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 Is Good Sometimes - #1928 - Seven Years

If I was a total pedantic asshole, I might be tempted to make some kind of semi-joke review about how this comic isn't funny. And that's like, technically true, but Futurama had "The Luck Of The Fryrish", The Simpsons had "Lisa's Substitute", XKCD can have "Seven Years".

I'm aware as I write this that I don't have the exact right words for it, but there's a phrase that I've come up with to describe things like this, and it's "This thing has stuff in it.". Like, Mulholland Dr. has stuff in it. 2001 has stuff in it. Finnegans Wake has probably too much stuff in it. (This blog, I hope, has some stuff in it somewhere.)

What I mean by "has stuff in it" is something between "This work of art* conveys an idea in a way that is arguably more impactful than if it was outright said." and "This work of art conveys an idea that is at best difficult to put into words.", with maybe a splash of "This work of art teaches the viewer something.". It's kinda like how impressionistic paintings don't make sense up close, element-for-element, but if you back away the seperate elements combine and it's a picture of a swan. Except the elements might make sense and instead of a picture it's a sense of dread or joy or amusement. I know I'm not doing the best job at explaining this concept I have, but keep in mind I'm trying to get across an idea about "Art", that thing that after thousands of years of argument been best described by the phrase "Art is what artists do" or, if you like, "Art defines itself". It's something like 'montage' or 'juxtaposition' or 'the way that music can make a scene seem more important' but on a larger scale, one step up on the rung. Basically like, 'can a liberal arts student overanalyze it in a paper?', and 'was the art intentionally made in a way that it could be analyzed in such a way?'.

So, if all that made sense beyond my own pretensions, here's why I think that this comic has stuff in it.

Y'know, putting aside the obvious actual emotions that went into this comic (emotions are usually a form of stuff), it's just a well-done depiction of a situation that I hope I'm never placed in. I have a friend who had a brief AIDS scare, and I couldn't fuckin sleep, man. That lasted for less than a week before the test came back negative. Cancer is a scary scary thing and it's bad and it has lasted as a feature in Randall's life for (as the title says) seven years. I had trouble dealing with the possibility of something similar for less than seven days. It's easy for you or me to semi-jokingly quote "Fuck cancer" or to look at panel six and call it maybe a little blunt or poorly done, but to quote Mark Prindle:

The mental torment is real. When your life falls apart, it's difficult to (a) envision how you could possibly build a new one in its place, and (b) muster up the strength and energy to actually do so. [...] I can vouch for the fact that when one considers one's life and art to be intertwined, one can only work through the pain by using it as inspiration -- even if that means displaying your failings to the world in all their unpleasance and embarrassingness.

The message of this comic is not necessarily a new one - I thought of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Grave Of The Fireflies** after reading it - but it is the first time I've seen the message made from such a personal experience. And for the record, it's a good message, and it's a message that's hard to remember in trying times. And the personal experience related does make the delivery more powerful, although I'm aware that to analyze what is essentially just Randall's life as if it were only a story is to belittle it slightly.

The message, at least by my reading, is hard for me to put into words, and I hope it's understandable that again, it's because these are Big Concepts. Yknow, like real respected philosopher people talk about. I don't want to further belittle this incredibly good, well-meaning, if-you-make-fun-of-it-you're-an-asshole comic by trying to inject my personal ideas or politics into it either.

By putting the scenes of vacations and recreation against the more dramatic scenes, Randall forces us to reconcile them together. We get a 'fun' panel as number three, which is really quick. It's almost jarring, especially if you follow XKCD and already know what's happening. And then in panel five, we get a 'cancer' panel and a 'fun' panel at the same time, yknow, for a given value of 'fun'. We, as viewers, are forced to figure out how someone can enjoy parts of their life and do things when their wife is suffering from cancer... which is exactly what Randall had to figure out. By continuing this pattern, Randall hammers home the need for humor, levity, and fun when dealing with a stressful situation. Because the alternative is an absence of those things, just sorrow all the time. And that's no way to live or to die.

