XKCD Isn't Funny - #1984 - Misinterpretation

I really don't mean to be snarky or sardonic when I say this, but it is a little incongruous for this comic to be so sarcastic when it's trying to tell off poor communicators. One of the most important features of a good communicator is friendliness; it makes the target more open to the message. This is why salespeople are supposed to smile all the time.

Notice how I said it makes the target more open. This is because people can be resistant to certain kinds of messages for various reasons. If someone is personally invested in an ideology of one kind or another, it can be impossible to persuade them to change their mind, because it's important to them that their ideology is the right one.

For example, in the 50s, there was a very small cult of people called The Seekers (not to be confused with the band of the same name) who believed everyone on Earth would die in a huge flood, and they'd be taken by spaceship to another planet on a specific date. As you would in such a situation, they sold all of their possessions and left their marriages. Then the flood didn't happen. The interesting thing is that before the flood didn't happen, the cult didn't really try to spread their message, but after the flood didn't happen, they suddenly started trying to convert everyone they could. This is because they literally could not alter their beliefs, if they did, they'd have to come to terms with the fact that they just ruined their lives for nothing. They had such a stake in the game that they couldn't start rooting for the other team.

The source for that piece of information is Art Of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, and you can go and read that and find even more ways that the human brain can be resistant to certain kinds of messages. Especially political ones!

My point in all this is to say that there are people who are literally looking for ways to discredit certain arguments. For example, back when I was 14 and even more of an idiot than I am now, I was very into a certain political trend at the time; let's not get into specifics because it's very embarrassing. And during that (VERY BAD) time period in my life, there was a post I saw on tumblr that compared something to how if you boil a frog slowly it doesn't notice. And because I was invested in having a certain worldview, I did a very silly thing and responded with "the frog thing isn't real", as if that was actually a refutation of the post. That's also why you get weird people who make super semantic arguments when you try to make a point on Twitter. They, like myself in a past life, have programmed their brains* to focus on trying to dismantle arguments that go against their worldview.

By the way if you're wondering the end result of that past life, there was a really cute girl I was into and I annoyed her so much with my dumbassery that she blocked me and never spoke to me again even though I'm like 90% sure she was also into at one point.

I guess my point, my 'thesis statement' if you will, is that yes, communication does require two people, and sometimes the other person is being a dick and it's okay to blame them for not getting the message.


*I was gonna link there to the philosopher who said "Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it." but it turns out it's just the tagline to a tabletop RPG called Eclipse Phase but it's still a really good quote so check them out I guess?

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1990 - Driving Cars & #1993 - Fatal Crash Rate

This review is going to be a little bit more vitriolic than I usually am, just because this kind of content really gets under my skin. (Please note that I am NOT saying that Randall should not have made this comic, I'm only talking about my reaction to it.)

I'm going to get a little bit abstract here, but bear with me. I'm not smart enough to know the word for this, but look at these comics through the lens of their function, what they do. Not what they're intended to do, ignore that for now, but what does a reader experience when they read this. I imagine for most people, all it will do is make them afraid. And, in my opinion, needlessly afraid.

Now, statistically, yeah, driving causes a lot of deaths. But that 'a lot' is only 'a lot' relative to other things. Compared to heart disease it's jack nothing. You're more likely to die from suicide. There's only a million deaths worldwide per year. That's WORLDWIDE. The odds of you, you the person reading this, dying in any given car crash is astronomically low.

All this is to say that the comic is essentially fear-mongering. And that is incredibly spiteful of me to say, but Randall has a large audience and it's callous of him to post things that only scare and worry people. These aren't awareness things, the last one isn't even the push for self-driving cars that it could be. And yes they're presumably Randall's honest feelings and yes he has a right to say it and all that but it's very lame that he was unable or unwilling to make a comic that expressed those feelings as his personal phobia rather than as something that is easily generalized to the reader.

I'd also like to point out that at least in my state of Rhode Island, high schoolers have to first take an unbearably boring driving class for like seven hours a day for two weeks, then drive with a legal adult who can drive for two hundred hours, then take a drivers' test. And that only gets you the restricted licence which doesn't let you drive with more than one underage passenger or after dark for (if I'm remembering correctly) nine months. And THEN you get your real licence. (Some of the fine details might be slightly off, it's been a while.) Other states probably have different laws, but no, not everyone on the road did a single test. And even IF that's all you have to do, you presumably have to have PRACTICED driving to get to that point. AND if someone does get into a crash, their licence can be taken away for being a bad driver so they don't get into another crash!

Oh yeah. Neither of the comics are jokes nor do they provide any valuable insight into anything. The second comic in particular seems to be based on wild conjecture. As that second link says, most car deaths occur between the ages of 15 and 44, but Randall's first chart has his current age of 33 as a low point of probability.

In conclusion, the best part of these comics is that one of them is numbered 1990, which is the year my favorite album came out.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1975 - Right Click

There's a game called The Last Guardian, and while I don't know jack crap about programming I've been told it's very impressive from a programming perspective. However, in Previously Recorded's review of the game, they not exasperatedly:

"...they spent six years making this fucking dog, and nobody made an interesting game to go with the dog."

