do you all want some shirts?

First off, if anyone wants to do a guest week or so, send me an e-mail. tons of you have the ability to do this.

SO YEAH SHIRTS. I dunno. People tell me to sell shirts. I have always said "whatever." But then someone told me to sell shirts and I was like "ok, maybe. I'll maybe do that."

Do people want that? You people? Is this blog enough of a thing now that you want it printed on your chest or your back?

Or perhaps, if you do not want something xkcdsucks-specific, we could think of something cynical and hilarious that is sort of in the spirit of the blog, and write that on shirts? I don't know.

So - consider this a threat to debate whether you want me to do this at all (I guess on CafePress, unless you think of something better) and what you'd want it to have. I am open to all suggestions.

So far I thought of:

"xkcd sucks" back: "yeah, that's right, I said it, nerd, xkcd sucks. What are you going to do about it?"

"No one cares what webcomics you read"

"Capitalism: It works, bitches!"

[cast of xkcd characters, all in a big crossed out circle, "xkcd sucks" on the back]

"xkcd sucks: a blog of bile, cynacism, self-righteousness and cuddlefish"

And I got a great suggestions via gchat for a hat with a stick figure on it, and the words, "Randall get off of my head!"

what should I do, guys?

Comic 605: Why You Shouldn't Marry Randall

This comic didn't anger me so much as sadden me. It's just "oh hey here is some mistakes you can deliberately make with math." As though people don't know how damn easy it is to lie with statistics. What's he trying to prove? Are we supposed to laugh at the man for being wrong? Are we supposed to laugh at the idea, knowing the man doesn't really believe it? Are we supposed to laugh at how terrible this marriage is going to turn out? Or how she is all dressed up and he isn't?

The old "My Hobby" comics were some of the best comics he did (particularly 37 and 236, if you ask me, which you do). But this one (and that other one) is awful. Randall in essence has two "brands" with his comic, two concepts which have predetermined implications and associations for his readers: Mr. Hat, and "My Hobby." As far as I know, those are the only recurring ideas of this nature in xkcd, concepts that can be places in all sorts of contexts and all sorts of jokes and make a degree of sense (no matter how often he tries to make Mr. Beret a recurring character, he hasn't given him any amount of consistency yet, so we can't count him).

Anyway the point is, like xkcd itself, fans of the comic expect good things when they see "My Hobby" and Mr. Hat (assuming they are still fans, they probably do, that is. If you are like me, you have lost all faith. But Randy doesn't draw for me). They are things he can rely on to make fans a certain comic that they might not otherwise, if the joke had been presented differently. See for example this dude. And I think that's what Randy is taking advantage of, perhaps not consciously: Covering up a crappy comic by putting it in a popular series. Think "New Coke." This is all meant more as observation than criticism.

Continuing with using this rather bland comic as a springboard for more general xkcd discussion, let's talk about math.

Someone e-mailed me with a link to this forum post, demonstrating just how simple the math here is. Especially when the 9th grade author of the post corrects Randall's graph. I'm not meaning to criticize the fact that it's simple (so you can delete your "You complain when it's too hard and when it's too easy, you dumb fuck!" e-mails) but it did get me thinking:

Does it seem like the math in xkcd is getting easier? At the beginning we had Poisson distributions and Fourier transforms. Even after it graduated from Randall's Notebook Drawings, we still got complicated stuff like this equation, Karnaugh maps, and the Bellman-Ford equation. And the Reimann-Zeta function.

What have we had recently? There was 602, but that was more of a "generic math" thing - it could be replaced with anything and work just as well. Fibonacci numbers, statistics 101 -it's just simpler now. Do people agree with this, or am I being crazy? And is it crazy to think that maybe it's because he is selling out and wants to appeal to more and more people, and jokes about Karnaugh maps are not going to do that? MAYBE!

Again, not saying this is bad, or that he should do something else - just saying that it seems like he is selling out his original niche for a more commercially popular one.

Lastly, when looking through archives for old math comics I came across this, and it made me so sad:

Oh, how we become that which we hate.

xkcd getting around; and not getting around

So a few weeks ago, Randall Munroe apparently added a sort of side project to his regular comic-ing - he wrote a comic for "Building a Smarter Planet", which appears to be a mind-numbingly boring website about, I dunno, stuff. Some exciting headlines currently on the frontpage include "June 24th Food Safety Forum on Capitol Hill was a huge success" (awesome!) and "Implementation of a livestock disease traceability system in the US" (woah! that one was written by super-celebrity Robert Fourdraine, PhD, COO Wisconsin Livestock Identification Consortium!! Awesome!)

Oh right this is an xkcd blog. Um yeah so Randall is apparently making comics for them now. He says that he will "occasionally produce a few extra comics" but so far there is only one:

You can see the blog post where they announce this new feature if you click on the comic.

