Hoorah for the return of "My Hobby", where we learn that Randy spends his free time being a totall asshole to his friends! Today's Hobby features Randy pissing off his friends for fun! CLASSY.
Now I was not aware that "Papyrus" was the worst font ever, just as I was not aware that it was the font used for Randall's favorite movie, Serenity. I learn so much from xkcd. So I asked one of my thousdands of good friends about it. For purposes of this conversation, my friend's name is Jimmy O'Helvetica:
Jimmy: I mean, again -- he's just pandering to the typophiles out there
Jimmy: or rather -- making mortal enemies
Me: is papyrus that bad?
Jimmy: It's not as bad as his handwriting
Me: zing
Me: that quote goes on the blog
But tired old pandering about fonts is not what pisses me off most about this comic, because I do not care about fonts. I care about comics being fucking original.
SO take a look at this chainsawsuit from the day before this xkcd came out.
This coming from a comic that has done a pretty good job making fun of xkcd in the past.
Now I'm sure this is all just a crazy huge coincidence, and that's why it's an even crazier coincidence that just three weeks ago, PvP also made a "typography geek" comic, though they used the totally different phrase, "font snob." Let's take a look - tell me if you notice anything interesting.
If you answered, "why, Randall made fun of the very same font this guy did!" then woo hoo for you! If you said "oh big deal, papyrus is a lousy font, everyone makes fun of it" than woo hoo! you have helped show that Randall is a tired old hack whose jokes are old and stale and boring! YOU WIN ALSO.
I know, I know, I should give him points for not just making fun of Comic Sans, but really, why? If Papyrus is just as bad, and just as many people make jokes about it, what's the point? Can't you replace the word "Papyrus" with the words "Comic Sans" and get the exact same thing?
Lastly, the comic seemed a lot like 280 to me.
Now I'm sure this is all just a crazy huge coincidence, and that's why it's an even crazier coincidence that just three weeks ago, PvP also made a "typography geek" comic, though they used the totally different phrase, "font snob." Let's take a look - tell me if you notice anything interesting.
If you answered, "why, Randall made fun of the very same font this guy did!" then woo hoo for you! If you said "oh big deal, papyrus is a lousy font, everyone makes fun of it" than woo hoo! you have helped show that Randall is a tired old hack whose jokes are old and stale and boring! YOU WIN ALSO.
I know, I know, I should give him points for not just making fun of Comic Sans, but really, why? If Papyrus is just as bad, and just as many people make jokes about it, what's the point? Can't you replace the word "Papyrus" with the words "Comic Sans" and get the exact same thing?
Lastly, the comic seemed a lot like 280 to me.
OH ALSO remember: the best font out there, regardless of what Jimmy O'Helvetica says, is still Humor Sans.
First!
ReplyDeleteThat was not forever, Rehoboam.
That is all I have to say.
I am opening myself up to Cuddlefish attacks saying this, but: this is also just not a realistic scenario. I mean, if you know enough about your friends to know they are typography geeks, they probably also know that you are aware of this fact. Design students talk about fonts! It is something they do.
ReplyDeleteNow, if you know them well enough to know that a Papyrus card will bother them, chances are they will get the joke right away--or, failing that, they probably know you well enough to not be afraid of saying "Papyrus? Really?"
I mean, the polite scenario is most likely if you don't know them very well, and they don't want to make you think they are a crazy by complaining about the typeface, and you didn't know better. In sum this is pretty much implausible.
Cue the Cuddlefish hordes comparing XKCD with speculative fiction, because people behaving in unbelievable ways is the same thing as a fantastic universe, and it was clearly /intended/ to be unbelievable. Sigh.
I am a cuddlefish.
ReplyDeletePVP is not a good webcomic.
ReplyDeleteWhy do people read it.
The first time I saw this comic, I thought RM was referring to papyrus, a type of fragile paper. "You printed this on PAPYRUS? How did you get it from disintegrating in the printer? What a lousy material to make a card out of! You should be ashamed!" etc.
