#average familiarity

[clove-pinks]

Steven Tors laments that Sir Isaac Brock is "sadly not well-enough remembered today in the country he helped establish," and I thought to myself, doesn't every Canadian know about Brock??

And it occurred to me that I am probably not interacting with the average citizen of Canada. I am literally the xkcd joke about experts wildly overestimating the average person's familiarity with their pet subject.

"It’s easy to forget that the average Canadian probably only knows about the Battle of Queenston Heights and the Siege of Detroit."

"And Lundy's Lane, of course."

[folatefangirl]

Made this during book club after our book talk got derailed into fandom talk 😅

[belleandkurtbastian]

@gupdoo3 and I were having a conversation about reference pools and I was struck with a flash of inspiration.

[evilmidnightlurker]

The problem with modern RuneQuest books

[the-frostiest-of-flakes]

[wolfstarwarrior]

Does anybody have that version of the xkcd average familiarity comic that talks about jk r*wling's bigotry? I need it for reasons

[codsfish]

Girlfriend has discovered xkcd for the first time and keeps excitedly showing me random comics that I've already seen. It's so wholesome (and also reminds me of the average familiarity comic).

[daisukitoo]

XKCD 2501 moment of discovering that my obscure knowledge is more obscure than I realized:

I was listening to a one-hit wonder from the 1990s, "The Mighty K.C." by For Squirrels. And it turns out that "one-hit wonder" may be rounding up a bit? According to a secondary source, it hit the top 100 chart for 4 weeks, peaking at #70. Would you call that a "hit"? Selling 100,000 albums isn't shabby. When I mentioned it to someone else who remembers 1990s music, she said she only knew the song because it occasionally comes up in my car playlist.

Between recording and releasing that single, half of the band was killed in a car crash, which explains the lack of a second hit. I don't recall radio stations mentioning that when they talked about the song, mostly explaining that the band name was "For Squirrels" not "Four Squirrels."