I actually do like the comic a fair amount, even if it does fit into the xkcd trope of "I say crazy things when on stage." It also suffers from the usual extra-dialog-stuck-in-after-the-punchline. But that's ok, those are minor complaints. Given the context it's in, this is a pretty good effort for Randall, and I am curious to see what others he comes up with. I think the lack of a set timeline helps him - I've often said that one of xkcd's flaws is that Randy forces himself to make comics more frequently than he thinks of good ideas. That of course won't happen here (unless we suddenly see "Randy makes a new environmentalism comic every June, July and August WITHOUT FAIL.")

My bigger concerns are with the post itself, written by one "Tim Washer" [holy crap, you can just add an E and change the H to T and his name is Time Waster! oh my god.]. Our friend is described as "the genius behind the web-comic XKCD." This just makes me vomit a little. Genius? Please. There's no reason to think he's particularly smart, certianly not from his comics or his studies of math or whatever. Ew gross. And using the hyphenated "web-comic" is probably the most succint way to say "I'm Old!" without using that exact phrase. But anyway.

Oh hey so remember how there is supposed to be an xkcd book? First off, notice how I used the phrase "web-comic" in that post - that is a crazy coincidence. I had forgotten all about it until I went to get the link right now after the previous paragraph was already written. Anyway, yeah, there was supposed to be one, according to the New York Times it was supposed to be out "sometime around june." Well clearly June has ended and so we are going to see just how "around" it is. Hey, it's not around at all! The Internet has no news at all on it since that first flurry of excitement in late April - unless I'm bad at searching, that is. If anyone has new information on it, I'd love to know what the status is. Despite what you may think, I really do have high hopes for a book of xkcd comics: As I will be glad to admit, there are a lot of very good comics on the site - they are just very few and far between after comic 350 or so.

And of course, I still need my review copy of the book...

Comic 604: Mistakes

I'll bet you like this comic. Or at least, a lot more of you like this comic than usual. But I didn't. SURPRISE.

Here's why - it's another situation that might be funny in real life (hell, it would be funny in real life) but given that it's a manufactured situation, it's not so great. You could come up with tons of these awkward phrases pretty easily. I went into more detail on this a few weeks ago, so I won't repeat it here. Awkward mis-typings are a key pillar of the Bash.org pantheon, but they are funny because someone actually made those mistakes. Comic 575 had a similar problem.

For example, suppose I am a webcomic artist who is kind of obsessed with a friend of mine named Megan, and I decide I am going to do something about it. I intend to type to my friend, "I really should go have a talk with Megan" but just at that moment, someone walks in the room and wonders why it smells gross and I say I need to take a shower. So what I type is, "I really should go have a shower with megan" HA HA whoops! how embarrassing! how embarrassingly sexual.

OR MAYBE I am sitting at my computer and a friend asks me if I have gotten a chance to play New Video Game X. And I want to say, "well I haven't had time yet" but JUST AT THAT MOMENT someone asks me why I keep drawing comics about Megan so I think about having sex with her and so I write "well I haven't had sex yet" oh my! how crazy!

MORE so suppose I am sitting at my computer and someone asks me if I want to go eat out at a restaurant tonight and I want to type "why, yes, I would love to eat out tonight" but (who can tell where this is going??) just at that moment My Beloved Megan walks into the room and asks me "why do you keep bugging me? what is your problem?" and I think "YOU! you, megan, are my problem, oh how I love you, megan" so I type "Why yes, I would love to eat you out tonight" and then BAM we've got the oral sex right there.

See how simple that is? Funny perhaps on a very fleeting, surface level reading. But it doesn't take much to look beneath that and see, oh yeah, this is really basic and simple and therefore stupid.

There's also a problem in this comic with the very awkward line between narrator and character - of course, the man at the computer is the narrator, with the opening explanation of the problem and then an illustration from his life. So far so good, except then we return to the narration at the end, separated from the story like the introduction is, yet...clearly a part of the story, but physically distinct from it. Perhaps a better way to have told the story would be closer to how I gave the examples above: Panel 1 would be "What I Meant To Type...", panel 2 would be "But Then..." with the giraffe coming out of the closet (so to speak?) and then Panel 3 would be "And So What Happened..." and you get the punchline there. As it is, the funniest line is the second to last one, not the last one, and so the humor is sort of softened.

Which way is the man facing in the last panel? I assume his head is turned around to look at the giraffe but you can't really tell.

Of course, it is not lost on me that today's comic features yet another reference to randall's favorite hobby, oral sex. It's not that I worry that he's too obsessed with it, I just wish he wouldn't share his obsession with his readers all the time, who maybe don't always want to be reading about someone blowing someone or something else?

And Last, the alt-text confirms for us all once more that Randall does read SMBC, making his copying of it the other day just that much worse. Honestly if you are going to refer to another comic, and steal its jokes, at least link to it along with your other "comics I enjoy." Maybe you could replace Perry Bible Fellowship, which has ended? Maybe?