And that's more or less how I feel about this comic. (If you're confused, click the comic to go to xkcd.com, then right click the comic there.) I am genuinely impressed that Randall managed to organize a weird drop-down menu thing within what seems like a normal comic at first. It does also seem like he put a lot of work into making a large number of branching paths. (Although, at time of writing, many of them do lead to dead-ends of one kind or another)

I think that most people, the first time they right-clicked, went to the top-most option first. So, "File" -> "Close", and then that very first button (at time of writing) doesn't do anything. Which, fair enough, it's just "Close", I'm sure the next one will be better. So then most people will probably go "File" -> "Open" -> "A:/" -> "Insert a disc into drive A" -> "Floppy disc" ...which also doesn't do anything. The "Chip card" option under "A:/" does lead to something, but it feels like a 90's-era 'computers are hard to use' joke. After "A:/" comes "C:/", and since "Documents" also doesn't lead anywhere, the first actual joke is in "Music", which turns out to just be a slightly expanded version of #851. I think this setup will give a lot of people a really weak first impression of this comic, which does have actual good parts in it.

It's also worth noting that in this expanded version of #851, two of the 'endings' link back to previous XKCDs, and one links to not the official music video of "Absolutely (Story Of A Girl)" or a funny joke song using the intro to that song, but just someone's random upload of the song.

Really the only section that I think is enhanced by the comic's format is the "Games" section, which includes "Rock Paper Scissors" (where you always lose), "Twenty Questions" (which has jokes instead of an individual answer for each path but I'm not going to hold that against it since that'd be 1,048,576 unique paths), "D&D" (which seems to have mostly broken paths but its still a funny idea), and "ADVENT.EXE" (which did actually give me a genuine sense of accomplishment when I won, even if it was half by luck).

A few other things worthy of note:

"Sequences" is literally just a transcription of an Adult Swim promo.

The "Bookmarks" folder appears to be almost entirely links to previous XKCD comics, for some reason. I do really like how "Secret" leads to "Enable Dark Web", which adds a "Do Crimes" option to the main directory (the first crime is "Say Swears"! Hee!). But then that just leads to more XKCD links for some reason. Randall! You already have a comic archive!!

The "Check Space Usage" sub-directory includes "Dark Matter", "Hydrogen", and "Helium", which comes off as less unoriginal than it actually is due to the comic's format working naturally as a setup.

"Music" -> "Hey now" -> "Hey now na now" -> "Sing 'This Corrosion' to me" inverts the comic's colors, which means that there was the potential for more interactivity between the comic and the different filepaths. This means that there is NO EXCUSE having the "); DROP TABLE Menus;--" just link back to #327 instead of having some hilarious system error thing happen.

I do understand that this was intended specifically as an April Fool's Day comic, and that a few problems I have with it (the number of dead-ends, the jokes that are just links back to previous XKCDs) are likely a result of a lack of time. I also understand that the joke is more the presentation than the actual content. However, I'm someone who likes his dancing bears to dance well, thank you very much, and I have enough faith in Randall to believe that he could have made something that was both novel and entertaining, rather than just novel.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1969 - Not Available [dedicated to Munch the cat]

There's a tendency among bad internet reviewers (like me!) to make hyperbolic statements, especially in the openings. Please understand, it's only because we want love and affection (and also because most of us don't know how to write a real introductary paragraph). So please be aware that when I say "I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be an anti-joke or not", I am aware that it reads like a forced and poor attempt to be funny and quotable, but no really I seriously can't tell.

Let's do a brief thought experiment. Imagine you check XKCD one day, and the picture is of one stick figure punching another. The caption is "If you ever really want to make people made, punch people in the face." See? It just doesn't work. Like... yeah, I know that would make people mad, it's a shitty thing to do. I have almost the same reaction to that hypothetical comic as I do to this one. The difference is that face-punching has a fun slapstick element to it, whereas region-locking is cold and boring.

Please note that I'm 100% aware that a lot of region-locking is because of copyright restrictions. Please also note that I think current copyright law is almost universally bad.

Explainxkcd tells me that this might be a joke on people who use VPNs to access region-locked content. That's like, maybe funny, but it'd be funnier to actually see someone trying different regions and failing, and then we could see Black Hat chuckling to himself or something. The alt-text is kinda clever too - a flag being region locked, get it?! But it's alt-text and it doesn't count.


When I was a kid Ed, Edd, n Eddy, I was kinda confused when I saw the Paul Boyd memorial note after the ending of "Look Before You Ed". It seemed kinda weird to me, since I thought cartoons were for kids. I didn't get why they'd want to put his name on a cartoon instead of a park bench or something. I didn't get back then that when you really love someone, you want them to be remembered, and thought of, by as many people as possible, as much as possible.

My cat Munch had to be put down this week.

My family got her when I was in fifth grade, from a cousin who got her from a friend who got her from someone else. Because of this, nobody is really sure exactly how old she was. She was originally named "Munchlax" by one of her previous owners, since she ate a lot. I'm pretty sure that at some point in her life she was abused. She was missing a tail (if you felt the tip it seemed bent in a way that I don't think a naturally missing tail would be) and when we first got her the first thing she did was run into the basement and hide for hours. It took more than a year before before she'd let me pet her. But eventually she realized I wouldn't hurt her and she slowly became the snuggliest cat in the world. I would wake up with her sitting on my back or cuddled up to my chest, usually purring like a tiny lawnmower. Back when I was more into trying to play the piano, she would always jump on my lap and headbutt my arms.

She loved to climb people. She would meow at me to pick her up, which had her head roughly level with my shoulder, and she'd climb up onto my shoulders and ride me around while I did things. She especially liked if I wore my hoodie so she could sit in the hood and have her paws on my shoulder. She'd do it to other people to, hilariously annoying multiple members of my extended family.

She loved to lay down in a woodpile outside my old house, and she'd blend in to the point where you wouldn't see her if you weren't looking. When she was sitting up and the sun would hit her right, she would almost glow, all her fur catching the light like a halo around her.

