Thursday, January 21, 2010

Comic 691: Shove It

high density of stupid in this here comic, yoWell now that we are all done arguing about 9/11 and terrorism and which country's residents are ignorant of which other countries, we can move on to the important stuff: Sticking things up one's ass.

The main character in today's comic loves technology so much, he wants to have sex with it, by putting it in his ass. His friend wants to clarify that he (the friend) will not put his hands up the main character's ass looking for the memory card.

I think we've all had a similar sentiment. Perhaps we did not want to put any piece of technology inside of us (I know I have never felt that need) but we all surely thought about just how much you can store in a small space, and how the capacity just goes up and up all the time. In that way, this comic is no more than comic 354, though to be fair, it at least tries to cram a joke in there. A joke about assholes. But the point is, "woah, hey, things are cool. Isn't that cool?"

Is anyone else annoyed at the inconsistency in this comic? In panel 1 he is scared to go near the thing, and then three short panels later, he's talking about fucking it. Also, I like the fact that while the character in panel 2 says "... on smaller than a dime," the art shows the drive next to some dimes, just to reinforce, yes, it is smaller than a dime! If you cannot read you can still get the point, how considerate.

Lastly, the forumites are using this as an excuse to show off how big their hard drives are, which is silly.

78 comments:

  1. my hard drive is nine inches long and six inches in circumference

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  2. We were talking about this with a friend earlier: WHY ARE ATHEISTS SO ANGRY AT CHRISTIANS?

    and we came up with this answer: they're jealous! Let's see why:

    1) Atheists think they got it all figured out. Yet they live unhappy and unfullfilling lives.

    2) We believe in something, while atheist believe in nothing. This is why they hate us so much.

    3) We arent sad and emotionally unstable like most atheists are.

    4) Girls dig us better since we have very wide social circles. Atheists have forgot how to live in society

    5) We aren't the ones whining all the time about "under God". If you don't like it, GTFO my country you godless traitor douche.

    6) We are more moral thus help sustain society. Atheists just ruin everything since they live a miserable existence.

    7) An atheist chick would rather fuck a christian, since we aren't hateful or have the need to lash out violently.

    8) We're simply cooler. Admit it, maybe it wasn't the case some 200 years ago, but nowadays being atheist sucks while being christian is cool as hell

    9) Anti-god is anti-freedom. Atheists know it, but can't come to terms with it lol

    10) Atheists are sexually depraved and need sick fetishes just to get aroused. How pathetic is that?

    11) If you don't die a virgin, and happen to get a daughter... chances are she'll be marrying a Christian :)

    I could be going on and on and on but you get the point by now. Go ahead and downvote me like a good little atheist

    Enjoy being atheist, sucker :)

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  3. That same inconsistency bugged me too...more credence to the "Randall does his comics 5 minutes before deadline" theory..

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  4. ok the guy who was braggin about his harddrive space said he only had 180Gb on his laptop... My Dell laptop has 250Gb and that was standard. MY DELL LAPTOP IS BIGGER THAN HIS.

    Now that we've let the insignificance of size settle into our minds haven't we had MicroSD cards for years? I mean my Wii has a Micro adapter so they're at least 4 years old, so why does Ravlov continue be "behind the times"?

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  5. I'm an atheist chick and I'm always trying to fuck christians but they keep telling me "no front hugs and no kissing" does anyone know what that's about?

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  6. i mean that really is the joke isn't it? that the guy is going to shove the card up his ass?


    wow.

    surely there are better jokes to be made about dime-sized huge-memoried cards.
    like say microsd cards freak him out in the same way obvious breast implants do, cos they both manage to get disconcertingy large memory(/mammaries) into a tiny body.

    horrible bad pun isn't it? yeah, sorry for inflicting it on you.
    but here's the thing: that took me two minutes of "lemme try and think of some joke for this..." and it is better than randy's "i am going to put this up my ass" punchline.

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  7. To the first Anonymous: Obvious troll is obvious. *yawn*

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  8. "the art shows the drive next to some dimes, just to reinforce, yes, it is smaller than a dime! If you cannot read you can still get the point, how considerate."

    At least he drew something else than just stick figures!! XD
    (Also, had he not drawn the dimes, I can totally picture you writing "and the art!! insipid as always!!! couldn't he draw like a dime, or a library, is it too hard??")

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  9. Ya, that can only really be a troll.

    In other news, in my dorm after we came back to school this week, what did we have as our name things on our doors? Why none other than xkcd comics courtesy of our RA.

    Now in all fairness to my RA, he did it well. On my door was the base system comic. I play baseball. On a couple guys doors that we make fun of for not being able to get with chicks was the can't find the g-spot and the bra with a rubiks cube comic. It was actually funny. It reminded me of that post by Rob though.

