Saturday, April 3, 2010

Comic 722: Lights in a Box

Today's comic made me think precisely two thoughts, both rather boring: 1, isn't this just the Simple English Wikipedia joke all over again? and 2, apparently Randall has now lowered his standards below the usual high-school level and is now on four-year-old level.

Luckily, a gentleman by the name of Charlton Cheslewite without even knowing that i had no clue what to write about said this comic inspired just a divine fury in him that he simply must guest write about it. So, here is what he told me:

Computer Problems, yes, but i think it is xkcd's fault and not the computers

When you really think about it, all that happened was a few chemical and electrical processes that were happening a few minutes ago aren't happening any more. I don't see why you would find that so upsetting, officer. Maybe my knife in his chest had something to do with it, maybe it didn't. It was just some chemical and electrical processes anyway.

Oh hey folks. I didn't see you there, staring at your screens of lights. Potentially you might have been interpreting some vibrations using membranes and novel bone structures. I expect that you've already come across this xkcd comic. I often find it somewhat amusing. Not because I think it's funny, but because Carl's day seems like it was made marginally worse by having read it, hoping to find some sort of humor in it. But today it seems to have bothered me more than it bothered Carl.

Look, I don't know Randall Monroe. I probably don't like him, but I don't like most people. This doesn't stop most people from coming up with things that are kind of useful, new, or interesting.

This newest xkcd is none of those things. Firstly, the joke isn't something new or interesting. I've read lots of versions, but I first heard it on play grounds as a child. People would lose a game of kickball, and vindictively announce that it was just a bunch of dorks running around kicking a ball. And they are correct. School was just sitting around in a class, writing stuff or maybe listening. Jobs might just be picking up a phone, muttering things, and putting it down. Everything in the world is able to be reduced to banal and stupid sounding things if you are willing to try hard enough.

Mind you, that only really addresses the first two panels. I've seen some comments on here hoping that the last panel had some hidden message, some additional meaning. Some posters have even come up with ways in which this last panel was secretly where the joke was. But I believe that the simplest solution is the most likely. Randall didn't want to just use two panels and no alt text. So he came up with another panel a some random crap about his cat.

Oh, his cat. What the fuck did his cat have to do with anything? It added nothing to the comic. He really just felt there needed to be an alt text and had drawn a blank. On the other hand, this was my favorite part of the comic. One of my favorite things is having people I dislike telling me about them getting what they deserve. It's right below people I dislike getting what they deserve on the list of things I like, and right above olives. Hearing that Randall's life is so empty that he frequently talks to his cat, who, I assure you, doesn't give a shit, was the best part of the comic.

When I first started reading this comic, I had really hoped that the man just played with lite brites all day. The comic referred to the buttons he pressed, making clear that he wasn't that cool. Likewise, while the world would be better off if he did, we can conclude that Randall isn't that cool either.

Actually, are any of us that cool?
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68 comments:

  1. Personally I thought that the alt-text would work better as a caption, thereby putting an actual joke into the comic. It isn't much of a joke, but it's something.

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  2. Randall says he describes his computer to his cat as a box of lights, but in this comic he isn't talking to a cat, he is talking to a woman. I think this says something about his view of women. Finally, I also like olives, and keep a list of things I like organized by how much I like them.

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  3. I still like my idea that the alt-text and third panel combine to say that the woman is as dumb as a cat, since the man is explaining his problems to her as he would to his cat.

    Hahaha shameless plug.

    Anyway, this comic felt really lame to me. I couldn't bring myself to hate for not having a good joke because it just felt so lazy. I don't know why I feel this way about this comic and not previous ones.

    It's just... from the first panel, it's obvious that the joke is going to be that something complex has been simplified, because the premise is the joke. I guess it's that with others, I can hate the joke because I didn't see it coming from a mile away, so there was an opportunity for something good, but the opportunity was lost.

    I mean, why are there three panels if the second and third are really just the same as the first?

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  4. And I got ninja'd by Anon 5:46. RAEG

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  5. This from the same person who gave us http://xkcd.com/676/

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  6. Okay, I know this is the third time I've posted, but I just looked at the forum thread for this comic, and the first two responses are:

    "Didn't find it all that funny."
    and
    "But it's behavior fitting with the syntactic faculties! That's inherently funny due to absurdity!"

    I'm pretty sure that the second one is sarcastic (I have trouble with sarcasm in text only), but either way, I just love that the first response said that the comic wasn't funny. Alright, I'll stop posting now, really...

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  7. Let's be fair: I think the whole thing is supposed to be a sort of cat's eye view: this probably is not what he actually said to the woman.