When my family first got her, there were crickets in the basement, but she was such a good cricket hunter that they were all gone within a year. Even when she was getting older she'd jump up and catch moths between her paws and eat them.

Speaking as someone who is at best a C+ and at worst barely functioning as a human being, Munch was the perfect therapy cat. I would look at her and I'd think about how much I loved her even though she was missing her tail and how she used to be scared of everything but wasn't anymore, and feel better about my own future. She was super soft and fluffy, and she could purr loud enough to wake people up.

This is one of the last pictures I took of her. She was sleeping and I didn't want to wake her up by petting her.

Rest in peace, Munch (????-2018). You were the best cat, and you were the best at being a cat.

XKCD - #1952 - Backpack Decisions & Questionable Content - #3676 - Put It On A Jazz Drive

When I was a kid, I didn't really understand how jokes worked. I didn't really understand how anything else worked either, but that's beside the point. I think it's a fairly universal thing for kids, when they get a laugh out of someone, to tell the same joke over again to see if they can get the same laugh. I've heard a few different people with children talk about things like this happening. And then the next stage, when that doesn't work, is somehow making the punchline 'bigger'. "To get to the other side!" becomes "To get to every side everywhere!", and so on. 

Just in general, kids don't understand the 'more is less' idea. You can see this in Hyperbole And A Half's "The Scariest Story", where the idea of 'a closet' quickly becomes 'THREE HUNDRED CLOSETS'. I remember specifically from my own childhood, after I first saw the Spongebob episode "Graveyard Shift" for the first time (and keep in mind I was like, five) I tried telling my own scary story, which took the idea of 'the lights will flicker on and off and etc' and turned that into 'and the lights will go up and down the wall and turn red' or something to that effect. 

I find it kinda interesting how when you do 'scary' too much, it stops being scary and becomes funny. Like, 'the killer with a hook for a hand' is scary, but then if you make it 'the killer with a hook for a hand and a skull face and he leaves a trail of blood with every footstep' suddenly that becomes a cartoon. Conversely, if you do 'funny' too much, it stops being funny and just becomes dumb, or, on occasion, a little bit creepy. 

I understand that in the two comics above, the exaggeration is part of the joke. I understand that. But the exaggeration is taken to such a degree that I can only think that these characters as depicted would not be functional people. And yes, I am taking the joke seriously, but only because of how the jokes are presented. 

In the XKCD, Randall is framing the comic to be #relatable. The first-person caption, the fact that the stick figure is standing in a store instead of shopping online, the way the graph underneath lists common things like laptops instead of Randall-specific things like 'hosting server' or etc. These things are meant to make the reader put themselves in the stick figure's/Randall's shoes. We are meant to be laughing with him, not at him. 

In the Questionable Content, we are viewing a moment in a story. This story includes a recollection of a suicide, discussions of war by a veteran who lost all her squadmates, a near-death from drinking, etc etc. My point is that Questionable Content, although it may be generally comedic, has Serious Moments. And in order to take these Serious Moments seriously, there needs to be basic order and logic. Sure we can have super science cardigans and all that; but nobody is going to spontaneously learn to levitate, the laws of physics still apply to everyone, etc. If someone is punched in panel one, they should have a bruise in panel two. Logic needs to apply.

In short, because of the context and presentation that these two comics have, the silly one-off gags that could be funny instead become worrying. Like, Emily just described herself as having vivid long-term hallucinations that she can't distinguish from reality. That's a problem! That's a big big problem! She works at a coffee shop with boiling liquid all day! I understand her thing is that she's unrepentantly weird, but there's a difference between enjoying weird food and literally being unable to tell what's real and what isn't. I know it's just a one-off gag, but now for every strip Emily appears in, I'll be thinking "Why has she not gone on meds yet that's what they're FOR.".

The XKCD comic is less unnerving since we don't have as much of an established universe, but it's still troubling. Again, I understand, exaggeration, comic effect; but the comic does not lend itself as framed to cartoonish hyperbole. Look at the art, it's a detailed drawing of a standard shopping aisle. And the guy is going over concerns that a person would probably actually have when buying a backpack. That makes the comic seem more grounded in reality. 

A better image would be the guy literally digging through a massive pile of backpacks, with the narration like "That one doesn't have pockets, that one's not waterproof, none of these are good enough, none of these are good enough", and then the caption could be "I've spent more time trying to find the right backpack then I spent trying to find the right college." I'd still think it was a weird choice for a comic, yknow, like, seriously, it's just a backpack; but it wouldn't be worth a write-up. 

On an entirely unrelated note, I don't know to what extent any of you are invested in me as a person beyond the #content I produce. Which is totally understandable if you aren't, really, I'm just a guy. But on the off chance you've been wondering why I took that break back in 2015 (back when I thought one paragraph out of four counted as 'reviewing the comic'), please feel free to check out the first thirty minutes or so of the latest episode of my dumb podcast (autoplaying sound warning if you click the link), where all is revealed, possibly to an uncomfortable degree. 

In conclusion, I dyed my hair again.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1948 - Campaign Fundraising Emails

I understand that mimicking the Gmail format is part of the joke, but I've been conditioned over the years to not even read the bold parts unless I'm looking for something in particular. I look at this comic and my eyes just glaze over. It's just a big wall of text, the kind that I read comics to procrastinate having to interact with in the first place!

Aside from the GODAWFUL choice of presentation, the comic is eh. Not actually terrible, but not anything above a D+. I really, really like the idea of a Nigerian Prince sending out a campaign email, but it's just one disconnected line that's not even lead up to. A few other lines aren't bad - 'Doom' and 'Outrageous' are pretty good - but overall things just fall flat. 'Wow', the second subjectless one, and 'They say we can't win' are just uninspired and kill any potential momentum to the overall joke-flow.