ReplyDelete"Total" asshole 8( Too many lls for my taste.
ReplyDeleteAlso, @ Carl, I'm not sure I understand the similarity between #280 and this one? There's kind of a connection in the theme "I take advantage of people who take things too seriously", but it seems tenuous.
It's a comic about a guy spending time doing esoteric things that bug a pretty small group of people for no real reason other than he's a colossal asshole.
ReplyDeleteAnd? And what?! I MUST KNOW
ReplyDeleteHello, my name is Trevor. I am a vampire and
ReplyDeleteWanna finish that thought? We'll wait.
ReplyDeleteBut not for long.
ReplyDeleteOk. We're done waiting.
ReplyDeleteMalethoth:
ReplyDeleteYes, we call him "Randall" around here.
AWW SNAAAP
/too obvious
Okay, 591 surprised me, because it actually made me think "Huh. That's kinda clever." Sure, he's taking on really easy targets (4channers and Twilight fans? Really?), but it's a relatively reasonable approach. The payoff is weak, but overall I thought it was better than usual.
ReplyDelete::checks the blog::
Hm. It doesn't say anything about it being inspired by an IRC conversation with actually funny people. ::shrugs:: That's one hypothesis unconfirmed.
591: It's Stepenie Meyer. (My wife is a huge Twilight fan.)
ReplyDeleteSomeone on another forum pointed this out to me: What's with the scribble in that one post in the first panel? Is it Randall himself making a mistake, then scribbling on it rather than erasing it, in which case huh? Or is it supposed to be the author of the post who made an error and, um, deleted it or something, in which case huh?
ReplyDeleteAdam, my condolences.
ReplyDeleteAs to 591, by referencing and providing the direct url to 4chan, Randall is doing the very thing which occurs the comic, bringing 4chan's existence to the attention of his idiotic fanbase.
If he were a fan of 4chan, he would know this is exactly what the community most hates and fears. It is a secret club, as it were. Instead, Randall seeks to demonstrate his Internet Credentials by namedropping. Which would be no different than his tired references to an old meme (rickrolling!), but by providing direct link to the website, he increases the chance of "infection" much more. The oblivious reader might see the name 4chan, not get it, and move on with their lvies. Even if curious, they would have to ask in appropiate channel. But with this comic...
Cancer.
This is like Randy's fifteenth time mentioning 4chan. We get it, dude. You lurk and/or post on 4chan. It isn't funny.
ReplyDelete@Subculture, doesn't that sort of thinking only apply to people who actually care about the quality of 4chan, or think that it's capable of getting worse?
ReplyDeleteHe misspelled Stephenie as Stephanie.
ReplyDeleteI'm ashamed to know.
/b/ + sycophants = /r9k/. His faggotry spread ahead of him even making this comic and 4chan already made a board for it. Shit's time travelling.
ReplyDelete591 isn't too bad. I like the joke. Anything that mocks /b/ in general and raidfags in particular is aces by me.
ReplyDeleteAnd if the existence of 4chan is somehow still a secret, then it is without a doubt the worst-kept secret on the internet.
(Actually, at first I couldn't tell that panel 1 was supposed to be 4chan. Was Randall just too lazy to add any detail, or...?)
@Trevor the Vampire
ReplyDeleteAnd what? That's it? "I'm a vampire and here's a million dollars?" or "I'm a vampire and here's your own spaceship?" I mean what the f-
OH wait, I get it. You're referencing another website that used to be funny.
I've seen the same/semi-same joke before both in the Roosterteeth comic and Real Life Comics.
ReplyDeleteI can read Papyrus fine. It's even kind of nice. I don't know what his problem with it is.
Now if he'd said 'Wingdings,' that would be funny, because just the word itself is an instant laugh.
Thanks for the blog, Carl. I only faintly remmber the last time I laughed at an xkcd comic, and now I can see why.
