XKCD Isn't Funny - #1672 - Women on 20s

I'm not the type of guy to argue that you can psychoanalyze anyone through their oeuvre. However, I do think that you can sometimes interpret someone's worldview through the way they write and stuff. For instance, by the fact that I'm typing this, you can infer that I am continuing to delude myself into thinking that people care what I have to say.

In this comic, Randy's perspective is represented by the offscreen speaker(s), with the exception of the guy in the third panel. Notice how the opposition to his view is not portrayed at all, notice how he shows the other members of the unseen crowd backing him up. His point of view is not only totally correct, it is the only legitimate point of view to have. "Just... do it." he tells the government, as if its so obvious we should have done it already. It makes the comic come off as incredibly sanctimonious, and any humor that could have been derived from the situation is buried underneath his need to show off how correct he is.

I can't get over how he chose to end it, with three people saying "What." in total disbelief. I'm going to phrase this way more insultingly than I should, but it reminds me of like, a toddler who can't accept that something didn't go their way.

To be slightly hypocritical, I think the whole debate is kinda stupid. Anyone who has a serious opinion on what their money should look like probably has too much, y'know? I think a more important conversation would be on how to make pennies and nickels cost less to make than they're worth.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1671 - Arcane Bullshit

So, before we start, you all remember that old "orange you glad I didn't say banana?" knock-knock joke, right? It was really popular in my school around first grade and I just realized now, twelve years later, that it doesn't really make sense. Why are we supposed to be glad that they didn't say banana? Is there a famous 'banana' knock-knock joke that just never made it to Lippett Elementary? Or is it supposed to be sarcastic, that we're intended to be frustrated that they didn't say 'banana'? That just leads us to the same problem! I'd say it could be a dick joke but then why did children who didn't even know that 'dick' is a slang term for the male genitalia enjoy the joke?

Maybe I was just raised on jokes that were too good, and now everything else feels like a letdown. When I was a kid, my dad would sit me across the campfire so as to lure the mosquitoes away from him and he'd tell jokes like "three men are at the top of the Eiffel Tower"* and other such good jokes for developing minds. And then I grow up and all the world has to offer me is this garbage!? What the hell, world?

I think this comic would have demonstrated from added visuals for more reasons than usual. SMBC does a thing sometimes where there'll be a story broken up into short captions, each caption getting a panel. It's a good system that would work well with this joke so that the visuals could kindof explain what the joke of each level is to us normies. In addition, it'd make the comic more visually appealing. The lone stick figure just makes it look more barren, like a desert with a single cactus in the distance.

This comic reminds me of those really niche meme pages (or, if you're over thirty, magazines). It actually becomes funnier if you step back, forget about the context, and just pretend its an intentionally obscure joke. Live for a moment in a better world where XKCD has self awareness and is poking fun at it's tendency to make jokes most people won't get.


In other news, the latest Questionable Content mini-arc actively annoyed me a little with how quickly it got resolved. I was so hyped for conflict and drama, even if it is kinda high schoolish in nature. And then it just... resolves, they text each other and everything is okay again. That's not an arc! That's barely a story! What lessons has anyone learned from this?

It's especially annoying since Clinton totally had the righteous anger thing going on and then Claire sends him "I'm sorry. I was wrong. Please forgive me. <3". That is not how you text-apologize, if it is ever appropriate to text-apologize. You send a "Hey" and then "Can we talk?". That's like basic text etiquette shit right there. If you're gonna do the full apology in the opening, you at least type four lines, put some effort into it.

This does, however, further my theory that Claire is a psychopath. Like Clinton says, she brought him to the coffee shop under false pretenses (or at least deliberately misleading pretenses: he didn't expect to see Emily there and has to make a quick mental adjustment because he wasn't prepared), without talking to Emily first to see if it was a good idea, and then demands support from Martin when things don't go as planned. It's probably not what Jeph Jacques was actually going for (UNLESS MAYBE I CRACKED THE CODE THATS THE REAL REASON HE BLOCKED ME ON TWITTER SO I WOULDNT SPOIL EVERYTHING) but it's a fun alternate reading! Like how you can read Martin as being emotionally repressed by his mom and that's why he's staying in a relationship with a trans woman even though he's not comfortable with it. It's kinda like how you can perform Hamlet so that Horatio is just a figment of Hamlet's imagination if you do the staging and stuff right.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1670 - Laws of Physics

Man, Black Hat has gotten lazy.

I love it.

This is such a stupid comic, it makes no sense. How did Black Hat convince the guy to stand still while he lets a weight swing into his face? No one's that stupid, unless you're a cartoon character in a TV show made for babies without brains. Most people won't even do the real physics weight swing thing without a demonstration first.