In the last panel, I think the message maybe shifts to be a little bit more broad, at least by how I'm reading it. We have to enjoy the time we have while we have it. We are all going to die, and it's better to die with happy memories than with sad ones. As one of only three 'state rock song's goes:

"Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die? And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that life goes fast, it's hard to make the good things last..."

And as the aforementioned Eternal Sunshine goes:

Clementine: "This is it, Joel. It's gonna be gone soon."
Joel: "I know."
Clementine: "What do we do?"
Joel: "Enjoy it."***

And, from a short story that some will think I'm quoting ironically or as a joke but I'm really not:

"It's like summer," he said. "We know it won't last forever. We know one day the leaves will fall from the trees and winter will come. I could spend my life worrying about the coming winter or I could enjoy every precious day of sunshine. I can walk. I can talk. I can think. It's still summer and I want to savour every last day."

And that message/idea maybe needs a handful of asterisks for people in different kinds of situations, and for a whole thing about hedonism & escapism and productivity & devaluing a person down to their labor, etc; but let's not get into that cause that's a whole other thing.

If I had to make a criticism, the solar eclipse panel could have maybe been more detailed and artsy, yknow, to bring across the beauty of it, but like everything else I could complain about, it's just a nitpick. This is essentially a perfect comic that is not only engaging on both the visual and storytelling levels, but also important and good and full of stuff. And even if you disagree with the message, the presentation, etc; you have to at least respect Randall's willingness to put his life out here, and to put as much thought and work into it as he did.


*Yes I'm calling this XKCD art. XKCD has been art before and it will be art again.
**I've never seen Grave Of The Fireflies.
***Included in the script, but not the actual movie, is an extra bit said by Joel that continues from the last line given: "Say goodbye."

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1685 - Patch & #1686 - Feel Old

I have a friend who has programmed for video games and does art commissions with Photoshop, and he didn't get the joke. This isn't just me not knowing computer stuff, this is Randy failing to sell an idea even to people who have years of experience in the field. (Admittedly not super hardcore experience, like he wasn't on the team that made Deep Blue or anything but still)

The joke, as explained to me by explainxkcd, is that GNU and Photoshop both have a tool called 'Patch'. So if you can't do something in GNU, take a screenshot and change the code text in Photoshop. That joke gets an "...I guess..." reaction from me.

Said joke could probably be depicted better. I'm not even referring to my usual whingeing about how things aren't explained enough, although, yes, this joke isn't explained enough; The picture is just of some random code. The caption could be under the source code for the Google homepage and it wouldn't make a difference.

I think this idea has some actual potential (here is where I get into the whingeing I mentioned earlier), show a guy working on code, getting frustrated, and he starts manually slicing it up in Paint. I still wouldn't find it that funny, but it would make the joke a lot more accessible - especially to the people that the joke is intended to be marketed towards.

So, what does it say about me that I'm reviewing this even though I'm one of those voters?

The title text, for those who can't read it, says "'How long are you going to keep this up?' 'Statistically, only four or five more decades.'" and I have lost any sympathy I had for Randy. This marks, by my count, the third time that he's made a "I do this a lot" noise on one of these 'time is passing' jokes. That is not just shitty, that is arrogantly shitty. That is him admitting that he knows he's in a rut and he's going to keep going anyway. 

In his analysis of the French New Wave, Lewis Criswell summarizes one of the movement's philosophies as "If you don't have anything new to say, why say anything?". (I could have used the entire title of Chumbawamba's The Boy Bands Have Won... as a quote there instead - you're welcome) 

In a way, saying something you've already said before is a way of saying nothing. No matter how many times a band rereleases an album, if they've only ever made the one album, they're only going to have the one album listed on their discography page on Wikipedia. And while the statement made by that album may be worth hearing again, this time in remastered surround sound, the statement still isn't a new one.

