this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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xkcd

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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) by xkcdbot@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world
 

xkcd #3110: Global Ranking

Title text:

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

Transcript:

[Cueball is seated at a desk, and uses a laptop. White Hat is standing right behind him.]
Cueball: I'm ranked 7,145,000^th^ globally on this chess platform.
Cueball: It's hard to be ranked that low in any activity.

[Zoom on Cueball talking]
Cueball: Few pastimes even have 7 million rated players. Until the Internet, it wasn't really possible. You could be this bad, but only unofficially.

[Cueball is now facing White Hat]
Cueball: So in a sense, I'm worse at chess than anyone was at anything for most of human history.
White Hat: Why are you still doing it?

[Cueball is back on the laptop]
Cueball: Well, no human has ever had this many friends to play with.
White Hat: That person is calling you some very obscene names.
Cueball: Our friendship is complicated.

Source: https://xkcd.com/3110/

explainxkcd for #3110

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[–] ksigley@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

There really is an xkcd for everything.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 7 points 1 day ago

People who have only just learned the moves of chess play better chess than I do.

[–] charonn0@startrek.website 37 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] ksigley@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

Happy cake day.

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Of all the games that I would expect to have a global ranking, that is the absolute last.

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago

the absolute last

just like Stanley

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I hear a dead rat is actually pretty good at this game. Way better than I was.

[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Have you tried playing it with a live rat that you shake and squeeze?

[–] Randelung@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh god, is that a RATSHAKER reference?

[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That it is!

Is it more obscure than I assumed?

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

At one point I was ranked dead last in the entire world for number of seconds lived.

[–] y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 42 minutes ago

You were in first for "youngest person" though!

[–] trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Chances are you shared that position with someone else.

Edit: There are 86400 seconds in a day while globally on average about 362,000 babies are born per day.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not if it's measured with a fractional part.

I wonder if the rate is high enough and the distances large enough that relativity could make it so people on opposite ends of the world disagree on which baby was born first. Then again, birth takes a lot longer than a second and it's not really possible to pinpoint an exact timestamp when the baby is born and wasn't previously.

[–] trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Not if it’s measured with a fractional part.

In that case I'd expect the wording to be "time lived", not "number of seconds lived".

I don't think the time someone is born is registered that precisely anywhere, so it would probably be very hard to get anyone to agree on it.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago

You know I thought of how to word that better, but wasn't sure I could convey what I meant clearly enough. I should have just used something like 'time lived'.