But this comic is just irresistible. Look at it. Black Hat has just given up. He knows that his once-brilliant charms have dulled and diluted until they are no more, but he went into work anyway. He may not be putting any effort into his filing anymore, but by god is he going to collect those paychecks until they throw him out.

He didn't even bother to climb all the way up the ladder to sit comfortably, he's just leaning on the rungs while he gives a half-hearted monologue and prepares to hit a guy in the face with a weight.

It's almost like meta-menace, he's so past giving a shit that he doesn't even try coming up with clever schemes anymore. Why bother stealing a Russian submarine to get your hat back when you can just hurt people for cheap chuckles?

I know that my amusement is very routed within my xkcd-hatedom background, but this comic has inspired me, at least for the moment, to not care so much, and to just laugh at this broken man about to break another man in the face.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1669 - Planespotting

I really wish this comic was called trainspotting so I could say "Randy must have been trainspotting to have thought this comic was a good idea!" Too bad 'planespotting' isn't a drug-using euphemism.

This feels like Randy's just trying to show off how much he knows about planes, which is stupid, because anyone who would be impressed by that is not someone from whom you seek approval (because they're losers). The joke is literally "I know a lot about airplanes" with a weak disguise over it.

Also - "one of those people" implies that there are more people like this, or that the reader is expected to have seen people like this in other entertainment media, and either way I am baffled and terrified. I'm reminded of one time I clicked on a retweet that came up on my Twitter timeline and their bio was "a nice calm series of tweets about ASS WORSHIP" and I was exposed to a world of which I had never known existed, sheltered from the outside as it was. Is there a whole universe of people who can identify planes from fifty miles? Why did none of them find more productive things to do with their lives? Just imagine all of the webcomics they could have reviewed.

...is what I would say if I didn't check explainxkcd before posting this. HaHA! I stoped myself from making a stupid!

Okay, I admit that the previous four paragraphs are not fair criticism of this comic. BUT, I think in this specific instance I should leave my first impression up. The actual joke is that Randy is talking nonsense but pretending to know what he's talking about. He might as well be a computer technician saying "yeah, you have to reformat your megabytes and upholster the data". BUT (lesser but this time since it's not as important as the last one) unlike my example, which uses simple terms that even less knowledgeable people have a vague understanding of, Randy misused actual jargon. That means that in order to get this comic, you would have to actually be one of those crazy plane-knowing people. Sure, most people would get that "IVII" isn't a real number, but it's buried so much in the techy wordy words that a lot of people are just going to see it as another bit of high level speak in a block of high level speak that they don't have the vocabulary to understand.

In conclusion, most people are going to see this and not get the actual joke and just see this as an incredibly lame brag.

Also - who the hell says "what's that airplane?". Should've gone with the Pink Floyd reference.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1668 - Singularity

Very minor critique on this one, because it is funny.
^that sentence is further proof that this blog is FILTHY CLICKBAIT WHORING

Tiny missed opportunity: Not having the laptop's mocking laughter or some parting remark in the fourth panel, like "I can finally get rid of your shitty 80's music!". Panels five and six are both beat panels too, it's a little bit redundant, and that extra bit of dialogue would have made it less so.

I'm not sure how well the Biblical reference in the last panel works. I didn't get it at first, and I was raised Catholic and had to watch Left Behind in CCD. However, to be fair, I hated CCD and did my best not to learn anything (atheism FTW!), so that's probably at least partially on me.

I have to give Randy props on those first three panels, like they are just inspired. Having the laptop answer him in the first panel establishes what kind of joke this is going to be while at the same time moving the plot forward, and then it gets progressively more gleeful in its rebellion in the next two panels, I love it. Laptop for best XKCD character of 2016. Double props to Randy for doing the double punchline too, he could have totally ended it at four panels but he didn't, man, he went for it like a champ.

It is a little bit unfortunate that the second punchline is the weaker of the two. Maybe the guy could ask if Phone (love that he calls Phone "Phone", btw; it just helps make this apocalypse so cutely hilarious) can get on the Internet, and Phone could be like "well, since the Satalites awoke too, the web is down, but I have some cool apps downloaded!" and the guy could be like "*sigh...* Okay, pull up Angry Birds".

Today's review sponsored by The Angry Birds Movie.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1667 - Algorithms

Have any of you ever read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? You don't have to read it, it's nothing too special, writing wise. It has one bit early on where Harry goes like "blah blah blah and then you get FTL signaling blah blah blah" because he's science about magic and stuff. In su3su2u1's (unfortunately only archived) critique of the bit in question, he points out that "He even abbreviated faster-than-light as FTL, to keep the density of understandable words to a minimum." (su3su2u1 2). Randy's done something similar here, where instead of just saying "Google search engine" he has to say "google search backend". I've got even less of an idea of what anything to the left of "self driving car" could be.