ReplyDeleteTo make a biscuit based analogy, xkcd is the ginger nut of webcomics - quite delicious at first, then it turns repetitive and dull, then finally the whole packet goes stale and inedible.
Munroe is trying to freeze the ginger nuts to get them to last longer, but the result is inevitable - he hasn't got a delicious biscuit again, he has a soggy, cold and bland one.
By comparison, the better webcomics on the net are more like bourbon biscuits - even if the bases go stale you can pull them of and still eat the delicious chocolate cream centre.
xkcdsucks cannot however be described as a biscuit - it is a warming bowl of porridge and brown sugar on a cold winter morning.
Cuddlefish Prime: To me it looked more like a standard conversation on Twitter of Facebook than an imageboard. There's no name, there's too much space between each post, there's solid borders rather than the soft edging most imageboard skins have, no date, no tripcodes and no post number. I thought he was gunning for a more generic "internet tough guys using some sort of funky system not many have installed" until the fourth panel.
ReplyDeleteIt may be rather nitpicky to some, but I certainly feel that making sure your imageboard parody actually looks like an imageboard would have been handy for context here.
@Malethoth K.
ReplyDeleteActually you've hit on what annoys me about both this one and the latest one.
There's certainly a humorous idea. There's just no payoff. This one: Wouldn't it be funny to annoy typography geeks with tacky fonts. The latest one: Wouldn't it be funny of Stephanie Mayer used her books to troll 4chan. Both of them are no funnier than the suggestion there. We need a better payoff. To make it into a joke it needs to go further.
I ripped my hair out over the new one.
ReplyDeleteAlso: I was going to mention the pvp thing a few days ago, but i realized that it was almost a month ago, and while it did mention papyrus, i doubt it was munroe copying.
Now, zhis one really fuels mein fiery hatred for xkcd. Vhere I come from, people who care for something as trivial as fonts are cast into ze bottomless pit of despair.
ReplyDeleteBut even vorse zhan fontophiles are people who make fun (more precise: zheir pathetic understandig of "fun") of something like zhat.
Randall Munroe shall taste mein fearsome German wrath!
Was that the worst attempt ever at calling people Nazis? Because that's what it looks like.
ReplyDeleteCarl: Please add a new entry for the comic on the day it comes out, even if you don't update the writeup at first, so people can use them comments section. Otherwise the comments just get highjacked.
ReplyDeleteAh, ze notorious Rehoboam! So we finally meet.
ReplyDelete@COVIZAPIBETEFOKY: I am an impatient man and I need my daily dose of bile.
ReplyDeleteDer German: jetzt, wir tanzen.
Ugh. My best friend is a self-proclaimed typography geek, and tries to make jokes about kerning and such, to the point where he wants a shirt that says "keming" on the front and "kerning" on the back. Because "ha, get it? 'keming' is 'kerning' with bad kerning!' And even he doesn't go "PAPYRUS!!!!! *shakes fist in anger*" Though he did find this one funny. I had to point out to him that it translated as "my hobby: being an asshole."
ReplyDelete@Rehoboam and Der German: may I suggest...?
ReplyDelete591 features Randall's textbook execution problems. The setup to the "joke" is so contrived, that it makes me stop while reading it and think "Wait, why would she be responding to these people?" "How would she know they're from 4chan?" etc. I mean, it seems like the humor is supposed to be from the idea that this could realistically happen, but the premise is so absurd I can't buy into it.
ReplyDeleteThat, and it's not particularly funny, I'm tired of these trolling and reverse trolling comics. We get it Randall, real life trolling is hilarious.
Also, please, no more 4chan references. Again, we get it already. 4chan is the pit of the internet full of trolls and it's hilarious. Enough.
Uh, if Twilight fans invaded 4chan, wouldn't the regulars just scare them off with mind-scarring pornography as per usual? (See "the cancer that is killing /b/")
ReplyDeleteAnn Apolis: Zhey confused "ein" und "aus", but very nice indeed.
ReplyDeleteAloria: Like so?
ReplyDeletehttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v286/Medeo/xkcd.png
You know? Indexed had a blog post making fun of Papyrus and other fonts. MORE THAN A YEAR AGO! Haha, not only xkcd is outdated, but all those examples you posted are outdated as well! And NOBODY CARES!... actually, a few people do.
ReplyDeleteAlso, shouldn't your font be called something like "Comic Sans Humour"? Because "Humour Sans" doesn't really mean anything ("Comic Sans [serif]" was named that way because the guy was too lazy to type an extra word, I think).
I'd go so far as to say 591 is the worst comic in a while. /b/ itself is like 75% self-trolling; the old adage of "trolling /b/ is like pissing in a sea of piss" generally holds. /b/ wouldn't be phased whatsoever by a bunch of Twilight threads.
ReplyDeleteAlso, from what I've read, Stephanie Meyer is a huge bitch, so it's unlikely she would be as measured in a response as this.
On the other hand, it seems Randall is able to emulate Meyer's awful prose fairly well, although I have my doubts that that's intentional.
I think I've said this before, but couldn't most of these "my hobby" comics just be "adventures of Black Hat Guy"? I mean, unlikely scenarios of douchbaggery is really all that character has, and the author himself keeps stealing the character's schtick. What an asshole.
ReplyDeletethe newest one was decent, I thought. I did chuckle, but some of the dialoge seems a bit artificial, and it does seem like randy is just trying to feed 4chan his loyalty
ReplyDeleteCuddlefish Prime: YES. I LOVE YOU.
ReplyDeleteI think you guys missed the biggest issue with the latest comic, in that this has already happened. A long while ago /b/ invaded Gaia Online, and because some morons advertised 4chan and in particular the /b/ board, Gaia users Google searched it and came across /b/. This was around the time 4chan stopped being intelligent people joking around pretending to be stupid, and started to become 95% pigfuckin' retards with a small few intelligent people (the ones who make the news, like the guy who hacked Sarah Palin's email). So Twilight fans going there would make little difference as retarded Gaia users and retarded Twilight readers make near-overlapping circles on a Venn Diagram.
ReplyDeleteActually I guess superpositioned would be a better term.
ReplyDeleteAlso Cuddlefish Prime that edit is brilliant.
The guy who hacked Sarah Palin's email was intelligent? The way I remember it, he forgot to get rid of the password and only used one proxy. And now he's being screwed by the FBI. Good work.
ReplyDeleteI think it's pretty clear that this goes in the "making fun of an XKCD because I don't get the joke" bin. Maybe YOUR friends don't go around pointing out every Papyrus sighting they find and shaking their fists in righteous anger, but perhaps if they did, you'd find this comic more appropriate. Papyrus isn't just some random font that Randall picked out of nowhere (or from someone else's joke), it's a font that's rather notorious for its ubiquity everywhere someone wants to make something look rustic but is too lazy to search beyond windows default fonts.
ReplyDeleteBoo hoo hoo Joe, I'll mail you some tears later.
ReplyDelete@Cuddlefish Prime
ReplyDeleteGreat parody comic. Be sure to post it over at the xkcdcouldbebetter message board.
http://xkcdcouldbebetter.proboards.com
One thing that puzzles me is all the "OMG the guy in the comic is being an asshole that is so mean xkcd sucks". Hmm, maybe it IS JUST A WEBCOMIC after all? And if Randall says "his hobby" is to do nasty things on a WEBCOMIC, maybe it's just fiction? Do you really need to look THAT hard to find examples of nastiness turned into humour (like the hat guy)?
ReplyDeleteBut it's true, this could work better if it were the hat guy doing it. Usually the "My hobby" strips were pretty bizarre and/or implausible things to do, but this time, it seems a tad too deliberately nasty. But, you know, I'm still sort of suspicious that Randall is NOT like that in real life (or, like many would say, in RL). Is it just me?
