Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

help-3

2024-02-23 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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help-3
Votey panel for help-3
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Explanation

This comic shows a man named Allan praying with the word "HELP" repeated dozens of times, filling his entire prayer bubble. The caption below reads: "Allan doesn't actually need help. He's DDoSing God to see if he can crash prayer service."

The joke is a tech/religion crossover. A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a cyberattack where a target server is overwhelmed with a massive flood of requests, causing it to crash or become unresponsive for legitimate users. Allan is applying this concept to prayer: by flooding God with an enormous volume of "HELP" requests, he's attempting to overwhelm the divine prayer-processing system and crash it for everyone else.

The humor comes from treating prayer as if it were a server-client system with finite processing capacity. It's a very nerdy, very SMBC approach to theology -- taking a spiritual concept and subjecting it to the logic of computer science. The comic also plays on the image of someone praying intensely -- which normally signals deep piety or desperation -- and reveals the motivation to be essentially trolling. Allan isn't in spiritual crisis; he's a hacker trying to break God's infrastructure, which is both absurd and oddly in keeping with the kind of person who would DDoS something just to see if they could.

View History (1) Original Comic