My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home while attending community college. At the time, his site was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing. My ping immediately went from probably ~25 ms to over 300, and then I timed out completely. I think it took us a couple hours to get our connection back, which I assume involved getting a new IP address.
This strip had a profound effect on my life after I read it for the first time. To this day it still means a lot to me. Thank you for sharing your story and to your brother for sharing his art.
Sadly, I didn't win the tournament.
[1] https://xkcd.com/10/