603: Idiots

oh hello there, look who is posting way crazy early.

I thought this comic was really, really condescending and insulting. Of course, the first time through I was just confused as all hell. I have not watched Idiocracy, and so, like you, I did not understand the premise that we were working from. And there are more ideas being thrown out than people so it got very confusing. And there is a new hat! What the fuck. i don't have time for this nonsense.

ok first off we need a name for New Hat, um...kind of looks like a old british man shooting elephants sort of a hat, the kind of thing teddy roosevelt would wear. Um...huh...you know what, screw it, his name is Mr. Line Through Head. yeah, look at it again, not such a great drawing now, is it? nope.

Ok the comic itself. First off, no matter what Idiocracy reference he made, it would have the tricky task of having to be comedy based on comedy. He had this problem with The Princess Bride and then again, to a lesser extent, with MathNet. If you are going to make a joke about something that is supposed to be funny, something that generally succeeds at being funny, it's hard to make an original joke that is good without just being derivative of the original. It's not funny to quote a movie on its own, it's funny because, and only because, it reminds people of something that already exists and that they already thought was funny. Once again, Randall falls victim to this trap - honestly, the best way to avoid it is to avoid making your comic reliant on someone else's comedy in the first place.

But onto the argument of the comic! Because this is a comic which makes an argument, a very political one.

First off, Stick Figure #1 (no hat) starts with a simple statement: "Idiocracy is true". Nothing too objectionable there. Now I don't know what it means for a movie to be "true" but based on the Wikipedia page, it looks like the movie is a comment on the state of advertising, corporate control, and general stupidity in our society (obviously, taken to extremes for comedic purposes, but clearly meant to show us about ourselves today). That's what I assume #1 means and he is perfectly logical to say so. So then, still in panel 1, Mr. Line Through Head reinterprets the meaning of the movie to be "stupid people have more children, though this didn't used to be the case." Now there is a little about that in the wikipedia page, and maybe it's all over the movie and I should just see it, but given that this is not, by any account, a popular movie, you have to imagine that most readers are in my position. OK - so we've twisted what the movie means. On to panel 2!

Mr. Line Through Head further elaborates, putting words into #1's mouth that he doesn't necessarily believe. Perhaps to continue the conversation, perhaps because he is not thinking clearly, or perhaps just to not be a dick, he agrees with Mr. Line. Fool! You fell into his trap!

Panel 3! The Great Reveal! Mr. Line says "HA HA FUCK YOU" and that #1 is wrong! And then when #1 says "Huh?" as in, "why did you lie to me? What does this mean? why are you such a dick" Mr. Line treats him like a stupid little bitch as though he had said "huh? what does the word 'wrong' mean?" which is pretty clearly not what he meant. Seriously, read that panel again. Doesn't it come off as douchey to the max??

Panel 4 contains perhaps the most morally superior sentence ever created about moral superiority. When I read that sentence, all I could think was, "huh, you sure sound pretty goddamn sure of yourself there, mr. line through your head." For a guy who claims to be decrying those who decry "obvious moral decay" you sure do seem to think that this is an example of moral decay.

in Panel 5 we get the lovely claim that "More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did." That's an interesting one. How on earth do you measure such a thing? If one is in favor, say, of affirmative action, because I think that current non-affirmative action university admissions are racist, does that make me "panicked over societal decline"? Does it do harm, by hurting white people, or does it help the world by stopping racism? Whether you think that person is "panicking over societal decline" or not depends on where you are on the issue and how much you agree with them. So the idea that you can just go about proving a statement like Mr. Line Through Head's is absurd.

In Panel 6 I was hoping for one of those "As the author, I don't actually agree with this" endings that some comics have. Like the sarcastic last panel of 589, where Randall makes fun of the sort of people who act like the characters in the first panels. But alas, no. All we get is "ha ha you are UGLY, man who looks just like me but without a line through your head!" And it's so forced in there, too - what does that even mean? Stupid people have to choose between #1 and sex with stupid people? So does that make #1...smart? Does that make him the only smart person anywhere? but Mr. Line Through Head just finished bitching him out for being stupid. I don't get it.

And then the overarching problem with this whole shit storm of a comic is that no where is there any proof or evidence offered for the claim Mr. Line Through Head makes. Ordinarily claims made in comics don't need them, but in this case, since his whole point is about one guy being too sure with no evidence, I would have like to see something. In the alt-text, on the blog, somewhere. So why should I believe Mr. Line Through Head? He has no better evidence than #1 or anyone else, so who gives a shit what he says?

oh also he spelled "zealots" wrong because he is unprofessional and a hack and only fixed it when people noticed, and he didn't admit he changed it. that's downright orwellian, Randy.