Commemorating Obvious Milestones Involving Chronological Sustenance

Well, there had to be something here.

Unfortunately I don’t have time for anything more complex, so here’s a low-effort illogical puzzle for the occasion. (It has been testsolved, at least. Thanks, Yoshiap.) It also features a brand new category, so as not to distract the people on LMI.

If you don’t already know what occasion it is, it’s easy to find out by looking through my archives or possibly anywhere else I’ve left a trail online. Or you could solve the puzzle! (Or you could scroll down to read the solution!) If this puzzle had an answer, it would be a nine-letter word, although like most of mathematics, it’s less about the answer than about the path you take to get there…

2017 edit: A warning that this has somewhat linkrotted and is harder to solve, but theoretically still possible.

11/20: Highlight for hints! (There’s one per line; they should probably be read in order.)

Have you looked at the URL yet?
And the URLs of any possibly related sites?
All three are in the top half of Spiked Math’s list of 25.
The one containing the answer isn’t because it’s more computer-science-y.

And if you just want the solution or the thing I really wanted to link to in the first place:

As clued by the first letters of the title and the URL, there are three comics clued with their dimensions, recolored fragments of their content, and their numeric IDs (sometimes only visible in their URLs) in their corresponding comic series. They are, in canonical red-green-blue order, https://xkcd.com/1230/, http://abstrusegoose.com/394, and http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3044#comic. If these comics are superimposed onto the puzzle rectangles, the circled components read “cartesian closed 22”. This clues a comic as well, which can be most easily found if you search for those terms alongside “comic”: http://ro-che.info/ccc/22. The speech bubble of that comic contains the answer, “sandboxes”, although of course the whole point was just to lead you to that comic because it involved Cabal’s (1.)18th birthday.

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