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 - #1475 - TECHNICALLY

 

I fucking hate this.

 

This sort of thing is just something that makes me irrationally angry, and I don't exactly know why; every time someone ignores someone else's point by saying something stupid I just want to punch them in the face. Ugh.

 

I understand that the idea is supposed to be "Your statement is not even worth a rebuttal", but can't Randy just say that? Does he have to be a goddamn asshole about it?

 

>inb4 "it takes one to know one": it does, and I am an asshole, but at least I'm not a rude, condescending, prick about it.

When Randy's self insert of the day talks down to White Hat, as in #1386 and #1414, it doesn't make him seem smarter, it makes White Hat seem persecuted.

In Slumdog Millionare, the first scene is Javad Khan blowing smoke in Jamal's face and slapping him, then cutting between Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, shots of money being thrown into a bathtub, and Javad waterboarding Jamal. Aside from being a fantastic opening to an excellent movie with a great soundtrack, it instantly both sets the tone for the movie and makes the viewer side with Jamal. He is the one being abused, he is the one who is being hurt, we don't know why yet, but the cuts to his performance on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? show that he doesn't appear to be malicious at all.

Here, White Hat tries to make a point. We aren't shown his full argument or point, but we do see that Randy decides to rudely cut White Hat off without hearing him out. Randy doesn't even try to justify himself like in #1325, he just tunes White Hat out like everyone should automatically know that Randy is in the right.

Furthermore, it might just be the people I hang out with, but when I'm discussing politics with my good buddies Frank and Lachlan (shout out), the phrase "Technically, [X], but [Y]". As in, "Technically, XKCD isn't worse than the Holocaust, but it is still pretty terrible.". It can be an easy way to provide context.

As is to be expected from a comic featuring White Hat, this comic is not only condescending, annoying, and preachy, this comic hides behind a shallow facade of being comedic so that it can make cheap potshots at strawmen, and is proof of a lack of a loving god.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1416 - PIXELS

I almost feel bad for the review that's about to happen (well, about to happen for me, it's already happened for you and you're about to read it hopefully), it had to be hard to program in a new comic format that could fail on IE, Chrome, and Firefox.

Oohhhhh, brb, I have to take a shower after that [sic] BURNNNN!~!

Okay, back. I didn't actually cool off much, it's been really hot out lately and my house has solar-heated water. Ugh. I hate being well-off.

If you're interested in seeing all the hidden panels, I recommend just going to the archive at explainxkcd, so you don't have to do deal with the interface that is alternately laggy and non-existant.

The original panel I used as a header is an allusion to the "turtles all the way down" idea, which I remember finding pretty interesting the first time I heard about it, at the end of

[SPOILER ALERT]

Tasty Planet 2, avaliable for Mac and PC at bigfishgames.com.

[END OF SPOILERS]

Tea loving readers may also remember it being mentioned on QI Series A, Episode 2, avaliable on YouTube here (about twenty-three minutes in) until it gets taken down by copyright again.

The first thing that most people who've sacrificed enough cows to their computers to make this comic work properly will see is an incredibly disappointing "BOOK LANCH". Yes, we know your book's launched, Randy, you've had a banner ad up under the XKCD logo for the past few weeks and now it's been updated with this:

 

There is, irritatingly, a fairly well done joke as one panel about the book launch, where a person puts the book on a rocket and launches it into the atmosphere; he then slowly realizes that it was the only copy. However, the gimmicky format and unneeded detail ruins the pacing, even separating a line of dialogue into a separate set of scroll-ins, and depending on where you scroll in, you may not see it at all.

 

Next on the explainxkcd list of minigags is "Needs More Struts", a throwaway reference to Kerbal Space Program. It makes sense only to people in that gaming group, and as has been established recently, gamers are just the worst people, so we can safely ignore this joke.

 

Then we have another reference, this time to a thing by Douglas Hofstater where he wrote a word out of smaller words, made out of smaller words, made out of tiny renditions of the largest word. Again, no new commentary is given and no joke is added. It's just saying "Remember that thing? Yeah, haha. That thing was great.".

 

Fourth is a joke about the Time-Turners from Harry Potter. The joke is supposed to be "J.K.Rowling regrets bringing the time-travel element into the series. She probably wished she had a time-turner once she realized the mistake she'd made.". But the way it's phrased makes it come off more like "Time-turners were a terrible idea, J.K.Rowling should use one to stop herself from inventing them.", which is a much more pompus way of making a decent single panel joke.

 

Number five: "How do we know anyone really wants to live in Stockholm?" and "Well what would you expect to come out of a fire hydrant?". The former has been done before, although not to death. The same can't be said of the latter.

 

There's also a few assorted doodles, none of which are worth looking at.

 

And that's it. A big, laggy, complicated, hard to navigate, new format that I'm sure took a lot of effort to make, but without anything tying any of the jokes together in any way, it just feels like a larger version of the 'made in five minutes for a contest' series.