And another thing, why is this coming out now? I understand that there are elections going on all the time, but it's not really campaigning season. This really seems like a comic that would be best deployed when the campaign cycle is in a fuller swing. Not that jokes have to be topical, but still, it's weird.

Also for the record I do know that there have been a few campaign ads released but 1. most of those were during the Super Bowl, which was after this comic came out and 2. they were for losers nobody cares about. Sorry to Jonathan Lamb if you're reading this but your name is stupid and you're not gonna be president.

XKCD Could Be Improved Somewhat - #1945 - Paper Graph Quality

Hey, XKCD finally reached the "WWII" milestone! We've just killed Hitler! Wooo!!!

Speaking of things to be happy about, I don't hate this one! As always I'm obligated to point out his hypocrisy in failing to give labels to the axises, and graph jokes are always a little bit lazy, but c'mon have you SEEN Nintendo's 2003 E3 presentation? This is something that deserves to be mocked.

Now obviously this would be better with some visual accompaniment. However, I came up with a simple fix that brings this comic from 'passable' to 'brilliant', without any visuals at all. First, shrink down the 'era' marker to the mid-2000s, it's more accurate. The line should still be rising up toward the end. Then, right at the end of that era, have a marker that says "web cartoonists discover graph jokes", and the line goes down again. It'd be AMAZING.

Pedants may say that webcartoons don't count as scientific papers, but I'll have you know that I go to college and -I swear this is true- I've seen XKCD chart comics as part of official class lessons no less than THREE TIMES. So stick that in your [noun] and [verb] it, pedants!

Oh, and the line should go down directly after the 'PowerPoint/MS Paint Era' thing begins, not before. And the line should be a more rapid decline, like the inverse of this:

It makes the correlation, and by extension, the comic, clearer and therefore funnier. 

In conclusion, I'm looking forward to the Cold War over the course of the next few strips. Если вы потратили время, чтобы перевести это, я люблю вас, comrades!

XKCD Could Be Improved Somewhat - #1902 - State Borders

Actually, the way to fix boarders would be to eliminate them entirely. Smash the state!!

Best, Karl Marx

I'm okay with this one! It's a good concept for a comic, especially since I think we've all had that thought about the bump on top of Missouri or Alaska's tail. Rhode Island doesn't need to be bigger, though, just saying, size doesn't matter.

The problem with this joke, which isn't a big problem but it is still a problem, is the empty space. Traditionally, this kind of joke relies on there being a lot of things to laugh at, so even if one isn't that funny, you can laugh at another. With this map, there are nine whole states that aren't touched at all, and more that are only touched a little bit. There's definitely more that could be fixed, like for instance, the ugly Idaho-Montana boarder.

It seems kinda weird to me that there'd be that "good curve! keep." line off of Georgia, but no other comments on the coastlines, when getting mad at coastlines is inherently funnier than getting mad at man-made social-construct boarders. Plus, there's plenty of design-flaw material there, like how the fourth island of Hawaii should be brought into the curve established by the first three islands.

There's also just a little missed opportunity about the plot. Wouldn't it have been fun to see the graphic designers about to unveil their list of demands, and everyone's all scared there's gonna be fascism (cause fascism's bad), but then they reveal the map and we hear the crowd's reaction like "...oh, that's not so bad." / "Finally, someone's focusing on the real issues!" / etc. That could just be me, though. What do YOU think???

In conclusion, I looked it up, and it turns out that Missouri's bump was actually the result of an incorrectly plotted map, so we can all blame John Mitchell.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1887 - Two Down, One To Go

When I first read this I thought this was in reference to some sci-fi book I'd never read. Like in the book these three things all happen and it's a sign of the apocalypse. (The fact that the aurora happens more than once a year did 100% slip my mind, and you are free to mock me for this fact in the comments) I didn't wanna do that kinda review again where I have to rely on explainxkcd to make sure I'm getting my facts right about the referenced thing I've never read.

See, back in middle school, I was taught to always label my graphs. Reading a graph is supposed to be intuitive, we shouldn't have to infer anything. Without a label on the y-axis, all we know is that these things have happened in some way. We have to read the alt-text to realize that Randy is just talking about stuff he's seen.

And that is just TERRIBLE. This comic is only valuable in any way to people who've become deeply invested in Randy as a person, and even then it's barely worth mentioning. As anon pointed out, the comic is just listing two things he's done. And yeah, both of those phenomena are kinda cool, and I'm a little be envious of Randy for getting to see them both, but is that really material for a comic? If he really wanted to use this framework, he should've actually described the total eclipse vs the aurora, comparing and contrasting the different ways they embodied the majesty of nature and all that.

In conclusion, when I was in grade school my aunt somehow won an interview with Ryder Windham and he was a super nice guy, but because I asked him about Bionicle at one point, that means I was technically TEN YEARS ahead of all y'all on Bionicle G2. And another time at work I recognized this dude's voice and he worked for NPR and he shook my hand.

What are two things you've done?

Why Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" Fails

Full confession, I have never been a big fan of 'the t-swift', before or after her shift from strummy country-pop to trendy dance pop. I do like "Love Story" and "I Knew You Were Trouble" though, even though they're kinda dumb.

That's really what Taylor Swift is best at: songs that are dumb but fun. Like "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". That's a stupid song, but it's FUN stupid, it's FUN to sing along to "Weeeee... are never ever ever... getting back together". I mean, fun for teenagers. Not me, I'm an adult person.