    Actually? What am I saying? It's a comic! It's not real! I'm going mad! AAAARGH!

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  8. It would have a certain pathos if there were no responses or alt-text, and Randall was explaining it to his cat.

    ...wow, this comic has turned into Garfield.

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  9. He's right that the pattern of lights is all wrong. Try as I might, no matter what buttons I press, I can't make a funny comic appear in my metal rectangle.

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  10. try typing http://qwantz.com

    O SNAP

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  11. "It would have a certain pathos if there were no responses or alt-text, and Randall was explaining it to his cat. "

    Or if he was explaining it to nobody at all. That would be coherent with the image of a sad, lonely loser that Randall passes off with his comics.

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  12. @Ann, I tried that.
    %http://qwantz.com
    http://qwantz.com: Command not found.
    %O SNAP
    O: Command not found.
    %_
    Nope, not the pattern of lights I was looking for.

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  13. Supprised you didn't title this one light bright to continue your little plagiaristic posting. First recipe for disaster and then that! I associated you with something that I would consider too far, even though it has nothing to do with everything. So, you wanna be unariginal. You can't! It's not a word! Sure there's around 1000 websites that use it, but that doesn't make it a word. If you want to know how a not word becomes a word? Here's your answer. LONG ANONYMOUS IS LONG SHOOP DA WHOOP I"M FIREN MUH LAZER! Yup, I'm P-Oed in a box. 139

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  14. Reminds me of the dream comic, 203

    But I really like to do this to the level where it's insane, where "Riding the bus will be a nice break from all this walking" becomes "I should appreciate punctuating this process of turning energy stored within my body into kinetic energy of motion in my feet and legs by way of muscles to propel myself forward at a somewhat slow pace, with the conversion of the energy stored in gasoline by way of a specially designed conversion tool housed inside a larger case specifically designed for the transport of large groups of people to kinetic energy of motion to again propel myself forward but at a faster pace and with less energy conversion on my biological part."

    Try it. It's fun :)

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  15. dehdesh, please clean up your verbal diarrhea before it soaks into the carpet. kthxbai.

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  16. I thought it was funny. I don't think most of Randall's comics are funny, but I do think you're trying too hard and wouldn't admit if he actually did write something that you thought was funny.

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  17. Hey, I play with lite brites all day. I'm offended that you assume none of us do, and now I had to blow one of my very few lite brite breaks on answering your stupid rhetorical question, and I don't get to take a crap for another six hours. Thanks a lot, Carl.

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  18. Hahahah, I also enjoy the rush of perverse glee that comes from Carl getting angry at xkcd! Hell, I don't even hate xkcd that much anymore.

    Anyway, problems with the comic.

    1) Monitors are plastic, not metal.

    2) Buttons? Get a mouse.

    3) "You know this metal rectangle full of little lights?" "What? No! What the fuck are you talking about you dickhead!?" (after some discussion) "Dude, your joke is bad and you should feel bad. In fact, I'm revoking your humor license indefinitely! I was gonna ask if you wanna go watch a movie, but fuck this I'd rather sit alone than suffer your idiocy."

    This is a natural flow of conversation. The comic is not. You could say that this is what the cat thinks they say, but no one says "Hey, you know this computer? Man I tried to compile my kernel but it failed." They say "Man I tried to compile my kernel but it failed." In fact, they don't even need to bring people to the actual computer in question to have this discussion.

    4)
    >He talks to his cat
    >laughingwomen.jpg
    Haven't you learned? If you're gonna talk to your pets, you at least assume reasonable intelligence on their part. How the hell can you escape into your private fantasy world from the fools surrounding you if your fantasy world is also full of fools who don't understand you? Insanity: Ur doin it rong.

    5) This is very close to Hollywood's view of a computer and work, not a cat's. Cats just think of it as a "scratch to make human give food" machine.

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  19. Title text, not alt text.
    Come on, Carl, repeat with me.
    Title text, not alt text.

    Alt text is "alternative" text for if your browser doesn't support an image. "Title" text is the text you get when you hover your mouse over the image.

    Title text, not alt text.
    It's been said before, but you still can't get it right, can you?
    Title text, not alt text.

    Really, does Carl even read these replies? If so, he probably skips the comments saying this.

    CARL YOU'RE A FUCKING MORON.
    There. Got your attention now?
    Title text, not alt text.
    Got that?

    Now, truthfully, I like the blog. Yes, you're still a moron, but at least a moron with a sort of good blog. Just get your facts right. Because it's...
    Title text, not alt text.

