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 Reviewed - #1868 - Eclipse Flights

Credit where credit is due, this is a good comic!

The dialogue avoids the worst of the usual XKCD problem where it's too stiff. Instead of "I'm calculating how many flights will intersect the eclipse...", we just get "Flight plans.". Much better! We can infer the other information from the context, which is what functional dialogue is supposed to do.

And the joke is good too. That overdramatic "end times" line just SELLS it for me. I just love the idea of a pilot going about their regular business when suddenly the apocalypse is happening except HA JK its not. It reminds me of those prank videos on youtube. No! Not those ones! The ones that DON'T suck!!!

I do have a few tiny quibbles. Panel two having no dialogue gives the comic a bit of a weird pacing, it's like a beat panel, but the panel after it doesn't have anything that would require a beat panel. Maybe instead panels two and three could be combined, with the dialogue from three superimposed over the image from two.

And yknow how English is read left to right, right? Because of that, we also 'read' art as going from left to right. Consider how we almost always see the 8-Bit Theater gang walking toward the right side of the panel, ditto for a lot of XKCDs. So the image for panel four should really be flipped vertically. That could be an intentional choice that I'm just not picking up on the ideas of, though.

I'd also like to point out that this is just a liiiiittle bit similar to #1391, which was almost five hundred comics ago, holy crap. And that on its own is not bad. This comic improves upon that one in pretty much every way, and if you're going to rip something off, you might as well improve it while you do. But if there's a third comic about people being confused about darkness, I will be very disappointed in Randall Munroe.

Scat Porn Reviewed - Questionable Content #3135

Jeph Jacques has finally ended all the angsty romance mental problems drama and switched to HARDCORE SCATOLOGICAL PORNOGRAPHY. And, as we do here on ScatPornReviewed.Blogspot.com, we will be reviewing it.

So, in the first panel, we get a qt3.14 robogirl on a couch. Not very sexy. But then! A guy appears and starts farting! The sexiness has leveled up, since here at ScatPornReviewed.Blogspot.com we are into that. The sexiness goes back down when we find out that he's apparently just playing the sound effects, but then we reach the sexiest panel of the comic, where robot guy releases a bunch of poo right onto her face! That's SUPER DUPER HOT, because it's like, all gross and stuff.

Unfortunately, it's revealed in the last panel that it's just brownie mix, which RUINS EVERYTHING. It's like if at the end of a story it turns out it was all a dream. It wasn't really poo, it was NEVER SEXY AT ALL. It's still kinda sexy that she thought it was poo, but she's not even bothered by it, we don't get to see her all grossed out, which would be SO HOT YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW GUYS.

I have to give this piece of scat porn a D-: Not very sexy. Next week, ScatPornReviewed.Blogspot.com reviews 2Girls1Cup, and we find out if it's just an Internet meme, or if it's a hidden classic.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1591-1609 - EPIC CATCHUP REVIEW OF SADNESS

I probably should have just done this directly after the hiatus. It'd have definitely been better than being behind for two months, but at least I'll be able to get back into the swing of things in time for December and the two year anniversary. For now I'll be channeling my inner Rob Mason (for there is a Rob Mason in all of us, right next to the Slim Shady) and giving you some shorter reviews that may or may not be fleshed out in future.

#1591 - Belle's Theorem
It's executed well, and I appreciate that I don't actually have to know what Belle's Theorem is to understand the joke, but the joke is just a preachy thing about how people don't understand science. D+

#1592 - Overthinking
It has footnotes. Might as well be Mallard Fillmore. F

#1593 - Play-By-Play
This reads like every pretentious 'I'm too smart to watch sports' comment I've ever seen, with a hint of the played-out 'common words' joke thrown in. Really boring art too; we should see at least a popup thing of the diamond. D-

#1594 - Human Subjects
Okay but why are her subjects awful? Are they criminals? Mentally disturbed? Republicans? (yuk-yuk) That context could add so much to this joke. We don't even get to see them do any of the things. C-

#1595 - 30 Days Hath September
I assume this is supposed to be a relatable joke but I don't have this problem since I'm a smart cookie. That wouldn't be an issue except no joke is made about the problem other than that it exists. F