Here's where the analogy breaks down: Randy isn't literally putting out the same comic over and over. He's doing it figuratively. What he's doing is closer to what we music folk call 'Garrixing' - ripping off yourself by making several songs that have basically the same progression, direction, point, structure, etc. These songs contribute little to nothing to any conversation that they're a part of and are therefore a net drain on those who consume them. These songs take up consumers time, money, and iPod space, and in return the consumer gets something that they have essentially heard before. 

Now, to be fair, Randy is not selling these individual comics. However, he still makes his living off of the interest generated by them. I find it to be self evident that knowingly reproducing content that you are giving to people that pay your salary is kind of a dick move. 

But even beyond that, by not creating or contributing to any discussions, Randy is stagnating artistically. Doing that knowingly goes beyond just being a dick move. Art is how we learn about ourselves. That's why angsty teenagers quote song lyrics all the time - the philosophies of the lyricist are being transferred into them. When Randy knowingly withholds from creating new art (yes, I'm calling XKCD art), he's not just putting off the next Time, he is removing from the pool of knowledge someone can gain from reading XKCD.

To put it in a slightly less antagonistic way, we've moved beyond Windows 95, right? We placed that brick in the ever-taller building of human progress and we built upon it. What Randy is doing is using the same brick over and over, and even though it may be an incredibly minor brick in the scheme of things, we can do better, damn it. 

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1662 - Jack and Jill & #1663 - Garden

Before we start: My friend Lightning released a new album the other day! It's called Golden Age and it's all 90s rave themed so if that's up your alley definitely give it a listen or two!

I'm really digging my decision to do double reviews sometimes. I'm not going to make it an everytime thing, but I like how when I have very little to say about a comic other than it's wrong, I can have a kinda short review but add a longer review on top of it so that I don't feel like I'm ripping my audience off.

This comic is wrong. You build wells at the top of hills so they don't fill up with runoff from higher ground, plus you carry the heavy bucket full of water downhill instead of uphill every time you get water. Randy is a goddamn city slicker who wouldn't know how to plow a field if his wife was a tractor.

Woo! On to the next one!

So, this is the first XKCD since the comic started to be delayed by three whole days. It had so much buildup that it ended up counting as Friday and Monday's comic, breaking Randy's technically perfect upload streak. Was it worth the wait?

Well, I can definitely appreciate the effort that Randy put into this. This has interactivity and randomness and stuff! ...unfortunately, it really just feels like a slightly more sophisticated version of one of those mid-2000s simulator flash games, or a more artsy version of the Plants Vs Zombies 'zen garden' minigame.

I also really don't see what it has to do with April Fool's Day. In the multiple delay status updates, the comic was referred to as 'the April 1st comic' rather than 'the Friday comic' or 'the latest comic' or just 'the comic'. I understand that the last two April Fool's comics were both interactive, but that's not really a prank or a joke (as in, more of a joke than a comic is already supposed to be, like that time Dinosaur Comics swapped out the dinosaurs with gifs of other webcomic characters that constantly switched with each other).

So, not saying that Randy should have done the work on the comic sooner, since I totally understand missing deadlines and underestimating how long something will take, BUT since the comic isn't actually holiday-themed in any tangible way, couldn't he just have done a quick filler-type comic for Friday and then finished working out the bugs at his leisure?

Now, the comic obviously isn't supposed to be funny, but does it accomplish what it set out to do? Not really. Like, it's neat, but also kinda screensaver-y, you dig? It's not unpleasant to look at, but I'd never seek it out (unless by 'screensaver' you're thinking of the pipe animation thing because that was the fucking bomb).

This last point is likely a more subjective one, but I think relaxation tool things are more relaxing if you have more of an influence on what the screen's displaying. In this comic, you control the lamps, and everything comes from how you place them. You don't plant the seeds or control how fast they grow or how fast the wind is blowing. Compare that to Silk or Neonflames, which, even though you don't completely control the finished result, you're given several controls that give you a good idea of how it'll look. Good on Randy for doing something new, but this really feels like XKCD's Chinese Democracy: a lot of buildup for nothing that impressive.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1568 - Synonym Movies 2

There's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said.
I'm just repeating myself repeating someone else
equally incapable of uttering a single new thought.
Yet you are ever worthy of adoration,
so how can I for a moment cease to lift my heart in praise?

