Comics I Don’t Understand

I’m Lost

Cidu Bill on May 13th 2009

Filed in Abstruse Goose, Bill Bickel, CIDU, Lost, comic strips, comics, humor | 17 responses so far

17 Responses to “I’m Lost”

Benjamin B May 13th 2009 at 12:15 am 1

This is really just a reference to how each episode of “Lost” seems to introduce a new, more bizarre plot to the already convoluted storyline.
farmerjoe May 13th 2009 at 12:48 am 2

The joke is that you are lead to believe that the NSA has intercepted some kind of scrambled terrorist communication, but the punchline is that it’s just an not-yet-aired episode of Lost.
Arthur May 13th 2009 at 01:20 am 3

Farmerjoe: It would take an unbelievable compression algorithm
to hide an entire TV episode in the high-order pixels of less
than 2 minutes of video.

Perhaps the video that had the secret message was the latest
(not yet aired) episode of Lost, and they’re watching it while
their supercomputer works on the encryption.
Marshal May 13th 2009 at 01:23 am 4

Interesting, Dual_EC_DRGB seems to exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

It appears to be a pseudorandom number generator.

KH-27 must be the satellite that replaced the KH-13 military satellite. I’ll let you google about that. 8^)
Bill Zilch May 13th 2009 at 01:25 am 5

It’s about the people that think that every minor detail in the background of Lost is some sort of secret hint into what’s happening. Except it almost never is.

Seriously, go into any topic about Lost on the Internet, and people will be talking about how some books on a shelf form an anagram that says how the show is going to end.
Silviya May 13th 2009 at 02:24 am 6

I’m 100% with farmerjoe - for me it’s just a random gag about a bunch of people pretending to have something really, really important, but it turns out they ar just looking for an excuse to watch TV serials in work hours….
GP May 13th 2009 at 08:21 am 7

Arthur, the show’s not hidden in less than 2 minutes of another video, they’ve found something hidden in less than 2 minutes of the show. Lost fanatics search nearly every pixel for hidden meaning, and often invent it when it can’t be found.
John B. May 13th 2009 at 08:50 am 8

The punch line doesn’t make much sense to me. Now if they had said “24″ instead of “Lost”, it would be much more funny!
Brent May 13th 2009 at 09:37 am 9

This joke could just as well be told with “Fringe”… in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the inspiration, as the eyecatch code for that show was broken by using a computer (although it was just a simple cypher) and in the news a while back. I figure that 24 was used because it was the bigger show… and is simply so much more twisted and entangled with secrets. The key here is that the show be one of J.J. Abrams mindtwisters… The Colbert Report did this joke when he was on.

It certainly couldn’t be told this way with “24″… that joke would involve torturing the “devious bastards” for the information.

#4, Marshall: Yep, it is technically a PRNG… but PRNGs are used a lot in cryptology, and this one is famous because it has a backdoor when used in the standard configuration.
Rammy M May 13th 2009 at 11:37 am 10

@Arthur & GP
23:10 to 25:47 is 2 minutes and 37 seconds, not “less
than 2 minutes”

Secondly “this video” referred to in the first comic-frame is the episode of Lost. The supposed “secret message” would be a message (ie “hint”)from J.J. Abrams to the hard-core fans. (Not that the episode is hidden inside some other “video”)

frame 7 is just their excuse to watch the show.

@Bill Zilch
In fact there are many “secret messages” like this, though it’s also true that (some) fans see and imagine more than there is.

If you’ve have read any of the fan sites (which I did in the 2nd season) then this is funny (but just in a “cute” sort of way)
Chakolate May 13th 2009 at 12:13 pm 11

Heh - for the first five or so panels, I thought this was going to be a riff on Bible codes. You know, how easy it is to find hidden messages if you look hard enough.
Judge Mental May 13th 2009 at 11:26 pm 12

I have gotten bored and walked out of a theater half-way through a movie before, but this was the first time it ever happened to me when reading a comic strip.
Elyrest May 14th 2009 at 12:12 am 13

Judge - I lost interest in the middle of the strip too. Then I had to go back and try to pay attention so I wouldn’t be lost during the comments.
Winter Wallaby May 14th 2009 at 04:21 am 14

Geez, Judge, I’ve gotten bored by comic strips before and stopped reading them partway through, but it seems like an overreaction to walk out of the building.
Size May 15th 2009 at 04:01 pm 15

I think it’s amazing that the people who work for NSA don’t have bodies.
MoWatt May 18th 2009 at 12:26 am 16

I just laughed out loud from a comment for the first time (as far as I can recall), thanks to Winter Wallaby.
Brian May 18th 2009 at 11:18 am 17

No, Arthur, the video is an episode of LOST, and they are using all their high-tech equip. to decode something within 150 seconds of the episode. (Sorry: 157 seconds, more than two minutes—get it right!) The joke is how many geeks get caught up with the manipulations of LOST.

I don’t think that it was an over-reaction on Judge’s part. Some comics just follllowwww yooooooou. (Picture man screaming in his car as he discovers the Katzenjammer Kids in the back seat. He runs into a restaurant: There’s Cathy & Irving at the next table! Ahhhhh!)