Death

Have you ever done something embarrassing in high school?

Have you ever done something embarrassing in high school for like six solid years and posted about it on the internet multiple times a week?

Hey. It's me. I wrote XKCD Isn’t Funny (XIF, pronounced “zif”) from when I was fifteen to when I was twenty-one. I'm twenty-six and a girl now, my name's Gwen. I keep on meaning to make this big video essay type thing about the XKCD anti-fandom, but I am an adult who works full time and struggles to get my chores done, so. I'd rather have my thoughts out in this form than not at all.

There were a lot of mistakes I made with this blog. I kinda wish I could go through every post and update them all with disclaimers about how wrong I was. But that would require me to read and edit like four hundred examples of my high school and college writing, and I do not have the psychic strength to do that. So: Anyone reading through this blog from this point forward, after every post, imagine that current-me is yelling at younger-me for being a fascist and/or an idiot. 

One of my biggest mistakes was trying to be funny. It really cannot be overstated how much of a self-own so many of my posts are. I tried to criticize someone for being unfunny only to continuously prove that I'm less funny than them. 

Fun fact!: When I started this blog I was largely known in high school for being the person who tried to be funny but wasn't good at it. And for being "that weird kid".

Can you imagine all the better things I could have done with my time? I could have learned an instrument or DIY’d my HRT. I could have at least made video essays instead of blog posts, yknow, created media that people outside of a specific niche might've seen.

Fun fact!: Since starting this blog, I have been diagnosed with severe chronic depression, autism, CPTSD, and OCD. Everyone knows the best judges of comedy are suicidal autists. 

Another mistake was trying to be smart. My understanding of comic art as a medium was near exclusively limited to a handful of webcomics and Garfield. My grasp of comedy was only a few years developed from unironically enjoying Family Guy. My knowledge of media criticism started with The Nostalgia Critic and ended with the other XKCD hateblogs.

Fun fact!: I never even opened the copy of Understanding Comics I bought like, four years into XIF.

And like, I probably could just delete this blog, and nothing of value would be lost. But every so often, I get a comment saying my shitty jokes are funny or that they wish I'd come back. Every time, it makes me feel like I've at least made my mark on the world or whatever. And also, it's really hard to spend years on something and not feel kinda proud of it. There is the occasional good point in the morass of poorly-disguised self-loathing and sub- sub- Yahtzee Croshaw "criticism". It is at least a document of my progression from ignorant gamergater asshole to semi-tolerable well-meaning leftist. Is a sucky legacy better than no legacy at all? I dunno. Maybe not. This blog is essentially a massive list of reasons to cancel me if I ever stumble upon success. That's without even considering the fact that I'm trans; and if you're a creator who's trans, a group of people will manifest exclusively to try to ruin your life and get you to kill yourself. Is that karma? I used to be part of a harassment campaign and now I worry constantly about being on the receiving end of one?

I once looked up what people were saying about me, and it is brutal. One person started their comment with something like "I found this blog and it just made me really sad.". Fuckin... ouch. And to be clear, I deserved it.

Fun fact!: I once referenced this blog during a job interview as a demonstration of my social media expertise. I was somehow hired on as an intern for a few months. That internship was a college graduation requirement. 

It felt really good to be part of a community for a while. A small community, hindered by the fact that Google+ prevented anonymous comments at the time, but still. It felt good to contribute to something. Those memories are mostly tainted now, though. 

Jon Levi, the guy who made the post that lead me to the XKCD hatedom in the first place, is now a weird self-hating fascist transmisogynist even though they're trans. Check out their twitter, they're straight up retweeting racist shit and decrying unions and arguing with parody accounts. Sad. Thank fuck the terrible podcast I did with them never went anywhere. Yknow, I still have a short story by them where they reinterpret Cinderella as a wholesome ‘coming out trans’ tale. That’s from before they got radicalized into hatred. If I'd been a better friend to them, could I have saved them?

There's another guy who did XKCD Still Sucks, I forget if he ever gave his name. He started when I announced I was stepping back from regular updates. He says I have "bonhommie" in his blog description, and the first time I read it, I carried that around with me all week. Fuck yeah! People think I'm a nice person! Anyway, most of his blog posts are one-liners, often with a weird fash bend. There's one post that attacks the sexual revolution. I suppose it’s less unexpected than I’d like. Stepping on someone else's platform to immediately start spewing horrible viewpoints was essentially what I did when I started XIF. It did kinda sting, seeing people seemingly respond so positively to such negative-vibes, low-effort writing. Is that really what’s wanted? Was all my effort at improving my writing just wasted? Cause I can stop trying, yknow. I can just update a blog every day and say "Randal Munro more like dumbass fuck". It'd lower the collective standards of discourse by another few notches but I'd take the patreonbux.

Hang on, real quick, let's do one last review so I can say I did the last one.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #2953 - Alien Theories

I feel like a genuine flaw with Randall's art is a lack of verisimilitude. In many of his comics, it's hard to imagine the hypothetical panels that would have come before and after what we're shown. In this comic, it just reads awkwardly because we have one person on the ground and two spaceships floating in midair. Wouldn't it be funnier if we saw the aliens in the flesh (or in the silicon-based skin-covering, if that's how they evolved)? And if we have to see the spaceships for whatever reason, shouldn't they either have lil motion wiggle lines or be hovering perfectly straight up? The angling makes it look like they're wiggling back and forth, but the lack of motion lines makes it look like they're hovering perfectly in place. It hits the eye weird. 

Does it annoy anyone else that the aliens are drawn with depth and the stick figure isn't?

Here's another problem with doing these reviews: After like fifteen minutes of staring at a single square of simplistic art, trying to figure out what emotions it evokes and why, I start getting a kind of evil zen going on. Is anything funny? What is "funny"? Really, all of us are our own individual universes, and to assert my worldview upon yours is to kill you. 

I hit up one of my friends who happens to be an amateur UFOlogist (Since ending this blog I've made friends! It rules!) and she would like to make it very clear that UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, aka UFOs) are actually a completely separate conspiracy from EBEs (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, aka ETs, aka aliens). Wikipedia and Rationalwiki (that's the level of research I'm committing to here, yes) disagree with her. Does it matter? Well, probably not, because the general perception by the public is that they're synonyms, but it's kinda neat. 

There's definitely a spark of something here, I just don't think it's presented as well as it could be. It is funny to imagine the hyperintelligent subject of one conspiracy theory being a conspiracy theorist about something else. But see, aliens being real would make it unsurprising that other aliens are also real. Who's this stick figure jerk, telling the advanced spacefaring species what is and isn't real? If mole people came out of the ground claiming that dowsing rods work, I'd be inclined to believe them. The two conspiracies need to be completely separated, different realms of thought. Something like aliens believing in the Cottingley Fairies. And then everyone else in the comic would be bewildered and confused, which is funny I guess probably I dunno

Okay, now that I'm the last one, I'm officially ending the chain of XKCD hate blogs that started with Carl Wheeler back in 2008. I'm like Eminem ending D12 by releasing that "Stepping Stone" song. Or like Doug Yule ending The Velvet Underground with Squeeze.

If I ever do manage to start making things again like I want to; I will probably post about it here, just because this is functionally my largest platform. When I announced I was stepping back from updating the blog once-per-XKCD, I got one person who said they'd check the blog regularly because they liked my work so much. If you're still out there, person, thank you. That means a lot.

Until then, this is my legacy. And it sucks.