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1565 - Back Seat

Anyone who needs a good art draw thing done for them should contact my good friend this guy since he has good rates and is pleasant to work with.

Phew, with that first sentence out of the way the rest of this review should be a piece of cake!

I understand exaggeration for comic effect is a thing, but it feels too abrupt here.

It reminds me of part of one of Dara O Briain's stand up sets, where he talks about how some midwives are really dumb but think they're smart. And he gets to how one dumb broad (read: "woman") thought that tears were better than cuts for pregnancy thing, and he follows that with "...in fact, some doctors prefer to use a bear."

Now, I love Dara O Briain, I think he is a top quality entertainer and all four of the shows he has out on DVD had me in stitches the whole way through. But that one joke didn't hit right for me because of how it wasn't phrased like "Yeah, in a couple years I bet they'll just have fuckin' bears getting women ready for pregnancy, right?". It was presented like he was making fun of something actually happening, when it should have been him bringing a train of logic to it's illogical conclusion.

I can totally see this joke working with a different setup (not as a Dara joke though, it strikes me as more Dylan Moran). But the setup would have to put the punchline in a point of reference. Like his friend had said the thing before disappearing for three hours, and the decaying raccoon is his imagined description of what's really going on.

This comic kinda hints at a similar background but doesn't follow through. A statement this broad should at least have some supporting evidence to it.

Also, the placement of the comic between "Protip:" and the rest of the comic stunts the flow a little, although I can see why he felt like "protip" should be read first.

At least this comic's better than Andrew Jackson Jihad's "Back Pack". What a godawful album that came from.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1549 - XKCD Phone 3

Today someone told me I was prettier than Bailey Jay and I was all like "Fuck yeha, my day has been made!" and then I see this comic and snakes started physically manifesting in my home.

I've already talked about this comic twice! Why does a third one exist! Of all the XKCDs that could have been tripled, why couldn't it have been one of the good ones? I legitimately wouldn't have minded if #1533 had been repeated, since it has a deadpan, almost hypnotic quality that holds up well in the face of repetition, much like a Spiritualized song.

Imagine if instead of this, we'd gotten four more panels of Beret just sitting there. It'd be a good callback, suddenly we'd all realize he's still sitting there from before! And then maybe in the third appearance of the antique factory we could get all existential or whatever and show him quietly crying that he's stuck with such a boring, thankless job.

Instead we get the third appearance of The XKCD Phone. "We made another one!" proclaims the comic. "Yes, but why?" the reviewer begs, "Why, oh why, oh why?".

I had my friend Gillian take a look at this one. She calls it "lame and kinda like try hard" and adds "it feels like one of those tumblr posts that ends in like 'potter heads get your wants' like that sort of vibe". If you don't know what she's talking about, you're a lucky person. Never get a tumblr, it's hell.

Possibly the worst part (aside from the fact that Hitler existed) is that every one of these lines could have been a genuinely amusing aside in some larger joke. Like it's kind of a funny idea that something like part of a phone was foretold by prophecy, but combined with all the other 'punchlines' (scare quotes!) we just end up with a confusing, unfocused lump. We still have not truly moved the overall punchline past "What if a phone was just really shitty?".

This is the type of comic that really makes me want to stop, more than people being MEAN :'( to me in the comments could ever even dream. It really makes me realize how repetitive and pointless this is, and how really I might as well be Beret at his antique factory.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1547 - Solar System Questions

This comic marks the second time Ceres has been mentioned in an XKCD, which means that if I'd been forward thinking instead of A FOOL, I TELL YOU, A FOOL, I could've had a mega-cool blocsonic reference going on. But you know, live and learn, like that one Sonic song.

That punchline is the epitome of shoehorned in, right there at the end. Are we seriously supposed to believe that all those questions (some answered) were setup for that? It's clearly not the focus of the comic.

