pickup-line
Original: pickup-line on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Man (with light-colored hair): Esthie, man! You're a neuroscientist! You wanna hear an intellectual pickup line?
(Caption / her thought): Like what?
Panel 2:
Man: I was just reading a thought experiment of Daniel Dennett where he imagined a brain where you put a thimble in someone's brain, but the thimble keeps moving around so they can probe it, but the prison is closest to it. Can't.
Woman: That's fascinating.
Panel 3:
Woman: Wait... what's it called?
Panel 4:
Caption: And so...
Man: Hey, there! Wanna play a game of hide the thimble?
Votey:
A hand-drawn graph. The vertical axis is labeled "brow," with "high" at the top and "low" at the bottom (an arrow points up to "high," an arrow points down to "low"). The horizontal axis is labeled "Panels" and marked 1, 2, 3, 4. A line starts high on the left, dips slightly, then plunges sharply downward by panel 4 (the falling segment drawn in red).
Man (with light-colored hair): Esthie, man! You're a neuroscientist! You wanna hear an intellectual pickup line?
(Caption / her thought): Like what?
Panel 2:
Man: I was just reading a thought experiment of Daniel Dennett where he imagined a brain where you put a thimble in someone's brain, but the thimble keeps moving around so they can probe it, but the prison is closest to it. Can't.
Woman: That's fascinating.
Panel 3:
Woman: Wait... what's it called?
Panel 4:
Caption: And so...
Man: Hey, there! Wanna play a game of hide the thimble?
Votey:
A hand-drawn graph. The vertical axis is labeled "brow," with "high" at the top and "low" at the bottom (an arrow points up to "high," an arrow points down to "low"). The horizontal axis is labeled "Panels" and marked 1, 2, 3, 4. A line starts high on the left, dips slightly, then plunges sharply downward by panel 4 (the falling segment drawn in red).
Alt text
A four-panel SMBC comic. A pale-haired man leans toward a woman (a neuroscientist named Esthie) at what looks like a bar and offers to tell her an "intellectual pickup line." He rambles through a convoluted, half-garbled retelling of a Daniel Dennett thought experiment involving a thimble placed inside a brain that keeps moving so it can be probed. She replies, "That's fascinating," and asks what it's called. In the final panel the caption reads "And so..." and he grins and delivers the actual punchline pickup line: "Hey there! Wanna play a game of hide the thimble?" The votey is a hand-drawn line graph: the vertical axis is "brow" (ranging from "high" at top to "low" at bottom) and the horizontal axis is "Panels" (1 through 4). The line begins high-brow, then nosedives sharply by panel 4 (the plunge drawn in red), illustrating how the smart-sounding setup collapses into a crude innuendo.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.