    Right. I bet you I'll have Muphry's Law written all over this topic. But at least I know it's title text. And NOT alt text.

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  20. I think Anon 3:27 liked the alt-text.

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  21. If a piece of writing makes reference to the author's cat for the sake of having something to say, the author is officially creatively bankrupt.

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  22. @Keep: My cat disagrees.

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  23. Veslfen, at least my verbal diarrhea is explosive.

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  24. @Tom
    "I still like my idea that the alt-text and third panel combine to say that the woman is as dumb as a cat, since the man is explaining his problems to her as he would to his cat."

    Seconded, that's how I read it.

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  25. Cuddlefish 3:27, we know it's "title text." In fact, you go back, it's come up several times. However, we still call it alt text. Why? Eh, sounds better, looks nicer.

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  26. @Mike: Right. From now on, I'm gonna call you Emily, alright? I just think it sounds better.

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  27. anon 3:27 is smart for knowing the difference between two html attributes

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  28. Qualifying your verbal diarrhea by saying it's explosive is a bit like defending your homicide by saying you raped the victim first. It just makes the crime in question more obnoxious and unsettling.

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  29. Apologies for the double-post.

    Actually this makes it a triple post. So sorry for that too.

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  30. A friend of mine really likes xkcd, and I was hanging out with him friday and he kept telling me this comic, and saying lines from it like all day long. I hadn't read it yet, and when he told me the whole thing, I asked "what's the fourth panel?" because I thought, somewhere, somewhen, there might be a joke? But it was just, well, computers are lights! um... yes. yes, that is how a monitor works. It's also made of different subatomic particles arranged in different ways. But a comic that does not make...

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  31. Hey Anon 3:27.

    Self Righteous FAQ #12.

    Also go fuck yourself.

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  32. I liked this xkcd because it's my kind of humor. It's a comic which reduces the entire field of study to which the character has devoted his life to the practice of shapes in a box of lights. The tragedy is that for all the high minded ideals of information sharing, electronic products, publication of ideas and so forth brought to us by technology and the internet, the activity can really be described in full as pressing buttons to display pleasing shapes.

    Tragedy is compounded in the third panel by the twin suggestions that these pleasing shapes are a hairsbreadth away from useless shapes at any time, and that there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.

    It calls to mind the fact that for all our biological complexity, the bacteria who have never evolved complexity, and have maintained a similar structure for millions of years outnumber us, and after we're gone they will continue to exist for millions more years after us. You realize everything in life is pointless and you have a great desire to laugh, then slit your wrists.

    That's why I liked today's xkcd.

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  33. that's funny. after reading today's XKCD I also realized that everything in life was pointless and wanted to slit my wrists, but it had nothing to do with a quotidian existential realization and everything to do with the fact that somehow, Randall Munroe makes a living peddling this shit.

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  34. Rob, has anyone told you that your profile picture looks startlingly like Stan Laurel?

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  35. no. I guess I can see it though, kind of, though I suspect it is primarily the hair?

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  36. Rob's new profile picture makes him look like a Plasticine person.

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  37. Veslfen, Your argument may be valid, but it is not velid. Don't make me vomit more words at you. I will make them come at you like a projectile.

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  38. The resemblance, to me, is uncanny.

    I heartily endorse the idea of Carl ending every comment thread with "Another fine mess you've gotten me into THIS time, Rob."

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  39. "You realize everything in life is pointless and you have a great desire to laugh, then slit your wrists."

    No: *I*, personally, shrug my shoulders and GET ON WITH MY GODDAMN FUCKING LIFE, because at least *that* I can do competently.

    There's absolutely nothing clever in making things look dumb. You can make ANYTHING look dumb -- people have been doing that for a long, long time. Randall merely reapplied that to computers (and knowing the computer aficionado he is, it comes across as very, very fake), but the worst thing is that there is no meaning in it. That is simply obnoxious and empty, devoid of any thought.

    The idea could be potentially interesting if that perspective came from a child, for example, or even actually from a pet; but to yield any humour, that idea needs to be explored further. And many here agree that *not exploring ideas further* is one of the many crimes of xkcd.

    And, frankly, if "everything is dumb and pointless" is what you consider humour, your style has become tacky and dated at least since Stereolab recorded "The Noise of Carpet".

    (Laetitia Sadier -- now THERE is a bright, cool person!)

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  40. The comment about the cat is probably an allusion to the idea that you can solve bugs in computer code by trying to explain the bug to some inanimate object sitting on your desk. Supposedly, the process of explaining what's going wrong out loud elucidates your thoughts.

    That parts not funny. What's funny is "my cat seems happier than me."