I'd like to say for sure what the focus of the comic is, but the best I can do is "something something science doesn't know everything". Which to me seems like a weird thing to say, considering how much of an advocate for science he's been in the past.

This comic should have also waited the ~eight days it'd take for a probe to land and [Soon!] to become an actual answer.

This is the kind of comic that makes me think that XKCD is actually some kind of giant joke Randall Munroe is playing on all of us. Like after ten more years of this he'll reveal that it's all a giant code for "Bush did 9/11" somehow. It's just so lacking in any actual information or effort. The explainxkcd post for this comic can actually be pretty interesting, because it actually, y'know, explains the answers or why we don't have the answer. This comic, meanwhile, teaches us nothing, contributes nothing, means nothing.

I no longer fear death.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1540 - Hemingway

More like "HemingGAY" if you ask me!!!
-me, if I was Mark Prindle

I really like the idea behind this. For one, it makes fun of "For Sale: Baby's Shoes, Never Worn", which is well known, short, and therefore ideal for this type of comic. For another, it makes fun of "For Sale: Baby's Shoes, Never Worn" which I've never really thought was as good as everyone (read: my awful 7th grade English teacher) made it out to be. Like, it might as well be "A Baby Died", which is half as long as "FSBSNW" and therefore twice as good.

But I'm not here to discuss six word stories, I'm here to discuss Christian alt rock band Switchfoot!

Well, after listening to every song they've ever recorded, let me tell you... they suck!

Now, with that out of the way, allow me to get a little off topic and talk about the latest XKCD comic: Hemingway.

It's nice that there's a variety of jokes in here, if you don't get one (looking at you, third one from the bottom) you can just move down to the next. However, the recurring 'Hemingway didn't actually write the story' is annoying and doesn't build like a recurring joke should. It's like Randy wants to show off that he knows more than us. Plus, it's weird to see Hemingway's name in the last line after being told three times that he didn't write it.

The text-only format is annoying too, I can imagine this working really well if every line had a single panel commentary of sorts. Like for "For Sale: Baby's Shoes, Just Hatched", there could be an uncomfortable guy holding shoes, drippy with egg fluid, saying "We don't know what laid them.". And for "This Weird Trick Covers Baby Feet!", there could be every Buzzfeed employee being brutally murdered because that's what they all deserve. I could swear that XKCD has even used this multiple caption/panel format before, but I'm drawing a blank. It's possible I'm thinking of Bug Martini.

That said, I did enjoy this comic, definitely way more than every other text-only comic we've seen.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1538 - Lyrics

That's a really bad way to represent hard-to-understand lyrics. Since the text is edited and cut up, it looks more like Randy's trying to show manipulated vocals, like in the beginning of Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" or Skrillex's "With You, Friends (Long Drive)". Instead of editing the text like that, he should have written the words as mostly gibberish, and placed the music notes over as well as around them.

Also if you can relate to this comic you are a total pleb. REAL music fans can instantly understand entire albums full of the most horribly slurred lyrics ever, even if there's three vocal tracks going at once and they're all in different languages.

I kid of course, but it's kinda odd to hear someone imply that they can never understand song lyrics. Like, I could totally get someone having no idea what Michael Stipe is saying in "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", but like, all songs? Seriously? Is that radio tuned to a station in Germany?

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1517 - Spectroscopy

I'm listening to Faith Hill's "Breathe" for the first time as I type this, and I was not expecting it to sound like this at all. "XKCD" and "pop country" had never been linked in my mind before, even tangentially. If there was any music genre I had expected XKCD to link itself, it'd have been chaphop or nerdcore or vaporwave* or something like that. But I digress.

I have to confess that I didn't get either of the references, so the crossover was completely lost on me. My usual criticism of XKCD's obscure jokes does still apply though. More people would understand this joke, and more people would find it funny, if the setup included the background information to the punchline. Obviously it'd make for a longer comic, but it's not like long, detailed, or complex comics haven't been made in the past.