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  10. Julian - I think the best thing to do would have been to talk about how small it is, without explicitly comparing it to a dime in the dialog. Let the visual comparison reinforce, not repeat, what the characters are saying.

    Christian Anon: obvious troll is obvious, and repeating the same post from before. stoopid.

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  11. A movie from 1971 and a movie from 1988. Dialogue taken virtually verbatim from each one. No attempt at synthesis, just "Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry was bad at counting, but Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man was good at counting! Bullets!" Insipid alt-text.

    I don't even want to see how much the forumites love it.

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  12. Is this in honor of Kim Peek (the inspiration for Rain Man) dying recently? If so, what the fuck. If not—Jesus, that's pretty bad taste.

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  13. There are definitely 21 lines in this comic.

    Of course, that's being generous and counting the panel borders, ignoring the gun, and treating each limb and head as a single line each.

    Either way, how can you count with a detatched head?

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  14. This just in: Authorities at a loss to explain sudden unexpected surge in number of Westerns rented from video stores by college-age moviegoers who previously had no interest in them whatsoever.

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  15. "Perhaps we did not want to put any piece of technology inside of us (I know I have never felt that need)"

    What about giant vibrating dildos? I like to keep one nestled against my balls, and one in my ass at all times. I only remove them to change the batteries and sleep.

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  16. anonymous, we must simply accept that you and I are different people, with different tastes, and different computer-machines.

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  17. Well, OBVIOUSLY all xkcd readers are Christians and all haters are atheists. I'm surprised it even had to be spelled out for you idiots.

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  18. I actually liked the latest one for the alt-text. It managed to present a sharper-than-usual "get out of my head!"-bait without it being the blunt instrument of bad punchlines.

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  19. Saw the latest comic (fIr$t!) - usual poos. Meh

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  20. Found this gem in the first post Carl quoted from the forum:

    "Aye. I'm perfectly satisfied with the quality of MP3 files, but given that space is not a problem, it would be nice to have a perfect quality file format. Maybe a lossless one at that."

    Mp3s suck, if you can't hear the quality difference well...second, perfect quality file format=/=lossless file format? Since when? If you have a perfect file format that loses quality, tis not perfect. Conclusion: He was just talking out his ass.

    Anyway, time to write my "real" essay, I don't think I could hand in a paragraph I wrote about someone who was wrong on the internet and get marks for it.

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  21. Well what? I can't hear the difference either after 128kbps.

    But yeah, wonderful. I also like how he's apparently oblivious to the fact that there are already lossless file formats.

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  22. And I thought *I* discovered the FLAC format way too late! Heh. I also can't tell the difference between a high bitrate MP3 file and the uncompressed file. Only once I had an album in 128kbps in which I could clearly hear all the artifacts. Now I avoid anything lower than 192.

    That comic gave me the creeps. Just EWW. Also, I think the jarring contrast between scared/arousal is intentional; it seems Randall was implying the guy had some sort of fetish, something almost masochistic, I dunno, something typically Randallish "LOOK AT ME I AM KINKY". The latest comic is a masterpiece by comparison; mediocre joke, nothing worth remembering, but not really offensive.

    Captcha: matel. Hey! It seems they finally discovered the marketing potential of these captchas: SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISEMENT!

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  23. Is it just me, or does this comic remind anyone else of the petabyte infographic that was all over the interwebs a few weeks ago?
    http://www.geekologie.com/2010/01/learning_is_fun_mommy_whats_a.php

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  24. I loved the new one, found the one this post is talking about to be not only stupid, but unfunny.

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  25. So Randall has basically told us he's autistic.

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  26. meet a giant fish!

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  27. what if he was afraid that it would explode and release an ENOURMOUS amount of books proportional to the size

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  28. Getting assraped by thousands of books at the same time? Hell, he'd find that a turn-on.

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  29. Love the alt text on the new one xD! so when he says "people like me" does he mean regular autistic people or is he comparing himself to rain man in the comic, ie a savant?? Seeing as how counting bullets was the very thing rain man was doing in the comic, I'm going to assume the latter.

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  30. Btw, I liked the actual comic, the alt text just made me cringe...

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  31. So does he think that counting bullets make people special or something? I like my history teacher's take on movies with similar acts of inaccuracy. He said that the more you know about the particular subject that is portrayed in the movie, the harder it is for you to watch the movie without getting upset. I find myself constantly agreeing with that sentiment for movies with sword fighting and military movies but you kinda have to know about the guns the people are using to actually show off your great ability of being able to count bullets (not that it's hard to figure out since Harry admits he's using a 6-shooter, but he could've psyched him in to believing it was a 6 when it was actually an 8-shooter)

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  32. Can anyone explain why the fuck would Dirty Harry want to shoot a harmless crazy dude who can't even tie his own shoes? The joke is just a shallow juxtaposition of two lines uttered by totally unrelated movie characters. Sorry, Randall, this is just lazy.