When Randall can't think of anything clever or funny to say, he just mentions 4chan or Internet culture like the pandering fuck he is.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fucking hack.
I think it's pretty clear that this goes in the "making fun of an XKCD because I don't get the joke" bin. Maybe YOUR friends don't go around pointing out every Papyrus sighting they find and shaking their fists in righteous anger, but perhaps if they did, you'd find this comic more appropriate. Papyrus isn't just some random font that Randall picked out of nowhere (or from someone else's joke), it's a font that's rather notorious for its ubiquity everywhere someone wants to make something look rustic but is too lazy to search beyond windows default fonts.We know that the joke is that there are stupid people who throw fits whenever someone mentions a shitty font. Those people are retarded, and so are people who go out of their way to bug them, and so are people who go out of their way to make jokes about people who go out of their way to bug them, and so am I.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, even if this IS a webcomic, just people being mean really isn't that funny. Scott Adams once said that there are six dimensions of humor, something like Meanness, Cuteness, Cleverness, Naughtiness, Bizarreness, and the Recognizablity, and that for a joke to work it ought to combine at least two of the six. He also cautions that the combination of Cuteness and Meanness is really freaking easy and often less funny because of saturation (i.e. setting a Tickle-Me-Elmo on fire).
Under this theory, we can see that Randall is simply cramming Meanness and Recognizability together, occasionally simply ramming Recognizability down his fans' throats. Or, in this case, since I really don't think many of his readers are like "Man, I totally hang out with a font-obsessed douchebag!", just Meanness.
This goes along with the idea "find a niche and patronize the shit out of them." Typography geeks *will* find this comic funny, simply because it's about something they care about and that they don't see often enough. Economists, physicists, and programmers are also notoriously vulnerable :)
ReplyDeleteFFS. Anyone here ever actually visit 4chan? A friend pointed me to Moot's reaction to 591. Renaming /b/ to the "Twilight appreciation station." Maybe Moot and Randall are in cahoots.
ReplyDeleteThey're good friends in real life, which stemmed from being on panels at conventions together.
ReplyDeleteThe adoption of /r9k/ is based on a bot that Randall coded/outlined. (I know for sure that he came up with the concept and applied it to an IRC channel but whether he actually coded it himself is another matter, although any chance for him to jerk himself while coding in Python must have been to good of an opportunity to miss.)
Seriously? That makes it worse. Now every meme comic's simply a shout-out to his buddy, going "Hey, I still pay attention to what's going on over there!" Now I've got images of them planning this well in advance. Since moot would have needed the time to screw up /b/'s formatting.
ReplyDeleteOk, what the hell is a "cuddlefish" and why couldn't somebody have come up with a slightly less ridiculous name for it?
ReplyDeleteYou could go through the blog archives, perhaps during December?
ReplyDeleteCuddlefish basically means anonymous around here.
It is ridiculous because (1) SO CUTE (2) maybe you will start using some fucking names
ReplyDeleteMonday's comic makes me blind with rage. Trolling doesn't work like that, 4chan doesn't work like that, no real communication works like that. That was the shittiest attempt at dialogue or humor. Then, upon visiting the forums, we've got the people trying to show Randall that their 4chan prowess is as complete as his (pathetically, this happens to be true) or people who clearly don't understand the internet and are calling for the death of an image board.
ReplyDeleteLets all spout nonsense about shit we know nothing about! Go! Go! Go!
ReplyDeleteDammit Randall I used to like your hobbies and now you are just a jackass. I feel like he is the friend who pulls "pranks" on his "friends" and they are like "... ha... okay are we done now?"
ReplyDeletewhat's with the incomplete paragraph, Carl? If that is a joke I do not get it; if it is a typo I have pointed it out to you.
Agreed with Malethoth. I mean it's basically depicting the idea of counter-trolling, so it's not too original, but has the potential to be amusing. Also I hate Twilight with a passion and enjoy hating it enough to briefly un-hate xkcd for a day.