Also, it's probably just my /mu/sical bias showing, but I'd have gone with the Pink Floyd song. It's the second track on the second-best selling album of all time! It's a more widely known reference, and a more dignified one too, more suited to the discovery of new planets. And -and- it's not like making the reference less esoteric would be handing the joke to the audience when the other half of the joke is about exoplanet spetctoscopy.

*I actually think vaporwave is a legitimate subgenre to plunderphonics, and I've done my own little experiment with it, but can't you just imagine Randy listening to it? This really intense look on his face, and he's going "yes, oh man, capitalism. Japan".

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1511 - Spice Girls

It's ironic that as I write this, I'm listening to Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, one of the least Spice Girls-like bands this side of Merzbow.

I got a really good first impression from this comic. Look at that: Depth! Details! Shading! Perspective! But then I noticed that the two side walls have different angles with the roof (and that they're not given the normal thick lines for some reason), that the speech line is really unclear as to who's speaking it and to whom, and that the joke sucks. Thus I shake my head sadly, a single tear glistening in the moonlight, before giving this comic a failing grade in spite of the effort that was put into it.

Boy, this is clumsily done. What is that box in the middle of the room even supposed to be? I'd say it was a safe but it doesn't have any dials or anything. Is it just a block of wood? Did they bring a block of wood into their hideout just on the off chance they'd be found out and would need enough cover for one person? And then there's just a torn bit of paper or whatever but the rest of the wall's perfectly smooth. But now I'm nitpicking.

The core idea, as per usual with XKCD, is fine. The execution, as hinted at repeatedly and explicitly throughout the previous two paragraphs, is not.

The spice girls reference feels dated as all hell to start, considering their last album came out in (checks Wikipedia) 2000, and their last good album came out in (checks TV Tropes) 1997. I'd have gone with something more current or timeless, like "90's TV shows" or "flavor of ice cream".

"The merciful one..." is a really clumsy phrase. Besides the fact that there're apparently only two Spice Girls in this alternate universe, as opposed to our full set of Kicking, Screaming, Gucci, Little, and Piggy, wouldn't someone in a stressful situation just leave it at "Which Spice Girl are you?"?

All of this is avoiding the obvious question of why someone is shouting this in this situation at all. I don't get it. Why does Randy like to imagine this? I could see it if it was a parody of the new Divergent-type dystopian teen fiction that's been popping up for a little bit now, where people are sorted by really arbitrary methods, but that's obviously not the case.

In conclusion, I don't know how to end reviews.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1508 - Operating Systems

This is a joke that I do not know enough about computers to understand. I just saw something called "Blood Drone" and I have to admit that attracted most of my attention.

You can only imagine my disappointment when I checked my dutiful and loyal sidekick, explainxkcd, and found that it was a development hell joke. Haven't we used all of them up by now, what with the finally released Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever, My Bloody Valentine's third full length album, and The Avalanches' second- oh wait

This is just a very easy joke to make, and it can be made in a lot of different ways and about a lot of different subjects, so I find it hard to comprehend why Randy decided to present it this way. Why not do it on a more popularly known subject, or ramp up the scale a lot. I vaguely remember getting pleasantly caught by surprise by a lesson on how the universe will progress before heat death happens.* At the end it added on "[X] is finally released". That didn't feel copied because it improved so much on the concept, like a cover that blows away the original song.

Ah, memories of better jokes. Good times. Goooooooooooooood tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimes.


*There's a wikipedia page for "timeline of the far future" which includes such things. Don't read it. It gets depressing fast.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1501 - Mysteries

I'm disappointed that "Your fetish" wasn't on the "Weird as hell" side.

This is one that I just honestly don't see the humor in it. It's kinda neat to see a list of mysterious events, I guess, but there's not really a joke here UNTIL...