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  33. "Is this in honor of Kim Peek (the inspiration for Rain Man) dying recently? If so, what the fuck. If not—Jesus, that's pretty bad taste."

    If so, the taste is still questionable. Also, didn't Kim Peek die in December? Way to be topical and on time Randall (or did it take him an entire month to write that one joke?).

    In XKCD land, Kim Peek and Clint Eastwood look exactly alike. I could tell who was Dirty Harry by the dialog, but had to look at the caption to see who Kim Peek was. It completely ruined the spontaneity of the joke.

    Also, why the HELL would Rainman rob a bank? It would have made more sense if he had been in the crowd and just shouted out the answer. Then the caption could be something a bit funnier, like, "just because you know the answer to a question doesn't mean you should announce it all of the time." Of course, the comic would probably be ruined by a completely gross alt-text (e.g. "This happened to me when someone asked what S&M stood for") and the forumites ("OMG, I have also caused an awkward situation by answering a question inappropriately!").

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  34. I just realized that comic 692 reminds me of most of the jokes in Epic Movie (or Disaster Movie or Meet the Spartans, take your pick): two characters from popular movies mashed together in a nonsensical scenario just to make one crappy joke.

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  35. I don't think the joke was very bad. It made me laugh. And even one or two jokes from Epic movie made me laugh. Though, most of it was terrible. No, really terrible. Comparing xkcd to that is just mean. =/

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  36. As xkcd goes, I thought 692 was pretty good; it made me laugh.

    I agree with Leonard's edit though; that would've been a much better comic. After Eastwood says "shit", maybe even include a "phew" from the guy on the ground?

    Who wants to make the edit into reality? :)

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  37. Wait, what anon 8:06? There's nobody who posted at 8:06, let alone an anon.

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  38. Also, I just realised that the guy in 691 doesn't necessarily have to put the SD card up his ass. He could also shove it under his foreskin.

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  39. jesus fred, thanks for making me cringe

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  40. Latest comic would have been better without the caption. He didn't even have to make specific characters, or a specific setting.

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  41. I quite liked the new comic. The alt-text was horrid though. "People like me. Not people like you, you plebs. You ain't fit to lick my shoes. Not if you don't count bullets."

    Alt-text: "corpsesup". While I was listening to "Ghost Town"! Spooky!

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  42. Honestly I don't mind 692 that much. It's not good, but there's no sex jokes, no stalker love, and it tries to have a punchline, so that's good enough for me. It's below average, but at least it's not offensive or terrible.

    I'll take a below average xkcd over crap like 691 any day.

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  43. Only read the first few comments.

    How about this? Here's a novel idea: let people believe what they want to believe, shut up, and stop trying to criticize them for it. Unless, of course, it's ridiculous. I'm christian. Do I agree with the hardcore christians, that homosexual marriage is wrong? No! I'm all for homosexual rights. Do I think that atheists are stupid/grumpy/etc? No.

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  44. Hey look, you fell into the troll's trap!

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  45. Here is a little thought experiment I have come up with for 691.

    Imagine the comic with the gender reversed of our aroused stick figure. That is: instead of nameless male stick finding microSD sexually arousing, it is Megan.

    I cannot prove this, of course, but Panel 4 would not read with the same utter terror Randy demonstrates w/r/t the penis. On the contrary, Panel 4 would be about Generic Stick-Man being incredibly turned on right now.

    Which doesn't tell us much about the comic itself, of course. But it is fun to play with Randy's conceptions of gender any time it comes into play. Try it out on a bunch of XKCDs!

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  46. Here's my edit for 692:

    http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2703/4295947117_d1b8fbf266_o.png

    I thought about changing Dirty Harry's second line to "fuck you" but it just didn't sound right.

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  47. Leonard: nice. I was going to note that it isn't clear why Rain Man is just standing there watching, but then I realized it doesn't make a difference.

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  48. I figured he was a) one of the bystanders watching the shootout (I tried adding more figures, but it just cluttered the composition) or b) Dirty Harry's new partner (actually, that would make a pretty cool action/comedy movie: a jaded veteran cop teamed up with a genius yet socially inept partner. The comic could be made into a joke about ridiculous crossovers, except, as I said, this one actually has some potential to be entertaining).

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  49. Yeah, I really liked the idea of Rainman as his partner. It has a sort of Monk meets classic westerns feel about it.

