Comic 708: Mind & Body Games

i am working feverishly on the dinosaur comics anacryptogram puzzle. am I close to solution? probably not, but I am close to a pretty good solution. Anyway, I guess I should take a break from it to post this.

This comic is stupid. For one thing, the punchline obvious, if only because it's such a common idea for a joke ("But if we have the regular dice....who has the sex dice??" "But if we have the tape John made...who has the tape with all the incriminating evidence??" "But if you were the one knocking on my door....who has been calling me on the phone all this time??"). Anyway, that's not really the big problem.

The big problem is that in order for this comic to make any sense, you have to imagine that all the characters are skull crushingly oblivious. For the couple in bed to not notice that one of the dice has DOTS on it instead of ACTUAL WORDS until they roll them is pretty dumb. Likewise real life D&D kids would be, i imagine, nerdily attentive to detail, and wonder why their dice (whose details are key to game play) had names of Naughty Bits on them. Here, though, they don't seem to notice until they are well into their game. Why? Because they are horribly dumb.

And goodness, it gets worse. The construction of that last sentence doesn't make sense at all. "I fondle the castle guard." Well that only works if you are rolling the die to figure out what kind of verb you are supposed to do, which of course, is not what you do. You roll dice to get numbers, and those then those represent other things. In short, had the die been normal, there's no way the guy would have said "I...three the castle guard" because that's stupid. He's bothering to read the verb, figure out how it relates to his situation, and announce what has happened, yet still manages to act surprised about it. In short, in real life he would just say something like "wait, what the fuck is this." I know I complain a lot about realistic dialog, and sure, there are plenty of other things a person might say there, but the point is: none of them are anywhere close to what he says.

also, dice crappily drawn.

also, making a comic about sex dice is basically the least mature thing you can do. As I put it to Jay in an e-mail, "sex dice are nominally for adults to get them to do crazy sexual things they may not otherwise have done in their sad loveless marriages but actually for teenagers to look at it novelty stores and laugh nervously about. perhaps one of them is brave enough to buy one for a friend for an awkward but hilarious birthday present." i think that is exceedingly well put.

update: i totally forgot my favorite part of all this! I think it would have been funnier if he had changed the 5 dice roll to a 2, that way the message would have been "two breasts" and instead of the dice actively encouraging him to do somethin' inappropriate to the lady, as sex dice ought, they simply give this passive description of what is already present, with no active encouragement. IT'S FUNNY TO ME.

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Hey hey, so speaking of contests, like the dinosaur comics one, MY contest will be starting soon! To recap the details:

--Entries are remixed xkcd comics, using your own text (or xkcd text, whatever) and entirely xkcd art. No other limitations, so you should have plenty of material to work with.
--The finalists will be chosen by me and me alone
--The winners will be chosen by you in some kind of online poll
--the top winner will get a $100 TopatoCo gift certificate (negotiable)
--two runners up will get $20 TopatoCo gift certificates (negotiable)
--you enter by uploading your comic somewhere and linking to it in a special entries-only post that I will post, say, on thursday (update: and will run for two weeks)
--I'll also post a thing where we can discuss the entries as people send them in
--i think that is all
--isn't it cool when the blog starts making money? heck yes
--if you have any questions, post them in the comments