When Swiftaylor tries to be dark, it really just comes off as immature. Take the bridge: "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me | I'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams". I'm just thinking 'Well, maybe people'd trust you more if you weren't caught lying'. And 'bad dreams'? Old Taylor is dead but the edgy new Taylor can't even say "nightmare"?

And that's really the biggest problem with this song. It's set up like an edgy diss track, when it has no teeth at all. Compare it to Remy Ma's Nicki diss, which brought those #receipts and kept bringing them the whole track. Is it fair to compare a pop song to a rap song on lyrical detail? Not totally, but it does illustrate the point that "LWYMMD" doesn't name names, except in the vaguest terms. If you look at the genius page right now, you'll see people saying the song could be about Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, or Katy Perry, but it's just not clear. So it becomes just a general 'unnamed person is bad' track that might as well be another 'my ex broke up with me song'. And that would be fine, if the song itself wasn't broken.

First, look at the lyrics, removing all context: "I don't like your perfect crime | How you laugh when you lie | You said the gun was mine". Crime/lie/mine is a super basic rhyme scheme (It took five people to write this???), and the image they create is totally disconnected from any kind of reality - someone's accusing Taylor Swift of murder? and then her only reaction is "isn't cool, no I don't like you". Weak!

The beat isn't terrible, but there's a lot of weird decisions. Like how the first verse is percussion only, and there's no transition to the piano-driven pre-chorus, even though there was a perfectly suitable transition effect used at the thirty second mark when a new drum comes into the mix. And interpolating "I'm Too Sexy" was just dumb. That song is one of the (enjoyably!) goofiest songs of all time. Even people who don't recognize it are going to subconsciously associate that goofy mood with the attempted seriousness of "Look What You Made Me Do", which takes away from any power the song might have had left.

In conclusion, the only way that the song works is if it turns out to be some kind of meta-diss. Like, "Look what you made me do, you upset me so much that now I can't recognize a bad song".

Questionable Content - #3532 - Now Light The Other One

This is not a bad gag, but it is not a good joke. This is an almost perfect low-level side gag to be included alongside a fuller joke or an emotional conversation. Even if you LOVE "an unusual candle smell" as a joke, you have to admit that it doesn't deserve three panels of setup. Especially when we've already heard what it smells like in a previous comic. And that other comic had two candle smells, not just the one! So it's not just redundant, it's also distilled. 

The structure of the comic, with the long setup to learning something we already know, makes it seem like the real joke is supposed to be Faye and Bubbles's reaction to the smell. But that doesn't work either, since they're completely deadpan in how they respond. It's just boring! And I'm not asking for Jeph to suddenly start writing his characters to be super over the top, but a comic needs to have *stuff* in it. 'Mild surprise that a strange label is accurate' is not *stuff*. 

Credit where it's due: Jeph did do the not-lazy thing, he did have Faye doing a thing in the background. That's nifty. It's no where near enough to make this comic good, though. 

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1846 - Drone Problems

When I have drone problems, it's usually because of unrelenting low-pitched hums! coming toward me from the sky as government-issued robots attempt to kill me
Best, anyone the US doesn't like

Speaking of pointless cruelty, what this comic needs is some Black Hat. Think about it, it makes perfect sense. For one, the girl's story doesn't make sense. If the drones are being flown so haphazardly, shouldn't she have known she wouldn't be able to hit them? And wouldn't it also mean that people flying drones near her were doing it by accident, and were therefore undeserving of having their property destroyed?

The comic improves a bunch if you rewrite it to have Black Hat as the shooting-down-y person. He's a jackass who doesn't care about shit, we're all down for his wanton havoc. If we just have our standard XKCD Guy™ and XKCD Girl®, it's not quite normalized, but it's more grounded than something done by Black 'Stole A Russian Sub Once' Hat.

That's not to say that Black Hat hasn't previously been used as a mouthpiece, he has, but it's been in a clearly over-the-top way. This comic, in contrast, is subdued, with the destructive idea as the setup, not the punchline. Instead of the mayhem being the part we're supposed to laugh at, it's just how we get to the actual joke. This makes the mayhem seem like just something that happens, especially with how the guy just goes along with it when he finds out. I don't think Randy is actually advocating for shooting down drones, but the comic's structure makes it look like he is. He even says "my system" in the alt-text!"

Even if we put all that aside, the joke is still poorly done. The last three panels are all the same idea, which slows down the delivery of the punchline and minimizes its impact. The two panels in the middle should be replaced by a single panel with a line like "Okay, setting up. I can't wait!", THEN cut to them three hours later.


By the way, if you're missing my #content, feel free to check out XKCD Still Sucks, a new blog on the scene! He's keeping the fire alive, plus he says I've got bonhommie! I looked it up, and it means I'm a really nice guy!!

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1751 - Movie Folder & #1752 - Interplanetary Experience

Somewhere along the line, Black Hat and Beret swapped some of their characterizations. In the beginning, Beret was the weird one and Black Hat was the menacing one. But then suddenly Beret developed supernatural powers and Black Hat stopped trying so now its just anyone with a hat is abnormal in some way.

Here is my totally evidenceless idea: Originally, it was Bald and Beret, with Bald just listing the titles and Beret interjecting with lines like "Love that one!" or "A classic.". But then Randy realized that the comic sucked and he had Beret actually interject with jokes, but the lines read too sardonically so R swapped B out for BH. It's a good thing the end result is funny, but then that's what you get when you do rewrites.

Black Hat's interjections make this comic. Without them it would be boring, even though the fake movie titles are kinda clever. Titanic having multiple sequels is a funny concept, but it's just a concept until our dark-helmeted friend describes plot elements.