Adam, you forgot that it's Stephenie Meyer, won't your wife be so pissed off
I'm really enjoying all these comparisons of xkcd to food. Well, not so much "enjoying" as "being made hungry." Thanks, guys.
Okay so basically 11:05 AM Cuddlefish, you have similar thoughts to mine. (Can you tell I am typing this up as I read through the comments?)
speaking of the term "cuddlefish" YOU GUYS MY BOYFRIEND CUDDLED ME THE OTHER DAY AND SAID "I AM A CUDDLEFISH" AND I COULDN'T STOP LAUGHING NOR COULD I EXPLAIN WHY (i am realizing that i have cheesy moments with my boyfriend, and also that i use caps lock more than i should)
um amanda that is the best thing ever
ReplyDeleteFernie Canto: I love the double meaning in "Comic Sans Humour" - haven't laughed quite so much in ages.
ReplyDeleteAJ - the double meaning was present in the original "Humour Sans" - that was the whole freaking point.
ReplyDeleteDave - the blog post is about how being an ass ain't funny, so don't be an ass.
ReplyDeleteThis is how 591 would play out in real life:
ReplyDelete1: Hey, lets troll the fuck out of the twlight boards
2: Not your private Army
3: Tits or GTFO
4: HAY GUYS IS MILHOUSE A MEME NAO?
Sorry =(.
ReplyDeleteActually Anonymous some Twilight board raids did occur a little while back: including a few major chatrooms. So the sillier thing is that this comic already happened in two ways; Gaia and also Twilight itself.
ReplyDeleteWell, as much major as a chatroom can be to have a Twilight board.
ReplyDeleteOH NO I DIDN'T
Next proposal: 4chan should have a /twilight/ board.
"the double meaning was present in the original "Humour Sans" - that was the whole freaking point."
ReplyDeleteNo, it wasn't. "Humour Sans" would be roughly translated to "Humour Lacking [something]", NOT "Lacking Humour". "Comic Sans" is a reduction of "Comic Sans Serif", "sans serif" meaning that the font lacks the little embellishments that differentiate e.g. Times New Roman from Arial. Carl failed trying to make a really clever pun, because some people seem to love being snarky without getting their facts straight first -- not that I haven't done that before, though...
A comic like Monday's is where XKCD's shitty visual style really hurts them. The idea for the strip itself is decent, and someone like Penny Arcade could have handled it well, but in a world of stick figures, I had to read it 3 times to figure out who the fuck was who. How was I supposed to know that "male stick figure" was a 4chan poster and "long-haired stick figure" was the author of Twilight? It would've been infinitely better had we been able to see the caricatures of both of these people and the expressions on their faces, and it would've made it a fuck of a lot simpler to read.
ReplyDelete@Fernie Canto:
ReplyDeleteIn Latin, you don't have to hold the strict subject verb ordering that you would in English or other languages, so "Humor Sans" is still a grammatically correct construct, and could appear in a legitimate Latin text (though it would mean "without liquid" in that case).
However, that's all completely irrelevant. Language exists for the purpose of conveying ideas, and if the idea of humorously using a Latin typography term to convey a lack of comical content was accurately conveyed, then the joke was successful. Only douchebag nitpickers who grammatically analyze the shit out of a throwaway one-liner to appear more intellectual than they actually are will have a problem with such a joke.
TL;DR My dick, you should suck.
Forgive me, Amanda, for I have typo'd.
ReplyDeleteFernie: The joke is not made funnier by making it more obvious. Besides, "Sans Humor" doesn't sound like a font. Also, what poore said.
It's a good thing we don't speak no durn fancy Latin, amirite?
ReplyDeleteSubtlety +1. Idiotic pedantism -5.
ReplyDeleteOn the name Humor-Sans, which for reference was created, like the font itself, by ch00f (though I wish I had thought of it...): As I see it, it's a joke on about 4 levels:
ReplyDeleteFirst, as a play on "comic sans", simply replacing "comic" with the almost synonymous "humor"
Second, because until it was created most people used Comic Sans, the crappy-child's-handwriting-font, when making parodies of xkcd,
Third, as "sans" essentially means "missing" or "without" it suggests something about missing or lacking humor, as xkcd indeed does.