....you get to the alt-text! Like, seriously, mouse over the comic, it is worth reading (if a little wordy for an alt-text). It's kinda self deprecating, which is a nice change of pace, and it's, y'know, a joke. However, it also really takes away from the comic. It's nice to know that Randy's literally just giving us a folddown of his Wikipedia experience of the night. I've said before that certain comics look like they were written after hitting the "random" button on Wikipedia a few times for inspiration, and now we know why.

In conclusion, seriously, @theneedledrop, only 5/10 for Strangers To Ourselves? I mean, it's no Jenny Death, but it's still at least a 7/10, dammit.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1497 - New Products

This is such an old observation. TV Tropes even has a whole page for the first two quotes, and probably one or two others that could also apply I'm forgetting.

I actually have an explanation for this sort of thing (that I suspect I might be stealing from a speech my dad gave to me once). When something meets our expectations, we don't take note of it, for the same reason that we aren't surprised when we wake up in the beds we fell asleep in. But when something goes totally against what we believe, we do notice it, for the same reason you'd notice that the sky had suddenly turned pink.

There are of course exceptions to this behavior pattern, although right now I'm pretty tired and can't think of any easy examples off the top of my head other than annoying pricks who say "I told you so" out loud.

This comic of course loses the usual points for being text-only when it could easily be converted into a comic proper. Just replace the text with little one-panel scenarios. Easy peasy.

In conclusion: Apocalypica - "Conclusion".

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1492 - Dress Color

Have you no shame, Randy?

First off, this isn't a joke, but second, it isn't a statement either, although it's clearly intended to be. "A statement about what?" a member of my lovely audience may ask. "A shitty meme argument that everyone got tired about before he could even publish this comic." I answer, giving them a firm handshake while gazing confidently into their eyes.

Like, there are things that become dated quickly, and there's things like this that people will forget before a week's gone by.

This comic is like the worst possible ripoff of the checker shadow illusion, mostly because it doesn't explain what it's doing at all. When people post the CSI or things like it, there's always a caption saying "X and Y are the same color", and/or show a connecting line between X and Y. This comic does neither.

It's especially baffling to me that Randy would make a comic about this when he just happens to have a blog dedicated to peoples' questions which has answered semi-memetic questions in the past.

That blog is also, as of 10:36 PM on February 28th 2015, showing a little sub-banner reading "NEWS! the What if? U.S. edition is out on September 2, 2014!".

This comic is almost worse than #1357. Looks like we have an early contender for worst comic of 2015.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1483 - Quotative Like

I have to admit a bias as I'm going in here: I hate linguistics, mostly because I used to have a friend who would only talk about linguistics and nothing else. I'm not exactly sure how much that affects my perception of this joke, but I feel that anyone reading should know when something may be affecting my judgement (more than usual anyway). I'd have Andrew review it but it turns out he's too busy working on Half-Life 5.

Now, I've always thought people who use the quotative like are obnoxious, just because every time I can think of, it's been used to tell really stupid, boring stories.
"Ohmygod, the other day my boss was like 'if you don't start acting nice to the costumers, I'm gonna fire you', and I rolled my eyes at him and I was like 'well, listen, if you're gonna fire me, you're gonna lose the hottest person in this store', and he was like 'get out' and I was like 'fuck you, I don't need this', and I stole all the money in the cash register and stabbed everyone in the face"

Speaking of stupid, boring stories, "I found this article on the linguistics of the "quotative like"". I understand not every conversation can be the subject of a major motion picture, but c'mon, silence would be better than that.

I also don't buy that Bald would instantly know what a quotative like is just from hearing the phrase. Reading this comic is the only time I can recall seeing the word "quotative" at all, and I read a decent amount.

The punchline is executed as correctly as it can be under the circumstances, but by the time we get there I just don't care, because we started out in a really stupid, boring way. It's like how track 15 of Sufjan Stevens Illinois is the second-best song he's ever written (best is of course "I Want To Be Well"), but you have to suffer through fourteen whole other tracks to get to it. Alternatively, it's the opposite of how "Live At Domino's" perfectly climax's The Avalanche's Since I Left You, even though everything up to that point and after was also completely worth listening to.