That said, the comic does kinda leave me waiting at the end. There are some good jokes in it, but the comic doesn't really 'move' from start to finish. It's the same kind of joke four times, and we don't even end on a high note, we just get 'Michael Bay CGI' which has been done more times than your mom

's gardening since she's a nice lady and people want to help her with her yardwork.

This comic, on the other hand, is all premise with no point.

Unless it's not supposed to be a joke, but it can't be intended as an informational thing. For one, don't most people know this, roughly? Mercury is really hot because it's close to the sun, Pluto is really cold because it's far away, all the gas giants are gas giants so they're gas and no land, and so on. I'll give credit for Titan, though, that was a new one on me.

Plus, obviously, none of the things can be done by regular people, so readers can't even have fun going through the list. If he actually wanted to let people do hands on things, he should have said to like - this is for Pluto - cover themselves in ice and lie on the beach at night, something like that.

And furthermore, I was once on Jupiter, and

Hey, wait a minute! He already kinda covered this in that one What If?, this is an outrage!


Oh, by the way, Blogger changed so that I don't get notified when someone comments, so apologies if I've missed any cool things anyone's said.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1749 - Mushrooms & #1750 - Life Goals

It's called "Mushrooms" because you'd need to be on mushrooms to find it funny! Haha!

I kid, I kid. It's still not funny tho. I can see how the idea could be funny, but the execution is more "cute" than anything to actually laugh at.

It's a subtle difference, but imagine that the guy reaches down to pet the mushroom in the final panel instead of the first one, and instead of growling, the mushroom purrs. It'd be more consistent, 'plot'-wise, and it would be a logical extension of the preceding action.

Now I'm aware that this IS nitpicking and I do still consider this a good comic, but I think with that change, it would move from being just cute to being cute and maybe chuckle-worthy.

The first time I read this comic, I got steadily more annoyed until the punchline, and full props to Randy, I did actually chuckle at this one. All that annoyance just released right out of me, which is a good feeling.

Points are deducted for the text-only presentation, but I'm willing to forgive it for being as long as it is, it wouldn't fit on Twitter. It would also be difficult to illustrate some of the things on the list, so I can forgive him (to an extent) for not doing so.

If this were a lesser XKCD, the joke would just be the weird life goals, but that final one gives the rest of the list a point. The comic has a reason to exist, it takes an idea and jumps off of it to make something.

That's not to say that this comic is amazing, but it does get my coveted "Good Comic" tag. To self-plagiarize for a moment: if all XKCDs were at least this level, this blog wouldn't exist.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1747 - Spider Paleontology & #1748 - Future Archaeology

I think this is the first time we've gotten two continuous comics that were also consecutive, without being part of a week-long storyline (of which there have only been four or five, all more than six years ago). And that's not particularly new for webcomics, especially with all those qualifiers in there, but still.

So, first thing: why is the future populated by floating energy sphere things. That seems like a weird thing to gloss over. The characters don't even react! I don't have an issue with the time travel element, that's fine, that's part of the joke, that's okay, but then Randy piled a further thing on top of it for no reason. Did he just not want to fit a third stick figure in the panel?

The joke itself is more of an idea than anything else, but it's a neat idea! This is also a comic where it makes sense not to show the dinosaurs oozing goo or something (as opposed to all other comics, where we SHOULD see dinosaurs oozing goo). The point is to make us imagine, it'd totally ruin things to give us something to narrow down how we'd imagine things.

Over all I give the first comic a pass. The second however, is meh.

This comic was released on October 17th, which means that the election reference in the first panel became dated in less than a month. And while it's slightly salvaged by the lack of any specific mention of candidate names or dates, it's still a really awkward thing to put in. He could have just had them say "So what advances have you made in the future?", or, even better "So, why are you a weird energy orb thing?".

And then we get to the punchline. The idea that Randy's trying to convey is that incomplete archaeology can give us false images of the past, just like incomplete paleontology. Which is true, and a neat thing to think about. However, he chose to illustrate this idea with "That's How I Beat Shaq". I may not be the most 'with it' person, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who didn't get the reference. Randy should have gone with something either more popular today, like Rick Roll, or something more memorable from the past, like Space Jam.

These comics made me think a little bit, which I appreciate, but I'd have preferred to have some more context to the weird orb thing angle, and I'd really have preferred not having to listen to an Aaron Carter song as part of this post's research.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1745 - Record Scratch & #1746 - Making Friends

Do people actually wonder what a record scratch sound was? I don't even mean "Do people not know what records are?", I mean that by now a record scratch doesn't really mean 'the needle slipped on the record player', it's just the sound effect for a freeze frame. It's like when someone falls off a cliff in a cartoon and a slide whistle plays. It is, as TV Tropes would say, a Stock Sound Effect. 

This comic doesn't indicate it, but it was directly inspired by a twitter meme. That's why the comic is set up so weird: it's set up like a tweet: caption then image. 

What the comic SHOULD have done is have at least one panel of the guy being approached by the mob, and then a record scratch (with the sound effect in between the panels). Imagine it in your head, isn't that so much better? The way Randy did it, it feels out of order, it's a little bit confusing. 

Also, nitpick: music is still recorded on vinyl discs by hipsters some people, and vinyl sales are still a sizable part of the market. It's not a completely archaic technology as the caption kinda implies. 

So if they're having this conversation, they're friends, right? It doesn't seem to me like a conversation that two people would have as just acquaintances. So wouldn't that mean that Ponytail has already experienced Bald's attempts at friend-making? I don't think this is me being pedantic, I think this is a logical question to ask given the series of events we're presented with.

