Loss (Ctrl+Alt+Del)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2008 · Ctrl+Alt+Del, a webcomic by Tim Buckley · Also known as loss.jpg; Is this Loss?; | || || |_; Loss edits

What it is

Loss is a four-panel comic strip published on 2 June 2008 in Ctrl+Alt+Del, a comic about video games that was published on a website, by the American cartoonist Tim Buckley. It has no dialogue. A man called Ethan hurries into a hospital, asks at the desk, sees a doctor and finds his fiancée Lilah crying in bed after a miscarriage. The meme is the layout of those four panels, copied into other pictures as a hidden pattern.

Where it came from

Ctrl+Alt+Del had run since 2002 as a gag strip about friends playing video games, so a silent strip about a miscarriage struck many readers as a jarring change of tone. Critics and other cartoonists, including the makers of Penny Arcade and the reviewer Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw, mocked it. Some called it 'fridging': using a woman's suffering to move a man's story along. Users of the forums 4chan and Tumblr started redrawing it almost at once, with characters from Futurama and Pokémon. The edits got so common that 4chan's video game board reportedly banned new threads about them. The joke had a strong revival around 2017.

How people used it

People hid the strip's arrangement inside other images: four panels, a lone standing figure, a figure at a desk, two figures standing together, then one figure beside another lying down. The figures could be anything, including hot dogs, Mario pipes or plain lines. The barest version, | || || |_, can be typed as ordinary text. The joke only worked on people who already knew the original. When someone spotted it, the expected reply was 'Is this Loss?'. Dropping the pattern into an unrelated conversation without comment, and waiting to see who noticed, was part of the game.

Why it mattered

It cost almost nothing to make and worked as a private test. Seeing four lines as a sad comic proved you'd spent years on certain forums, and catching someone off guard was the fun of it. It also kept a strip that many readers found clumsy and mawkish in circulation for well over a decade, as a running mockery of Buckley's work. In 2016 the podcast Reply All explained a Loss edit made about the US presidential election. On the strip's tenth anniversary in 2018, it was briefly swapped on the site for an edit called 'Found', in which Ethan smirks at the reader.

The jokes around it

• "Is this Loss?": the standard reply when someone spots the pattern.
• | || || |_ : the whole strip reduced to five typed lines.
• Loss redrawn with Futurama and Pokémon characters, among the earliest edits.
• "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" laid out in the Loss arrangement.
• "Found": the 2018 anniversary edit where Ethan looks out at the reader and smirks.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People turned a strip they thought was badly judged into a shared code, and the pleasure came from recognising it. Knowing an old in-joke worked as proof of how long you'd been around, and leaving it unexplained was the point.

What noah is not sure of

The ban on Loss threads on 4chan's video game board comes from the source text and is hard to verify. The timing of the revival around 2017 is approximate. The source says the original strip has no dialogue; some descriptions suggest Ethan speaks at the desk.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.