Comic 659: Less Than The Sum of its Parts

I find myself at a rare loss for words, simply because I cannot say with my usual certainty what exactly is happening in this comic. Ordinarily I turn to the forums and to your comments for help, but there isn't a consensus here. Is the man inspiring the girl to donate her organs, because once they are "done" being used by her body, they are like lone lego pieces that can be used for other projects (/bodies) ? That was how I first interpreted it. Or is she irritated by his philosophical elitism, and thus driven to make him an organ donor, using his own logic? Or, is she changing her organ donor card from "donor" to "non-donor," because the Lecture convinced her that she will lose all her individuality if even a small piece of her is removed? Or maybe she is changing his card from one to the other. I'm not sure you can make a persuasive case for any of them.

That's because so little context is given. Presumably, randall has an idea about which person's organs are being donated or not. But he doesn't tell us, at least not clearly. He could have shown the whole driver's license, including a picture, so we know if it's the girl or the boy. He could have shown us a little more of a reaction from the girl instead of "blank stare," so we could know if she is generally agreeing with the man or disagreeing. I personally think the first interpretation I listed is correct (which makes the comic only slightly funny, in a sort of profound life-explained-through-toys sort of way) but I really don't know.

So I won't say any more, and maybe the next comic will be simpler.

Prediction: At least one cuddlefish will write a long rant about how dumb i am because obviously this comic is X Interpretation, and I am worthless scum etc and this shows how unqualified I am to write this blog and therefore xkcd is great, but before I get a chance to respond, another cuddlefish will write the exact same post but says it is obviously the exact opposite interpretation.

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In Other News: I have just learned of a most extraordinary coincidence. Google Analytics informs me that on September 2nd, 2009, the day of the infamous Comic 631, the number of people who visited my blog after googling "xkcd sucks" jumped up to 631. how can it be??

Comic 658: SEXcruciating!

Oh lord. What are everyone's two favorite elements of xkcd? If you said "making everything about sex" and "ridiculously bad puns about science" well you are in LUCK! because today's comic stoops to both those levels, AND does it incredibly badly!

YES, the word "exclusion" starts with the prefix "ex-" which can, I will admit, be modified to become "sex-" and sex, as you may be aware, is hilarious. It is a guaranteed laugh, because everyone is so awkward about it! So you can always always always tap into that awkwardness for Laffs A Plenty. Obviously, xkcd does this very often. That's why it is so funny!

So what could be funnier than taking something not usually about sex - the Pauli exclusion principle - and making it be all about sex? It is perfect. It fulfills the XKCD Paradox Of Nerdiness - being about science, so it is nerdy, but being about basic high school science, so everyone can feel good about themselves for getting the joke. Heck, even I get the joke and I basically know nothing about chemistry.

God, seriously though, how lame was this joke? Don't we all talk about the concept of being "sexiled" when a roommate is having sex, forcing one to sleep elsewhere? I assume I am not the only one who has heard this word. "Sexiled" is a far funnier word than "Sexclusion" - for one thing, being kicked out of your room because of Sexy Times inside is much closer to being "exiled" than to being "excluded" - after all, how many people actually want to be included in the sex? Basically none, right? I mean, no one is like "Ugh, my roommate is having sex and excluding me from it" they are more like "ugh, my roommate has driven me into EXILE." Also, the word just sounds smoother - following the "ex" sound immediately with a hard C is much more awkward than following it with a long I. That just flows nicer. What I'm trying to say is that this comic is a pale shadow of a joke that everyone already knows and uses.

Not that that will stop Randall from making more jokes like these. That's why I want to help him out. Each of the following words has had the word "sex" cleverly added into it. Each one could be the subject of its own great comic, or even, if you work real hard, a 5 part series.

extra --> SEXtra!
extraterrestrial --> SEXtraterrestrial!
extracurricular --> SEXtracurricular!
extortion --> SEXtortion!
extraneous --> SEXtraneous!
exit --> SEXit!
ex-wife --> SEX-wife!
explanation --> SEXplanation!
exhibit --> SEXhibit!


God, so many great jokes here. Tell me some other good words in the comments.

Comic 657: Wayward Journeys

I know i usually forget to do this, but I'm making this post now in case you want to talk about the highly unusual comic 657. Yes, I know that if you read this by RSS feed, it makes it more difficult. To you people I say, just check back wednesday night. Also, if you are reading this by RSS you are most likely Rob, in which case i hate you and you should get the hell off my blog.

A few quick thoughts

-Regardless of what anyone says, this comic is very, very impressive, and clearly took a lot of thought and care to produce. I don't want to think about how hard it is. This doesn't excuse any of Randall's earlier lazy comics, but it does show that when he wants to, he can do something intense like this.