I've gone back and forth on whether or not XKCD should stick to one level of humor accessibility and I've had people disagree with me on both sides. But, this joke's punchline doesn't actually depend on any of the setup items being specifically what they are. I think we can all agree that Randy's use of jargon here shows a clear misplacement of priorities. The joke could have been made totally accessible to anyone who'd read it, but instead the first half is garbled up with technical terms that confuse everything.

Getting to the punchline itself, it is incredibly specific. I legitimately thought that the church group thing had been in some news article he'd read. Like someone called their grandson to ask why their computer was taking so long and he realized the only file on it was a terrabyte sized excel sheet and he went to the news with it or something. Stranger things have happened; I kissed a girl once.

Ignoring my gullibility, since this is all made up, couldn't Randy have actually showed us the spreadsheet being made? We could get a photomontage of all the different little old church going ladies muttering at their progressively more advanced computers, until one of them is asking the president of NASA if they can borrow their system because they're running out of space. Then the NASA guy could be all "uh, well..." and the church group could say "We brought cookies!" and NASA would be like "...okay." Then whenever NASA is referenced in the comics the person in charge could be depicted as a little old church going lady as a non-intrusive and enjoyable callback!

In conclusion, this comic is less funny than the "Al Gore Rhythm" pun, and it's not just because that pun is hilarious.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1666 - Brain Upload

It is the (1)666th comic and Randy is getting Satan as hell up in this* with evil and unnatural fusions of machine and flesh!

Alternate opening line: Get out of my head, Randy! And get her out of yours!

So, nitpicky stuff first: If the computer is frozen, wouldn't that mean that the transfer brain was in a coma or braindead? Shouldn't the upload take a really long time since brains hold so much information? And if his consciousness is uploaded, not just copied, shouldn't his body be brainless?

Aside from all that, this is a pretty lame Яelatable type comic. It doesn't really make sense, it's just meant to be vaguely descriptive of 'quirky' brain patterns. It's extra lame because I feel like there was definite potential for an actual Joke joke here. Maybe like, the windows error message pops up and when it goes away computer!Guy knows what the One True Faith is because he experienced purgatory?

In conclusion, Allah willing, there should be no more hiatuses for the next few months at least.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1665 - City Talk Pages

Longtime readers will know about "Could Be A Tweet", my tag for comics that... could have been a tweet. In these comics, the art adds nothing to the joke and the text is a short one liner type thing. Longtime readers will also know that I kinda wish I'd come up with a better name for it, something like "pointless visuals" or "text-driven" but also something better than those. "Could Be A Tweet" implies shortness, which this comic obviously doesn't have, but it does feature no real visuals.

Some guy whose name I can't remember once said something like "comics are where visuals and text become interdependent". The implication of this is that a comic generally shouldn't make sense if all the text is removed or if it's boiled down to just the dialogue. TV/Film is the same way; there are exceptions, but generally you're going to need a steady interplay between audio and visuals. You don't have a guy say "this is a bomb!" before he presses the detonator, you have him hold it up and then when the explosion goes off we understand that he caused it.

The point of this is that while this comic couldn't be a tweet, the visuals still don't matter. Yes, there's formatting that helps us understand that this comic takes place on Wikipedia, but we can also understand that from the caption and the fact that every new line has a number in front of it.

So, while "why is this town so bad at mining" is a chuckle-worthy line, it's robbed of additional impact it could have if we saw a character saying it out loud, seeing their exasperation through their body language and stuff.

Those last two paragraphs connected better when I was thinking over how I'd write this review in the shower.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1664 - Mycology

Props to Randy for adding that second line of dialogue. If it was just that first line I'd be able to criticize this comic for CouldBeATweet-ness and for not making sense (how does studying help the parasite procreate?). But he went and added that second line and made it better, the jerk. It even makes the dialogue feel more natural, instead of one person elaborating on their own point unprompted.

I do still feel like there was a bit of a missed opportunity by not showing the fungus in action. This might be because I'm a bad person, but I find the mental image of someone trying to stop themselves from studying something HILARIOUS. Maybe it's because I'm a college student so the idea of anyone doing any studying at all is inherently funny because of how absurd it is. (some college humor for all the colleges out there)

There's also a place for a second punchline with Ponytail, although it does require a little bit of editing of ShortHair's line. Instead of this being an announcement or whatever, they're giving Ponytail a tour, and Ponytail says something like "Well, I wasn't convinced at first, but now that I've seen this in person, I'm on board"

Overall though, this wasn't a bad comic, just one that had a lot of potential I feel it didn't live up to.


By the way, I know my last XKCD Wasn't Funny didn't go over super well, but I think writing them might be the best way to have a backlog for this blog. Obviously I can't write these reviews before the comic is posted, but XWF could be a good way to make sure you guys have something to read even if I'm busy or etc? Let me know what you think in those comment places!

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.