XKCD Isn’t Funny - #1428 & #1429: The Story Of The Two Great Lost Reviews

Back when I was an XKCD fan, I read XKCD a lot. That may sound like a redundancy, it’s really not, I didn’t just check XKCD every M/W/F, I’d hit the random button a few times, check Questionable Content, and then go back to XKCD, hit random again, and read through the archives a bit.

I wasn’t the most exciting person a few years ago.

It’s an unfortunate side effect of my status as an ex-XKCD fanboy that I can look at older XKCD comics, the ones I read time and time again previously, and I just have no opinion on them at all. I don’t find them funny, but I know I found (some of) them funny in the past, back when I also thought it was impressive I found a contradiction in The Bible.

I’ve tried to do reviews of older comics and I just couldn’t form an opinion one way or another. I’d read it so many times that it ceased to even mean anything. What was funny about it? Was it one of the ones that was supposed to be funny? Did I pretend to find it funny?

And I don’t know what it was about #1428 and #1429, but they both had that same effect on me almost instantly. Maybe I was just really sad through that week for whatever reason; I just had nothing at all, and I still don’t.

Which sucked more than it usually would, since I’d just promised to post something for every comic from then on.

My thoughts on #1428 pretty much got as far as “Well that doesn’t seem like something you should actually say in a job interview, I don’t think he would have been hired with that attitude.”, which is obviously taking the joke far too seriously (even for a blog like this), a post with that sentence as the sole idea behind it wouldn’t be anything worth reading.

The demons that live inside my skull managed to do a little more with #1429, I got a decent intro and a paragraph or two of content before realizing that although I was saying things, there wasn’t any kind of end point, there wasn’t any backing idea to it at all. And if there’s anything that producing content for the Internet has taught me, it’s not to say anything unless you’re absolutely prepared to defend what you say.

So. That’s the tale of how I didn’t update for almost an entire week. Two last things before I start working on my write-up of #1430:
1. There’s going to be something special for my one hundredth post. Possibly special in the short bus sense, but special nonetheless.
2. There’s going to be generally more variation in the content of this blog, although I’m not sure to what extent. I’m not going to start talking about other webcomics anytime soon, though.