-to the always classy sje on the forums: You are a moron, there is only one critic on this site who matters, and that is me, and I read it right, and have seen the movie like a billion times. That clever little "let the voice of one person stand in for the whole website" is lame, and if I were to use it, I might assume that all of the xkcd forums were filled with giant assholes that reveled in the mistakes of others.

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PS i thought of an xkcd comic today and I want to say it now, so xkcd fans can tell me is sucks and then will have to backtrack when xkcd inevitably makes the same joke - it would basically a twitter post version of Fermat's last theorem, saying that 140 characters was not enough to explain it fully. Math reference + Internet Twist = XKCD Gold.

also, how long before we get a logical journey of the zoombinis comic? Maybe Mr. Hat is playing the game and uses all sorts of practical, assholeish tactics to avoid the usual logical rules.

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OK. Now it's time to get down and right about this comic.

This is an impressive comic. A lot of the usual anti-xkcd folks are impressed with it, and I fall into that category as well. Let's break it into two distinct parts, the charts themselves and the joke or jokes.

The charts are cool. Now granted, this sort of thing is not original; the most famous chart in the world (according to some sources), the Napoleon's Forces one, is of this style. It's actually a chart which xkcd has referenced before (incidentally, I could have sworn he referred to it twice. lots of cookies to whoever can find another example). Even the idea of doing it for a story dates at least to Slaughterhouse-Five, as many people have pointed out. But that's really not the point - I don't want to criticize him for that; unlike many other examples it's really completely fine that he's done this. I just want to make sure that all the fans who are like "oh wow he is so brilliant to think of using graphics to see where people move as time goes on!" know that they are dumb.

The Lord of the Rings chart, covering 1000 pages of novel as it does, is of course the most impressive. Particularly if it was done entirely freehand, as I suspect, it would have taken many tries and many drafts, and many consultations of the book. His blog post sheds a tiny amount of light on this (but I warn you - do not click on that animation link at the end....). The Star Wars graph, while clearly simpler, is also impressive on its own. And I guess Jurassic Park as well.

The presentation of the graphs leaves a bit to be desired - on the front page, they are just far too small to make anything of, and the "joke panels," discussed below, are shunted off in the bottom where the eye is not really able read them, let alone concentrate on them. But is there anyone out there who seriously doubts that this will not be turned into a poster, probably before christmas, and that Randall had this in mind when he made it? Any copyright lawyers out there who know if this would constitute fair use or not?

But of course, xkcd is a comic, and so it can't just show you something cool, no matter how cool it is. It has to make a joke. And this comic, I think, tries to make two. First, 12 Angry Men, a great movie but one where nearly the whole thing takes place in one jury room, so the chart version is comically simple. Ha ha, I guess. You wonder why he didn't go even more sparse and do a well known two-person movie, like My Dinner With Andre. Or a single line with The Cube. Whatever.

Then the real joke is the last graph, Primer, a movie so complicated that I've seen it 4 times and still have some key questions about just what is happening. It's not the crazy jumble that Randall makes it out to be (for one thing, like most time travel stories, the time travelers create duplicates of themselves when they go back in time) and it is, in fact, comprehensible. Nonetheless, that is how the movie feels, the first time you watch it. Unfortunately, I couldn't enjoy the joke. So few people know this movie that to me it just felt like Randall the insecure nerd trying to prove that he's heard of this cool nerd movie. Most people who have just discovered it, like me, did so either directly or indirectly because The Onion AV Club brought it a lot of attention this summer. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Randall just watched it recently, and wants to tell people - like he did with House of Leaves - that he is just as well versed in nerdery as they.

In comparison to the nearly overwhelming impact of the "serious" panels, these last two jokes ("12 angry men is simple" and "primer is complicated") seem pretty pathetic. Why not just skip them entirely and leave us with only the high quality stuff?

Of course, had he done that, there's a good chance I would have said "this is cool and all, but it's not funny. It's not trying to be funny. Isn't xkcd supposed to be a webcomic?" and I would have been right.

That's why Randall Munroe should stop trying to be funny, as I have said a thousand times. By trying and failing, he's just bringing down the quality of the good stuff, like the serious panels in this comic. That's why he needs to scrap the webcomic format entirely and move all his fans over to Randall Munroe's World-Famous Death Defying Amazing Picto-Blog and he should do it as soon as he possibly can.

This was a very cool installment of xkcd. But it only reinforced to me that Randall does have good ideas, and xkcd is not the best channel for them.

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PS here is something interesting - looks like xkcd is now overtly objectifying women for profit. I wasn't expecting that.

Comic 656: Treatery

First off, sorry for being so slow with these posts, and not responding to e-mails etc as fast I would like. You know how life can be sometimes, that little bastard.