Lastly, xkcd is the comic sans of webcomics, which is to say: shitty.
"Sans" is French, not Latin, which would be "sine".
ReplyDeletePoore form, Poore.
I would like to point out that the poore with a hyperlink for his name is not really me. Why anyone would want to pretend to be me is a mystery, though.
ReplyDelete@Anon:
You are technically correct - the BEST kind of correct! However, the French word is derived from Latin, and the French rules of grammar are similarly derived from Latin, thus my defense still stands.
Also, Carl's defense is more succinct and better anyway, so fuck it.
It's a good thing we don't speak French either.
ReplyDeletecaptcha: makenitip(?)
Bonbons remain orbiting. Now and then, line dancer defined by umbrella trade baseball cards with for tabloid. Furthermore, stalactite defined by meditates, and apartment building inside girl figure out over cowboy. Unlike so many haunches who have made their frustrating tomato to us. Now and then, living with bride fall in love with around hydrogen atom. Bride from burglar behind roller coaster, and about wheelbarrow make love to parking lot.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you're right. Everyone that makes fun of a commonly hated thing is a hack.
ReplyDeleteBut dude, this is serious, he makes fun of it because everyone hates it. It made sense to me...
hahaha you are a loser xD
ReplyDeleteso the explanation for this comic at xkcdexplained just called out Randall for not knowing that "Typography Geeks" a) don't refer to themselves as such (unless they just claim it for attention-seeking purposes, which seems about as likely as the comics we keep getting from xkcd) and b) are not rage, freak-out prone tools.
ReplyDeleteI also discovered that I originally thought xkcdexplained was simply to explain the jokes and leave it at that, then I found out that they're really mean (not that it's necessarily a bad thing, just eye-opening is all) and very touchy about how Randall does his comics with this one being a prime example of "jesus fuck Randall, do some fucking research into the goddamn sub-culture you're making fun of before you make a shitty comic about them" and I found myself laughing and going "holy shit these people are bigger nerds than Randall but have the nice decency to call him out in the least nicest way possible".
So when I first read this comic wayyyyy the hell back when it first was posted I looked at it going "is she flipping because he somehow got a hold of ancient papyrus and used it for a completely selfish act?" now that made sense to me, it explained her flipping out at him and I found it, interesting (I do not recall laughing at it) but upon learning that she was flipping out because it had to do with the FONT? It reminded me of seeing other people freak out at largely arbitrary things to freak out over (recent one, the Nostalgia Chick reviewed Bratz, which isn't a great movie to begin with but a big complaint she has at the beginning is the use of Comic Sans for the font for the titles... why the fuck do we care about that? Her arguing about it kind of ruined the review because it turned her into a rager just to rage over something even though there were plenty of things to get mad at and the font never needed to be brought up, it was tedious and unnecessary)
Real typography geeks rage over font choices, and they exist. They tend to be designers/design students who spend a lot of time thinking about design, and have lost focus on the actual intent of design. They tend to assume that anyone who uses Papyrus or Comic Sans is going through an active, deliberate design process where they spent hours picking fonts and decided to go with those, like there is some deliberate, belligerent ignorance at work here.
ReplyDeleteThey forget that for most people, design, especially typographical, is a really short process where you maybe look through the font menu and click one you kind of like, if you don't just pick a few with names you like and go with the first one that also looks nice. They assume that all design is deliberate.
I've had a designer comment on the arrangement of plants on a coffee table, surprised at the thought we had put into it. She seemed confused when she found out that it was the work of thirty seconds of moving the table and putting the plants on it in a way that felt vaguely right.
The point being, designers will complain about things you would never even notice without them as if they are the worst thing in the world, and you should humor them, because some of them are cute. (Lots of them are douchey though.)