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  50. The only change I'd make to Leonard's is the same change I'd have made to the original: Remove Harry's response. Don't change it, just remove it. It's just a speed bump on the way to the caption.

    I also like the idea of Rainman being Harry's partner. Also, if it were actually Monk instead of Rainman, they'd both have been inspectors from San Francisco which could add some legitimacy to the mash-up.

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  51. guys but Dirty Harry isn't a western?

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  52. Yeah, I've been wondering what the whole western thing was about. I figured it's because there are a lot of bullets in westerns, but.. why not general action movies then?

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  53. Well, Dirty Harry was played by Clint Eastwood, who also did a lot of Westerns. In a way, the Dirty Harry movies are modern versions of Westerns, about a single man who attempts to hold order in a lawless society.

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  54. Yeah... that doesn't make it a western. Also how is that even remotely the theme of Dirty Harry?

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  55. The themes of westerns include: a rugged anti-hero, gunplay, and the effect of technology on the human condition, all of which are present in the Dirty Harry films, along with a geographically western setting (the west coast).

    How is Dirty Harry about a single man who attempts to hold order in a lawless society? Let's take the first film: in the first half, Harry sees all sorts of crime and intervenes, often alone, to prevent it (e.g. the bank robbery). In the second half, Harry pursues the Scorpio killer. Even though he is in a crowded urban setting, he receives no support from the police force--he might as well be a lone gunslinger, the Sheriff of San Francisco.

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  56. I also thought Die Hard 4 was a great western.

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  57. Dirty Harry is one of the first "Loose-Cannon Cop" movies out there, it is made by basically taking the ethos of the western and applying it to present day. So you are right and wrong, but mostly wrong.

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  58. Come on guys, you might as well say that Mad Max 2 is a Western.

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  59. Now that you mention it, Mad Max 2 sort of is a Western.

    But really, the whole genre debate is just a distraction. The point is: Monk+Dirty Harry=awesome.

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  60. I haven't seen Dirty Harry. Everything about it sounds like a western. It also doesn't really change the point.

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  61. Oh man, it just occurred to me, there could be a whole scene where monk complains about Dirty Harry's nickname and begs him to become "Clean Harry".

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  62. Everything to someone who has never seen or really read about it, that is.

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  63. Mad Max 2 can't be a Western, for the same reason Dirty Harry (ostensibly) isn't a Western: It isn't set in the Frontier Expansion era of American history.

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  64. But that's a very narrow conception of a western. It's like saying that Taxi Driver isn't film noir because it isn't black and white.

    Of course, Roger Ebert also saw parallels between Taxi Driver and some Western films, so maybe Taxi Driver is a Western too?

    Perhaps we should just accept the concept of genre as a somewhat vague and arbitary way of categorizing films based on plot and cinematography and move on.

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  65. I had a few seconds free, so I edited the cartoon a bit more.

    http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4047/4298953938_9f8636733a_o.png

    Now it's Monk and the unnecessary "shit" is gone.

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  66. But the whole "___. Definitely ___." is the stock phrase for Rain Man impersonation, not Monk impersonation.

    And Ann Apolis:
    Rather than "people like me" would you rather have Randal going all, "people like you and me, dear reader, for we have so very much in common."

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  67. It would be even better if there were some visual way to tell who the characters are without the bottom caption (i.e., if they weren't just stick figures). It wouldn't exactly take a world-class artist to draw Rain Man or Monk identifiably, and you can tell it's Dirty Harry from the dialogue anyway.

    But this is Randall, who is convinced that any joke can be told in the format of a stick-figure comic, regardless of how much additional awkward text he needs in order to explain it.

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  68. "...for we have so very much in common. Like, perhaps, the bed we shall sleep in tonight? *spritz*"

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  69. "...for we have so very much in common. Like, perhaps... cunnilingus??? *wink*"

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  70. "It would be better if there were some visual wa to tell who the characters are without the bottom caption..."

    Yeah, but then the xkcd fanboys would have no way of knowing what to Google so they can feel self-righteous when they're in on the joke! You can't Google a picture!

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  71. You can't googlegoggle stickmen!

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  72. hey guys lets focus on the small subset of a movie's themes that fits our self-made definition of 'western' and ignore everything that doesn't fit the definition to explain that every movie is a western.

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  73. who the hell is leonard and where has he been all these years. he needs to stick around, i think we can all agree. For the "Clean Harry" joke alone.

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  74. First of all, I'm pretty sure that this exact deal was covered, pretty explicitly and at length, by The Chronicles of Narnia.

    Second, this article is way, way, way cooler than anything Randall has done, and I just read this article like last night. GOOMH RANDALL I WAS THINKING ABOUT THE HERO'S JOURNEY TOO!

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