2016-01-28

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1630 - Quadcopter & #1631 - Longer Than Usual


I really like the concept here. I think there was a genuinely funny idea behind this comic. However, the parallel he's going for isn't executed correctly. The guy should be flying around a small quadcopter (which, just saying, is a stupid name for a thing) and then a fully grown helicopter snatches it out of the air. Having the quadcopters attack him muddies the metaphor a little. That said, I think the final punchline is still amusing, just not as amusing as it could have been.

The art is pretty iffy on this one, though. I understand why it's hard to draw quadcopters, but that doesn't change the fact that it's really hard to tell what they are from the visuals alone.


It's funny that it took me longer than usual to review this comic, huh? Let's just pretend that was intentional and also that it was funny.

It took me a minute to realize the joke, but when I did I legitimately laughed out loud. It is text only, but to be fair to Randy, I can't see it working with visuals. You'd have to make the visuals really vague for it to be interpreted in these two wildly different ways. Unless maybe you're dating an online AI? Maybe you're dating Google!?

This still loses points for being CouldBeATweet, but the end result still gets a passing grade.


Apologies for the unintentional hiatus lately. As much as I value my fanbase and as much as I enjoy putting out that #content, this blog does end up on the low end of my priority list when Real Life stuff happens. I'll do my best to catch up quickly :)

2016-01-23

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1628 - Magnus & 1629 - Tools


I actually really like this one. The dialogue is pretty stilted in the first two panels, but I don't care as much when it leads to a good punchline. It has that all important Context that I'm always banging on about. We can see the characters come up with and develop the idea in their heads, so it's not just "what if these two random celebrities were pitted against each other". Their laptop experiment came from a discussion about an iPhone app, it's a natural development of the scenario.

The punchline isn't as good as it could be, though. After "this project has gotten weird", Bald should say something like "Not weird enough. I want to know if a twenty-year old Martha Stewart is a better belly-dancer than a fifty-year old Alexis Texas.". Ending at "weird" feels a little anti-climatic, she's just stating the obvious. It's more fun if they're aware of the weirdness and are continuing anyway for science reasons.


This is an excellent example of a comic not having that all important Context. Why is this person's job so complex? I think this is one of those times that Randy had the idea for the punchline and worked backwards without worrying too much if it made sense. He thought "Oh, it'd be funny if someone had a really complex job, but they didn't know what it was for, and just guessed it was porn". And he's not necessarily wrong. But the awkward first two panels create a disconnect between the setup and the punchline, draining out a lot of the humor of the comic. 

On a totally unrelated note, I've been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately, and "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" is such a good song, man: "There will come a time when every evil that we know will be an evil that we can rise above". That's just such a good sentiment, I love it. It gives me good vibrations, and I hope it does for you, too.

2016-01-19

Scat Porn Reviewed - Questionable Content #3135


Jeph Jacques has finally ended all the angsty romance mental problems drama and switched to HARDCORE SCATOLOGICAL PORNOGRAPHY. And, as we do here on ScatPornReviewed.Blogspot.com, we will be reviewing it.

So, in the first panel, we get a qt3.14 robogirl on a couch. Not very sexy. But then! A guy appears and starts farting! The sexiness has leveled up, since here at ScatPornReviewed.Blogspot.com we are into that. The sexiness goes back down when we find out that he's apparently just playing the sound effects, but then we reach the sexiest panel of the comic, where robot guy releases a bunch of poo right onto her face! That's SUPER DUPER HOT, because it's like, all gross and stuff.

Unfortunately, it's revealed in the last panel that it's just brownie mix, which RUINS EVERYTHING. It's like if at the end of a story it turns out it was all a dream. It wasn't really poo, it was NEVER SEXY AT ALL. It's still kinda sexy that she thought it was poo, but she's not even bothered by it, we don't get to see her all grossed out, which would be SO HOT YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW GUYS.

I have to give this piece of scat porn a D-: Not very sexy. Next week, ScatPornReviewed.Blogspot.com reviews 2Girls1Cup, and we find out if it's just an Internet meme, or if it's a hidden classic.