#1596 - Launch Status Check
Why doesn't anyone ever oppose these things? There should be at least one guy getting progressively more and more frustrated at all the unprofessionalism. There should at least be some acknowledgement that this is immature. There are tumblr posts kinda like this that go like "me as a doctor: woah dude youve got like tons of bad stuff in you" or something like that. And they're kinda bland and interchangeable but they pretty much work because the structure of the joke makes it clear that the joke is their own immaturity or incompetence rather than just 'what if everyone was stupid'. D+

#1597 - Git
Would have been better if the third line just ended at "No idea." but then it would have been CouldBeATweet so hmmmmm. Nice use of that context that #1594 was missing and it's pretty much understandable even though I'm not Programming Guy so C+

#1598 - Salvage
Wow! Nice job on this one, excellent non-verbal exposition, pretty good art, and the punchline hits you all at once at the end. This is my favorite kind of XKCD. A+

#1599 - Water Delivery
Boooo on the reused building and water bottle art and kinda ugly colors but yayyy on most of the rest. It gives topical background and illustrates the idea well. Unfortunately, it does have that 'feels like a presentation' thing going on, similarly to #1400, where the idea is presented in the manner that's easiest to understand instead of the way that brings out the humor the most. The captions should have been the first and last panels and the comic should have been the middle panel. B

#1600 - MarketWatch
So they noticed it happening... but also they were doing it intentionally and didn't want to break the pattern? Huh? Why is this event occurring? I have so many questions. Also the newscaster's hairline clips through the side of her head. F+

#1601 - Isolation
First reaction: 'this is just #1227 but visual and not quotes. After getting to the punchline: "oh. that's okay then". Full credit where credit's due, my expectations were successfully subverted. Nice double meaning in the title, too. B+

#1602 - Linguistics Club
It's CouldBeATweet, but it'd be a funny tweet. It's got that rhythm that one liners are supposed to have, and that little line between the two halves helps bring that out, improving on what the text-only version would have. C+

#1603 - Flashlights
I really like how the person says "I guess?" because that's totally the reaction of everyone in the audience. Lighting a forest on fire seems more Black Hat than some random dude, though, who is he to burn down all our precious oxygen-generators? Anyway pretty lame punchline, we should see the burning forest, D+

#1604 - Snakes
Why did it have to be snakes? Haha, I'm being silly, I'm not actually Indiana Jones, I'm Greg Greenwell (for now)! It's a nerd joke, but it's a nerd joke most people will get, I think. It's CouldBeATweet though, which is of course unforgivable. Also it's weird that he'd color the snake considering how hard it is to see. C

#1605 - DNA
It's a White Hat comic. It strammans and simplifies the opposition so that Randy's OC can win. Nothing is new. F-

#1606 - Five-Day Forecast
Well. That's dark. I'm kinda sad now. Also that is some reused art assets. D

#1607 - Supreme Court
thewecomicsreview likes it! It'd have been funnier to see the supreme justice saying it from his podium thing though. C+

#1608 - Hoverboard
It kinda feels inevitable that XKCD would do a flash game comic, and honestly good for it, even if it is a blatant gimmick. The controls are pretty decent (although not as good as the controls for Cubified, the free flash game available through desura, that I did the soundtrack to) and it was a good choice to have an infinite jumping mechanic. It's also pretty neat that it lets you discover the true expanse of the game on your own.

It is, however, pretty lame that parts of the scenery are non-solid while looking exactly like the solid scenery, making some navigation a trial-and-error process. The bigger spaceship thing has too many interlocking corridors, meaning that it becomes confusing without a built-in area map. And that island in the sky with no indication that it's there but it has two coins? Dick move, Randy, how was someone supposed to discover that? Lern 2 level design.

but if you want to add a soundtrack, Randy, seriously, hit me up. Not even joking on this, I'll do it for pennies.

#1609 - Food Combinations
LIES, Randy, LIES. I've told people many times that red Doritos taste good with milk and/or dipped in chocolate pudding, and not a single person has ever even entertained the possibility that I am right (even though I am, as always). And likewise, no one could ever convince me to try ice cream with eggs. D-


So I know this isn't my usual thing, but if you don't like it, just remember that A) it's not going to be a regular thing, stick around for a typical review tomorrow, and B) the first comment on Rob's post about me existing was that my reviews are too long and this is my appeasement of them.

XKCD Is Alright - #1551 - Pluto [+Announcement]

"It's interesting how Randy's thought process when he saw the picture of Pluto was instantly "I can make a comic out of this" while mine was "That would make a bitchin album cover"."

