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.