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  41. @ Bret:

    Oh man, you must have /hated/ #676 then with just about every fibre of your existence.

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  42. This comic has nothing to do with the "simple english" joke. It's clearly a sarcastic bird's eye view of how people doing technical work spend their time - it shows how absurd it would appear to someone who doesn't fully appreciate the details of modern technology.

    Like it or don't, but get the interpretation correct, or your criticisms are invalidated.

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  43. "Like it or don't, but get the interpretation correct, or your criticisms are invalidated."

    what, all of them?

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  44. "Everything in the world is able to be reduced to banal and stupid sounding things if you are willing to try hard enough."

    That's the funniest line, because a subconscious adherence to this very principle is the only thing keeping this blog alive.

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  45. "That's the funniest line, because a subconscious adherence to this very principle is the only thing keeping this blog alive."

    aww, it's so cute how you think you have the faintest understanding of the human condition.

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  46. I don't think anyone's getting as high-and-mighty as to drop the "human condition" bomb. I'm just toying with logic -- can you say my statement isn't consistent with your, ahem, thesis?

    Frankly dude, I love your blog. It's like, omg, *so* new media.

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  47. by "you" I meant "Carl."

    Sorry Rob, I just have no interest in talking with someone who can't even win an argument with his own strawmen.

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  48. so why are you talking to Carl?

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  49. I just finished reading the entirety of Josh's blog and boy, am I glad to be back at xkcdsucks.

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  50. write us a review, 12:24 Anon, you hero among cuddlefish

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  51. Josh's blog is a pretty terrible thing. He posts lots of really dumb things, and they all suck. His poems remind me of the poems a weird girl with purple hair in my eighth grade English class wrote, and they are all of the same quality: bad. Many of his posts include unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, such as "maniacally narrative effervescence", and pointless metaphors, like in this sentence: "Now, nearly five years later, the word "Katrina" is just a particularly large chunk of ice in the Bush Administration's eight year avalanche of inadequacies." That's right, an avalanche of inadequacies. That is how I would describe Josh's blog if I had to use a stupid metaphor.

    On January 15th, 2010, in an attempt to populate his blog with posts, he posted a really crappy Dark Knight commentary that he wrote in July 2008. The commentary was overall very bad; at one point Heath Ledger's talent was described as "hot, glistening, throbbing". This commentary made me wonder if he didn't have any more worthy things to post. Clearly he did not, and in fact had even worse things to post, as evidenced by everything else on his blog. In conclusion Josh ur dumb

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  52. I'd like to link you to a wonderful explanation of "ad hominem" attacks that someone wrote on some blog a while back, but for the life of me, I can't remember what blog it was written on...

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  53. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  54. First of all, take a fucking chill pill Fernie. Nothing justifies allcaps.

    Second of all, if dark humor is tacky, I don't want to be classy.

    And actually, I liked 676 for the same reason... that we manipulate grand, epic movements with every stroke of our fingers and become architects of incomprehensibly complex reactions to accomplish something headdeskingly stuipd and banal. It's like 676 and 722 are calling you out for reading them. Saying, "What a worthless person you are to have read this terrible comic".

    Of course, this is almost certainly not what the author intended; my enjoyment of these comics is in my interpretation of them. It's the metahumor of revealing all of the comic, and in fact all of the humor on the internet as a dark, ugly joke of itself.

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  55. I also doubt that someone with a name as unoriginal as "anonymous" could ever understand what an ad hominem attack is.

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  56. Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man

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  57. "I also doubt that someone with a name as unoriginal as "anonymous" could ever understand what an ad hominem attack is."

    Oh, the irony!

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  58. Okay, so...how do people feel about 723? I think it suffers from the things with which XKCD seems to be chronically afflicted--overly long gag, surfeit of panels, etc. However, the joke in and of itself is decent. The concept--as far as I know--isn't plagiarized. The execution, while not stellar, could have been worse.

    Maybe I've just set the bar really low ever since 709?

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  59. Eh. It's an original and interesting enough idea, but no funniness at all. Made me think: "well that's something cool to think about" and that's it...which is nice I guess

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  60. Is there actually a joke in 723? I feel like it's just a "Did you know...?" educational segment that has me leaving thinking "huh. I didn't know that."

    Unfortunately that's not good enough for a web comic...

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  61. You really don't see the joke, 2:37? It's right there in the last panel. Or did you think that Twitter users are really actually that stupid?

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  62. Prefers the riddler to a joker

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  63. 723 was decent. Not good, but not horrible either. It should have been shorter by at least a panel, I think.

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