The fix for the weird paradox isn't even hard, just call attention to it and make that part of the joke. Cyanide & Happiness's "Sad Ending" short gives a good example of how to do it. If a work points out one of its flaws, that flaw is not a flaw that can be held against that work. (The way that the work points out the flaw can be, but let's not get into that now) It's like how you can't criticize Harry Potter for having magic, since that's the premise. They say "In a world where magic is real..." I don't say "Ha! Magic isn't real, your series sucks!", I have to say "Several scenes lose tension due to the lack of clearly defined rules for how magic works, etc."

THAT SAID, I do actually kinda enjoy the described scenario here, even if it is a little silly. It's cute! Just think about people slowly creeping towards a guy with a broken leg, when suddenly - "No one is sure why Uranus has a sideways rotation!" And all the predators halt for a second, and go "Hmm. This guy isn't so bad after all."

If only we had that visually presented to us. Oh well.

[page break]

Yo I'm writing this after watching Love Actually so forgive me if this is a bit sappy, but I wanted to say Happy Holidays to everyone reading this. Your comments honestly do perk me up and I sincerely hope that my Christmas gift to all of you will be a balancing out of my work and my college and my podcast and my music and this blog so I can give you regular updates across the board. 

Also, to the first reader of this post - your present is an iTunes gift card! The code is XVHV685WN9KV7JXP. (Hopefully this time it'll be usable in all countries)

I love you all.

- Greg

XKCD Isn't Funny #1742 - Will It Work? & #1743 - Coffee

I'm gonna have to trust this chart since the farthest I've ever gone down it is the package manager. I am a simple man, and I stick to what I know.

Yo, by the way (real quick) I don't know if this is a well known thing, but I remembered myself figuring it out in fifth grade and being really proud of myself and then my teacher fuckin SHIT on it! So like, the difference between 2^2 and 1^2 is three, (3^2)-(2^2)=5, and 4²-3²=7, and the difference between a square and the next highest square keeps increasing by two. And people get a lot of money when they discover new primes, right? Therefore I can use my thing to keep discovering new squares and become crazy rich, right? Someone hook me up with the email of whoever's in charge of giving out money to maths peoples.

Speaking of math! Back in my science class, I learned how to do graphs and this ain't no good. You gotta have little dashes that show where you are on the scale, even if you're not doing number specific things.

It also feels pretentious to say "code" instead of "program". (It is possible that I am just misunderstanding a difference in terminology) It's like those pretentious guys I've been told exist that say "film" instead of "movie" or "lobster" instead of "instant ramen". Some of us weren't born with a silver screensaver in our mouth, Randy!

There's probably a good joke somewhere in the idea of this comic, but a narrative structure would probably bring it out best. Maybe a guy's scrolling through snapchat or whatever the young kids are into these days, and he sees a code that only needs minimal tweaks, and then he's frustrated when those minimal tweaks turn out to take up years of his life. And that would even be kinda relatable; plenty of people have spent way too long working on something meaningless. The way this comic is presented, it's only relatable to coder people.

I haven't yet experienced this phenomenon, but I've been told (read: heard on a podcast) that there are these people you run into that really make a big deal out of not being able to cook. Like "Oh yeah, I burn water, I can't make cereal", like it's something to be proud of. The "I don't know how to adult" joke has kinda worn thin by this point. I'm all for understanding that we're all fallible humans and we're all just trying our best and all that, I'm less for celebrating not knowing stuff and wallowing in ignorance.

That's me reading too much into the context and whatnot, though. How does the joke stand up outside me whining about what the kids are doing these days? As it turns out, not too bad! Total is usually worth a chuckle,  and it is kinda neat in a gross-out way to see the chick horribly misinterpret the concepts involved in making coffee.

However, there are two huge Missed Opportunities in this comic. For one, it'd be way better if we saw them reading from a wikihow article or a cookbook or something. "Step 1: Poor the coffee grounds" and they just poor it out on to the floor. Ha!

The second M.O. (Mike Oldfield) is that we don't see the guests. This whole comic gains an extra dimension of sitcom hilarity if we have their guests are just in the other room, hearing these not-coffee-making sounds. Extra bonus points if we get to see the coffee actually being served, which makes the concept that people are going to drink this stuff more real and therefore more horrible and therefore more funny.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1734 - Reductionism & #1735 - Fashion Police And Grammar Police

I actually kinda like this one. If we put aside the text only 'could be a tweet' -ness of it, I can get behind it. Since the joke is taking reductionist ideas to their (il)logical conclusion, the joke is self-explanatory enough that you don't need to have knowledge of reductionism going in.

Points are deducted for that SUPER lame explanation of "R", though. At least specify that it's a consonant.

See, the difference is that if someone has really terrible spelling/grammar, I can't understand them.

This comic also has a weird tonal disconnect. It starts off with "judgemental and smug" etc, but then suddenly goes into "appreciate that they way you are interpreted is your responsibility" and "understand...". Then it's "vindictive about... proxies for race", but THEN it swings back to "fun to cheer on". See how they don't really form a united statement?

What I think happened is that Randy started off on one side of the fence, but then thought "hang on, I'm on to something!" and tried to make a short version of a thesis paper on the subject. (Honesty time: I would totally read the full version)

If Randy had picked either "they're both bad" or "they're both good", then that could have been a coherent argument in joke form and I would be able to judge that. As it is, this comic fails to make a concrete statement. Even if it was on one side, the bullet point structure is too direct, almost confrontational, to be comedy without alterations.

