Update

I may or may not have bitten off more than I can chew. 

Back when I started this blog, I was in high school and had no other real life commitments. It was easy to find time to write a review, and it was easy to think of new things to say. 

Now, I'm in college, which is haaard, maaan. I'm also trying to do a podcast thing, which at this point I find more rewarding than this blog. Like, with Panel Beat, me and Jon can have a fun time talking about whatever we want, but with this blog, I have to talk about how a comic is dumb. And it's harder to find new ways to say a comic is dumb when so many of them are dumb in the same ways. 

That's not to say that I regret doing this blog. I'm glad that I had a device that helped me improve my writing. But I'm not getting any real spiritual (or physical, since none of you jerks buy my tunes) benefits from writing it anymore. And I don't want to force myself to do this; I won't enjoy it, and my writing won't be as good.

And that's not to say that this blog is going to die, either. I'm just going to switch focus. Instead of trying to review every single XKCD, I'm going to talk about the ones that I feel like I actually have something to say about. And I'm going to be expanding in scope, talking about other webcomics and maybe other stuff too. Probably a once-a-week schedule from now on?

Feel free to yell at me in the comments.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1810 - Chat Systems

This comic was probably intended to be confusing, but it succeeds a little too well. Especially compared to the other graphs that Randy's put out. Even when he was making an infographic that nobody needed or wanted, it looked planned out and designed. Not to say that Randy put zero thought into the organization of this comic, just that he put less thought into it than we've come to expect.

I really like the double 'wall' bit, but that's the only joke, and it makes the rest of the comic seem like just setup, when it could be much more. Well, not that much more, but still more than what it is.

Maybe if it was more driven by narrative. Like, a guy could be meeting up with a Skype friend for the first time, only to realize that they lived in the same apartment. That's a weak example, but still. And then the wall gag could be the alt-text. It'd say something about the tiny invisible connections that make up our world, like the guy who dates the girl who serves you McDonalds is also friends with your uncle. Maybe I just want everything to be Cloud Atlas.

Also, if I were the type of person to do sick burns on Randy, I'd say like "you can tell he's making this comic up because there's no way he has this many friends".

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1772 - Startup Opportunity & #1773 - Negativity

I think I've finally figured out what Beret is supposed to represent. Y'know how Randy likes to play up his quirkiness sometimes? Beret is that 'quirky' archetype taken to its (il)logical extreme. See, he's not just hipster, getting his clothing from vintage shops. He's off the chart on the quirky hipster side of the hipster-normie scale, to the point where even his groceries are from shops that you haven't heard of... because they don't exist anymore.

And that's fine, that's a good joke, except we as readers have to make that connection ourselves. We don't see a standard issue hipster buying an out of print 7" who then gets one-up'd by Beret buying a custom space microphone. We're just thrown in to the deep end and we have to invent our own narrative. And that's cool in a David Lynch movie, when the goal is to make an unsettling and confusing experience that you can interpret yourself. It's less cool in a comedy thing, since it's forcing the reader to basically write their own joke with the pieces Randy gives us.

In his review of Final Fantasy XIII, Yahtzee said that "the kookiness of the prerequisite kooky character has now reached some kind of singularity. Her actions don't seem to have any connection to sentient thought or social context.". That's the other problem with Beret. He's so far off the scale that he just seems like he's on drugs or something. We can't relate to him, even through his unrelatability.

Like, with Michael Scott, most people wouldn't do the things that he does throughout The Office (US), but we can see his logic a lot of the time. He doesn't want people to think prison is cool, so he creates 'Prison Mike'. That's dumb, but there's a logical step from point A to point B. With Beret, it just seems like he doesn't understand anything around him. That's not funny, that's just kinda sad.

All that said, this comic works (to an extent) because the punchline is based around people reacting to Beret. Beret is the setup, and the reactions are the punchline. Also it makes fun of corporate types and I love me some anti-capitalist propaganda.

At first I thought this was a remake of that 'Balloon Internet' comic, but apparently this whole time that comic has been a reference to a Google thing. Who knew?

It's kinda lazy to only draw clouds for one panel. I understand that text is almost always the top layer in comics, but we don't even see the tiny clouds lined up with his head. Adding clouds to the other panels would even make the joke more impactful, since it's based on the contrast between internet negativity and nature peacefulness.

The joke is good, though. It has that surrealistic dream-like logic that Randy can make work really well sometimes. Like, you could have a guy pop his head out from under a rock, but why not have the grass itself insult the guy? It works because the grass is retroactively made into the premise of the comic. It still comes out of left field, but since that left field -ness is being played for laughs and not plot, I am fine with it.

And I'm aware it's probably not, but let's all just pretend that the "you suck" phrasing is in reference to the original xkcdsucks blog.