 'McFeely'.

It appears Randy's been on a bit of a nostalgia trip, because both of these references are pretty damn old. Even his alt-text is a nostalgic, self-referential look back to what is probably one of Randy's favourite comics. While he manages not to explicitly scream out his references, he's probably confused half of his audience with this comic simply because they don't know what the hell he's on about.

That alt-text also means the character depicted here, Randy's hypothetical child, is a guy. Not easy to spot given that the only clue to identity in xkcd is hairstyles.

This whole comic seems quite broody and nostalgic. I'm not sure why he specifies the Rogers Street near Somerville, where he lives, but it adds to that feel while horribly mangling that sentence. Does Randall want to start a family? Is he going through a quarter-life crisis, or existential angst over his mortality brought on by recent events?

Probably.

The worst part of this comic is obviously the fact that swarms of idiot fanboys are going to descend on that street like a plague of giant sweaty locusts.