2016-01-18

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1626 - Judgment Day & #1627 - Woosh

 It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

Man, Randy should just kinda not write political comics. At least the preachy ones (that's a phrase I hope I never use again) give the people who agree with them agreement chuckles. I actually do agree with this one, it is kinda messed up that we have bombs that could end all human life. And I can see jokes being made about that, just highlighting how absurd it is. But this comic is delivered so matter-of-factly, it's like Randy is scolding us: "What's wrong with you?".

There's also the weird implication that we'd be better off if we were controlled by computer overlords, which is kinda like... no? I would much rather the human race make its own mistakes, thank you.

Also, (and bear with me here) nuclear weapons kinda make sense if you understand the history that lead up to them. Like, yeah, it's probably not the best thing that we still have them armed and ready to fire, but if you look at the political pressures that caused people to develop them, you can understand why we had them at all. No one just made them for kicks, y'know? No one woke up one morning and said "I'm going to fuck everyone over today by making weapons that'll end all life on Earth."


 It also occasionally replies with 'Comment of the year', 'Are you for real', and 'I'm taking a screenshot so I can remember this moment forever'.

And onto the other side of how robots control our lives, comment bots, arguably the worse of the two.

Honestly if that bot had commented on my thing, I'd have just been confused. The "woosh" as onomatopoeia for 'going over your head' went right over my head. That is my fault though, not the comic's. The comic is actually pretty decent. My main issue with it is that there is not a single website in the world that has icons but not usernames on comments. Unless the squiggly lines underneath are supposed to be the usernames? But then the squigglies wouldn't be underneath the icon and the comment, and they wouldn't be different each time.

Also, I feel like the caption would've matched the comic more if multiple people replied to the "woosh" comment. Like someone else chimes in with "No, you're right, it looks fake, I don't get what he's saying" and another guy's like "Maybe they're saying it's supposed to look fake?". It'd be a picture of mass confusion, instead of just one guy being confused.


So like, speaking of robots, if sapiosexuality is a thing, where people are attracted to intelligence, and there are also people who want to fuck robots, are there people who are solely attracted to HAL 9000 -style artificial intelligences? #DeepThoughts

2016-01-05

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1625 - Substitutions 2

Within a few minutes, our roads will be full of uncontrollably-swerving cars and our skies full of Amazon delivery dogs.

Imagine if I just copy-pasted Jon Levi's review of the first Substitutions comic but switched out most of the words with their first synonym in Word. I'd be making exactly the same point as that review, and anyone who read both reviews would essentially be getting the same information twice, but it'd mean I wouldn't have to think of anything original for another day.

That might be too mean. Really, the worst part of this comic is the bland, text-only presentation, not the duplicate joke. It wouldn't be so bad if it was like a Dinosaur Comics, where they'll kinda be listing things sometimes, but it'll be in dialogue form. Of course, if this was Dinosaur Comics, the list would be in the middle and it would lead to some other joke. (Dinosaur Comics is good)

I do actually like the "years/minutes" part. Especially because I know there's at least one XKCD fan who's blindly followed this list and will eventually forget the filter at a crucial moment and miss an important deadline.

Overall though, it's not even as good as the original. The original was a ripoff of a better comic too, but it had multiple jokes in it, and it was actually poking fun at things. In this one we get "expands > physically expands", and I don't get it. That's not fun, that's just redundant.

2016-01-01

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1624 - 2016

Want to feel old? Wait.

First comic of the new year! And it is a time is passing comic. Boo! Although I suppose it's really the best time for it, since it is the time of year(s?) when we all look to the past for a bit, as fellow followers of the Gregorian calendar.

I also appreciate the self deprecation, or at least self awareness. The joke isn't just "time is passing!", it's "time is passing!" + ironic detachment. And I, as a jaded millennial, love me some ironic detachment.

I have a minor quibble with the art: the ceiling has depth, but the bed doesn't. It gives the two sides of the comic a slight incongruity.

Overall, though, not a terrible way to start the next series of 156 comics. I don't get much enjoyment out of it, due to my prior exhaustion with time is passing, but that's a personal bias.