Yeah, I suspect it’s a jerboa problem. I’ve posted about it on the jerboa community now.

Edit: Confirmed. Jerboa’s source code uses a plugin to force all links to be opened as https.

under what circumstances have you peeled a lemon

Super late, but I figured it out because it happened again in a more recent comment. Lemmy seems to automatically change the links to https instead of http, even when http was explicitly included in the url. Somehow, xkcdsw is a completely different site on https than on http. If you copy the link into an external browser and remove the s, the link works as intended. I can only assume this is a behavior of the lemmy app(s), which is why it didn’t affect some users. Were you using jerboa?

Relevant xkcdsw (the first link in the comment): https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2wx9ws/today_i_discovered_xkcdsw/covb60y/

Now, why the hell would I link to a reddit comment instead of directly to the comic? Because for some reason, xkcdsw links on lemmy turn into links to a dodgy crypto site: http://xkcdsw.com/687

No idea why this happens - I remember this happening a few months back and I assumed that somehow xkcdsw had gotten hacked in between me fetching the link and other people replying, but just now I discovered that it works fine as long as you’re not following the link from my lemmy comment. Also, judging by replies the last time it happened, the direct link from lemmy does still work for some people. I assumed those people on the previous thread got in before the site got hacked, but now I wonder if it’s instance-specific. Is my instance just redirecting certain links to a crypto site for some reason? Or my app (jerboa)?

For those not seeing the redirect, the address bar claims it’s still xkcdsw, but the content appears to be from dogecoinaverage

The actual xkcdsw is just a shitpost, barely worth the two words and one link in my original comment, but the redirect is weird.

Edit: the fact that the link in the reddit comment works even via jerboa’s internal browser makes me think it’s the instance.

Edit 2: previous occurrence of this: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5379893 - it doesn’t seem to be instance-based, as someone on Feddit.de saw the redirect, but someone else on my instance did not

Edit 3: mystery solved(ish) - lemmy is silently changing the http to https (for some reason), which results in a different site (for some reason). I’ve alerted the xkcdsw owner to the problem via mastodon.

Edit 4: this is gonna look really confusing now that two9a has fixed the xkcdsw https situation. Like “what is this comment even talking about?” Trust me, it made sense up until about 10 minutes ago. Oh, also I confirmed that jerboa is the what changes all http links to https.

deleted by creator

You need to prompt your party to roleplay as non-idiots and think through their solution step-by-step. Of course, it’s possible your party is also running an outdated model.

I was going to say that’s actually a G K Chesterton quote, but it turns out it’s more complicated than that. Neil Gaiman himself said it was from Chesterton (when quoting it at the start of Coraline), but he wrote it from memory and didn’t double check, so the original is worded differently. At least, that’s how my quick googling claims the paraphrase happened. The misquote is pithier than the original so… is it now a Gaiman quote, even though it originates as an attempted Chesterton quote?

As far as I can tell, the passage he was thinking of was:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

• G K Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

For those like me who are not familiar with rapper feuds or sex offender locator apps, this is the rapper Drake’s house shown as containing many registered sex offenders in an image posted by Kendrick Lamar. Just to save some googling.

There’s a similar story about CS Lewis that’s much older. I originally saw it in some print source, but this (unsourced) quick Google copy-paste gives the gist:

One day, Lewis and a friend were walking down the road and came upon a street person who reached out to them for help. While his friend kept walking, Lewis stopped and proceeded to empty his wallet. When they resumed their journey, his friend asked, “What are you doing giving him your money like that? Don’t you know he’s just going to go squander all that on ale?” Lewis paused and replied, “That’s all I was going to do with it.”

Obviously it’s funnier when a comedian says it, just thought it was interesting that the general idea has been around for a while. Probably as long as there’s been booze and beggars tbh.

Weird - I’m seeing that now too. But I wasn’t at the time that I copy and pasted the links, and you can see from the other replies around 8 hours ago that other people were also seeing a site hosting edited versions of xkcd comics. I guess it has suddenly changed, after years of being up, in the few hours after I posted it? I have no idea what happened there.

I could have sworn there was an xkcdsw exactly like that, but there doesn’t seem to be. Some of them are a bit happier though

E.g. http://xkcdsw.com/3968 , http://xkcdsw.com/2485 , and others if you click “browse by source” at the bottom and search for “spirit”