Anyway, let's do the best we can under the circumstances: Guy wants candy before halloween, so he dresses up as a well-known time traveler in order to justify asking for candy a day early. Mildly clever, but here is a case where Randall's terrible drawing just make life sadder for everyone. He can't just draw Doc Brown - because he is physically incapable of drawing a figure that people will recognize as the character. So he does his best - coat, glasses, wavy hair - and decides, no, that is really not enough for people to recognize (and he is right). So what can he do? He has the person in the house tell you: "NICE DOC BROWN COSTUME." There's another example of our favorite xkcd-unrealistic-dialogue, so stick that in your pipe and do it without a condom.

(update: some silly people seem to think that I am saying here that it is unrealistic for people to compliment a costume that a child wears whilst trick or treating. That's not what I'm saying, because yeah, that happens. What I'm saying is that in this case, Randall had to make the dialog far more stilted than would happen in real life, because otherwise we would not know what this person is dressed as, because the art is lousy. ok guys?)

Lastly we have the problems that only dawn on you gradually - if this person is clever enough to go and do all this, shouldn't he be old enough that "halloween" just means drinking excessively in costume? Is this really the most efficient way to use time travel to procure candy? Why has this fellow not been punched in the face yet? Etc.

In short, CANDY+BACK TO THE FUTURE does not always equal a great joke, SORRY RANDALL.

Comic 655: Trickery

It's a guest post! Woo!!! In part because he ended up falling through the summer of MADNESS cracks (i think), and in part 'cause you were all like "uhhh, carl, stop SUCKING SO HARD" on the last post, everyone's best friend, dragon2041, wrote today's guest post. A few of my own thoughts follow. Dragon, GO!

I was hoping that today's strip would be either truly awful or surprisingly good. Unfortunately, it isn't. And that's a trend we see a lot in xkcd - a stunning mediocrity that leaves the reader with no feelings whatsoever about the comic.

Either way, I'll split this up into 3 sections : The Criticism, the suggestions, and the praise.

The Criticism:

To start us off, we have another instance of the head not being attached to the body in panel 1.

The setup for the comic isn't so bad - we see a man rock climbing, plenty of opportunities to go from there -... And then in the very next panel, we see pieces of someone. Please - don't give away what's going on in the second panel when you're aiming for a big surprise. I'm biased though, having already seen the fourth panel - it's entirely possible that someone reading it for the first time could mistake the leg and face for that wooden post that is the goal in kids' rock climbing course.

Speaking of a kids' rock climbing course - that's what this is supposed to be a picture of. This stick-man is using the almighty power of slanted photography to make it look like he's climbing a kids' rock climbing course. Who among you would be truly impressed by that? Why would anyone even want to post pictures of themselves climbing a kids' rock climbing course?

Admittedly, the fake picture would be made a lot more impressive by the fact that he's not using a belay (the device that clips to a rope/pulley system and supports your weight), except for the fact that professional climbers, the kind who climb Mount Rushmore [people climb mount rushmore??? -Carl], would still use a belay on a kiddy rock climbing course because most of them aren't fans of falling. I know I'm nitpicking, as it's supposed to be a falsely impressive picture, and, you know, the character isn't actually climbing.

And finally, we have the alt text. This alt text wouldn't be so offensive if the comic it follows was actually good. But it isn't - it's mediocre. And in the same way, the alt text itself is mediocre. It's a problem I feel we see a lot in xkcd - the alt text continues the already boring conversation. If the alt text is a followup to an interesting/funny conversation, that's great - but in this case, it would have been far better as a random observation - or perhaps a callback to some of the old alt-texts, with Mr. Munroe (Randall?) making a comment in the first-person about similar situations/what he would do in the situation.

Either way, it all wraps up with a mediocre punchline that doesn't add much to the comic - even omitting all the words and keeping just the "art" that's currently there would make for a better comic.

I'm worried that I'm criticizing just for the sake of criticizing - but I hope I've raised at least a few valid points.

The Suggestions:

Put the head on the body in the first panel.

Erase the girl in the second panel - although, admittedly, if she just appeared in the third panel, that would be a little weird. I stand a bit divided here, I guess.

Give some funny alt-text.

The Praise:

Well, I guess more effort was put into the first panel than Mr. Munroe (Randall?) usually puts in. Really, the first through third panels aren't that bad. They set up well for an interesting punchline or a funny wordless comic. Also, the situation presented is kind of funny-interesting, with someone faking rock-climbing to impress their friends.

I guess that's all I can say =\.

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Carl again. My own take on the comic was that it was an exceedingly old joke (I recall it being in an old Mad Magazine batman parody...from the 50s. And I'm sure it was old then, too) rather blandly executed. To all those people who suggested that a far better joke would have been to have a guy who goes to rock climbing walls, sets it up so he is standing out from the wall, and thus makes real photos of rock climbers look fake - that is a great idea. That would have been awesome.

Who is impressed by pictures of rock climbing? I went rock climbing some times. I am not a sporty person. I went to like, rock climbing birthday parties when I was like, eight. Why would you be impressed by that facebook picture?