That's the only sentence I wrote of this review on the Wednesday this comic was posted. Since then, I've had a personal emergency that I'm not currently comfortable talking about publicly, which left me without internet access for five days and also did other things. It's possible I'll say what happened at some point in the future, but at this point, suffice to say I'm alright now.

Just like this comic, actually (well, not JUST like this comic, but whatevs). I'm personally not a fan of the drawn outline jokes, since I've seen the "heart" shape compared to like three other things and that makes me think that everyone's forcing themselves to see things that aren't there. But thankfully, there're also jokes like "charging socket", "new netherlands", and etc, some of which are kinda amusing to me. It's not a bad way to go, making enough little jokes that most people could find at least one to laugh at. Some of them are kinda repetitive, though. C'mon, three medical-type jokes? All in all, though, pretty alright.

Just like me, actually (now). However, for reasons related to the personal emergency and what resulted, I'm going to be extending the small posting hiatus for a little while longer. Regular posts should resume mid-August, with attempted updates every day until I catch back up to XKCD. I apologize for the inconvenience and unprofessionalism and thank you for your patience and understanding.

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 Is A Graph - #1491 - Stories of the Past and Future

That's a pretty dramatic title for a graph, isn't it?

Obviously it wasn't intended to be funny and therefore I can't criticize it on those grounds, but I do have a few thoughts.

It might just be that I've gotten about ten hours of sleep over the past three days, but this graph was kinda hard to read at first. There's a lot going on.

I'd also be willing to bet that this is going to end up for sale as a poster, and if we're judging it as a poster, I don't hold it in high regard. There's too much empty space on the bottom half, it looks like he just found films close to the line and didn't bother finding examples to fill it out. For example, Avatar is conspicuous by its absence, considering it's the highest grossing film of all time.

XKCD Is Properly Executed - #1478 - P-Values

I'm not going to use my trusty "graph jokes are never funny" stamp here, not only because this is technically a chart, but also because I actually think it's is a good way to present this joke. The comic reads almost like dialogue: [p-value], [interpretation], [p-value], [interpretation]. There's a rhythm to it.

Now, as the type of person who just failed a calculus midterm, I wasn't aware of p-values before reading this comic. However, this comic starts with what could be a real example of a caption for this kind of chart (I assume) and gradient's into jokes. This both establishes that this is a parody and what the parody is of.

Hell yeah I just ended that sentence with a preposition, screw you, 7th grade English teacher.

I call this a well-executed comic, which isn't a sentence I expect I'll have the pleasure of saying often. I don't find it funny, but I'm putting all of the blame on myself for not knowing what p-values were before reading the comic.

XKCD Is Poorly Executed - #1457 - FEEDBACK

I've got pretty simple feelings relating to this one: decent idea, could have been executed better. And considering I've been feeling that way about a lot of comics lately, maybe my blog should be called "XKCD Is Poorly Executed", but that'd be far harder to brand, so just this one post for now.

I could see this joke being presented really well: we could see the full process behind picking up the pineapple and slowly coming to the belief that the pineapple holds the wifi somehow, and then after a longer buildup we find out the wifi is just randomly varying.

As it stands, this comic isn't really bad, but I feel like the pineapple is just a bit of "lol, random" rather than something that was actually thought about as part of the joke.

There's also a problem with the caption. "can make you crazy" just reads weirdly to me, like "I can drive you their house."

In conclusion, I watched Silence of the Lambs the other day and it was awesome, 10/10 would recommend.

XKCD Isn't Awful - #1422 - MY PHONE IS DYING

As you can see in the now properly implemented tag system (and, y'know, the changed title), I think this is a "good comic". It's topical, accessable, and uses a nice subversion of expectations. If I wanted to, I could probably be really nitpicky and argue that the "sun cycle" should have been a little more blatant, but that's something I learned about in like, third grade or something.

Ugh, third grade. All the terrible memories just came rushing back. I had this really old teacher that really, really wished she could still use the ruler on us. She didn't let me sit with my legs crossed, she called home when I crossed my legs out of habit later in the day. A whole year of this. I actually spent more days sitting at The Bench than going out to recess, which I think explains why I'm as bitter and hateful as I am.

Speaking of bitter hate, the last panel loses me. It's just dragging out the punchline from panel three without adding anything. Well, there is "that would just make it run out faster!", but we already get that the joke is phones die and stars die, that has been established by this point. There's a difference between building on a punchline and repeating it, is what I'm saying.