I will grant that the original observation is still interesting. However, the real interesting discussion is in how the two groups share root origins or are unconciously operating the same function in different ways. This is the hypothesis, we need the data analysis and conclusion.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1732 - Earth Temperature Timeline & #1733 - Solar Spectrum

Oh, so that's what he was going for with that ice levels comic a while back.

My main problem with this comic as an infographic is that it seems kinda disconnected from itself. Most of the things listed (pottery, writing, Shakespeare), while important to human history, have approximately zero effect on the climate. I understand that it's not Randy's fault that human history is like that - Earth lives on a whole different scale from us - but it still gives us a lot of information that isn't really related to the point he's trying to make. I will say that it's neat to scroll manually through all that history, it's like that solar system distance thing.

I'll also say that, terrible Pokemon joke aside, this comic does a pretty good job of explaining the difference between 'typical' climate change and what people usually mean when they say the phrase "climate change". Speaking as someone that used to have this exact problem (thanks for NOTHING, Michael Crichton!), I think this comic might have converted me to its side.

HOWEVER.

I, the little guy, am not the person that needs to be convinced. I could work my whole life to destroy as much environment, and I wouldn't fuck things up as much as the big companies do in a day. I don't mean to get all preachy and stuff, but y'know that whole ozone layer thing? They told me in middle school it closed up, but it's still there! We all agree that chlorofluorocarbons caused the big ozone hole (or at least, that's what my astronomy textbook says) but the end goal for phasing them out is still set to 2030! I know that we can't shut everything down overnight, but we've known since the eighties! (According to my astronomy textbook!)

And those big corporation peeps aren't reading XKCD, they're snorting coke off of expensive strippers, since they're all rich and corrupt and rich. So while this comic has nothing but good intentions, it has not succeeded unless it inspires people to go out and do something. It's like that one Chumbawamba song says: "If our music makes you happy or content, it has failed. If our music entertains, but doesn't inspire, it has failed. The music's not a threat. Action the music inspires can be a threat." (that's from the excellent Revolution EP, if you were wondering)

My astronomy class actually explained this to me so I get the joke! And it is a joke, even if it's one that only smart college-educated people like me can understand. 

For you DUMB HICKS, there are like, these spectrum thingies, and the black lines tell you which elements there are in the thing its a spectrum of, BUT THERE AREN'T SUNGLASSES IN THE REAL SUN. It actually lends itself pretty well to this joke, since it puts the sunglasses in the last place that the reader reads (in a traditional western left-to-right style).

This comic would be EXTRA not-bad if "those giant sunglasses" if it was phrased "silicon (for those giant sunglasses" because like, silicon makes glass (and plastic, maybe??) so it'd be scientifically accurate too. That's a nitpick, though, and if we put aside accessibility, I give this one a passing grade.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1730 - Starshade & #1731 - Wrong

Is "Starshade" an intentional Gregor The Overlander reference? 'Cuz that'd actually be pretty cool, especially because "Gregor" is basically my name and it'd therefore almost be a me reference!

Pranks aren't funny if they're nice. Well, that's not true, there can be nice pranks like painting a dome like R2D2 or whatever, but pranks can't be purely beneficial to the recipient. That's a surprise gift, not a prank.

The kinda-funny idea slightly to the left of the core of this comic is that these two people are able to set up the massive space thingy without NASA knowing until its in place. None of the process or action by which this feat is achieved is shown in the comic, and that's just a shame. It still wouldn't be as funny as if they were actually screwing with NASA, but it'd be funnier than just hearing vague descriptions of things happening off-screen.

This one could have been funny if the guy was wrong about something else. Like, can you really blame him for not knowing something about quantum physics? That shit's confusing as hell!

See, for a guy being wrong to be funny, we have to know how he's wrong. So I will give credit where credit might be due and I will admit that if I knew what they heck "particles" were, maybe I would enjoy this. However, I think we can all agree that this joke would be more accessible if he was wrong about something like the digestive process or whatever.

Now, onto the elephant of the room: This comic is almost certainly about the phenomenon known to us poor peoples of 2016 as "mansplaining" which is when a man corrects a woman because of sexism, or something like that. I'm a man so I might be wrong about that but that gives women a chance to womansplain me back and the genders will be equal again so yay!

Randy, as has been established, is a feminist-y type of person. I'm not going to get into the politics since honestly who cares about my poorly-informed opinions? I'll leave the gender debates to my 15-year-old self. I bring the mansplaining thing up because it means that Randy is trying to make a point, and this point is being made very poorly. All we see is a guy deny that he's wrong and then be wrong in a different way, no lesson is taught or learned, the bad guy is not brought down through a pie in the face or a verbal knockout, we just see things As They Are (in Randy's perception).

I've been reading The Naked Jape for the past few days, and there's a chapter that discusses the different theories about why jokes are funny. I won't get into it for space reasons, but basically there are four theories, none of which cover all types of jokes but together they cover pretty much everything. The one thing that all the theories agree on is that for a joke to work, reality has to be at least a little bit altered. That's not to say that all altered reality is funny, just to say that for a joke to be made, reality has to have been altered; all thumbs are fingers but not all rectangles are squares. That's also not to say that real life can't be funny, just that standard real life isn't funny; a guy picking up groceries is not funny on its own, he has to be picking up KY jelly and fruit or have forgotten his pants or whatever.

So, with the previous paragraph in mind, reconsider the comic. If this is just reality As Is, then what's the joke? There isn't one. And we already talked about how there's no point being made, so what's the appeal of this comic? There isn't one.

I want to close on a quick disclaimer. I may have political views, but I do my best to set them aside for this blog. I'm not criticizing Randy for putting forth a feminist statement, I'm criticizing him for putting forth a badly made feminist statement.