Sunday, May 22, 2011

Comics 900 and 901: Cuddlefish! You're My Best Fans, In A Comic You Must Defend

Ugh. Let's get this over with, shall we? I'd apologize for my tardiness, but I'm not sorry.

900. First, observe that Randy's idea of a conversation with Megan (alas, she has returned) involves her fleeing him. This is not commented on in the world of the comic--as far as Randy is concerned, he has many conversations with Megan in this way, leaping into her path, talking to her, and her moving swiftly past him. He has never paused to consider why this might be.

But apart from that: internet atheists! How did you like your pandering? Was it good? Was it tasty? It seems to me that, as far as internet atheist mocking of religion goes, it's pretty weak. Randy often does this, where he tries to pander to multiple largely unrelated groups at once--in this case, people who know what error bars are and internet atheists. Boring.

And notice how he's trying the shotgun joke effect here by working, by my count, four jokes and/or references into three panels--usually something reserved for his list comics. I guess he couldn't find a way to make these jokes into a list so he just threw them into a drive-by conversation.

901. Given Randy's oral fixation, I don't think this is actually meant as a joke, but as wish-fulfillment fantasy.

There's really nothing to be said for this one, except that some people are praising it for some reason--I think people are so used to Randy's godawful walls of text that when he produces a comic without words they feel such a wave of relief they mistake that for a well-made comic. It's not.

I think the mistake you're making is assuming that each hideous comic Randy shits out thrice-weekly is equal to the sum of its parts. That is, that Wall of Text + Floating Heads + Pandering + White-Knighting all add up to a specific level of badness, and that if you take away the wall of text or the pandering then it's slightly less bad. But it's less arithmetic and more cooking with hideous poisons. You can take the arsenic out of your arsenic/cyanide/chlorine gas cocktail and it will still kill you just as bad.

Oh, sure, you can damn this one with faint praise, but people seem to forget that the point of damning things with faint praise is the damnation part. These things are not good enough. They fall short. These little good bits are not good. They are crap.

This one is boring. In order for something to be good, it has to rise above completely failing to invoke any sort of reaction at all. It has to actually, at the very least, make me go 'if I weren't so hideously bloated with hatred I might have smiled at that once, in innocent times.'

87 comments:

  1. Look everyone, that delightful Raven has reviewed an XKCD comic but without sobriety.... fuckfuckfuck.

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  2. No, you dope-addled cocksucker, it's a decent joke. Simple, but decent. No pretty pictures, but still a decent joke. I bet you've praised things that were half as funny but happened to not be burdened with the fact of being xkcd. Go lace it with anthrax and shove it up your anal cavity. You can't say it's an inadequate joke without revealing yourself for a retarded child hell-bent on endlessly shaking your fist in the same direction. Suck it up and maintain a true vision of reality.

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  3. tl;dr 900 would have been better without text, although Ravenzomg (moar like GAYvenzomg amirite?) illustrates this better. Also, people who saw that 901 is an improvement for a similar reason, I TROL U NAO.

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  4. XKCD 901 is still not funny 2:11.

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  5. What makes 901 a decent simple joke? I do not see it.

    Please explain.

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  6. they laughed at it and are trying to defend their bad taste

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  7. 901 didn't insult me but nor did it make me laugh/smile. I agree with Rob. Just because its not as bad as normal doesn't make it good. I think people are getthing these two things confused...

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  8. You must be people who scratch your heads at the Three Stooges. People who turn your noses up at Abbott and Costello. You wave your bottoms at Spike Milligan while shouting "I am better than you! I am better than you!" "What was that?". you cry. "Something that doesn't require any education at all to follow? Why, it must be complete bullshit! Have at it! It is rubbish, I say!" Then you lie down in your beds and happily fill your heads with the mistaken thought that has held you through your life: "I am smart." An erroneous conviction, but what of it? Plenty of others have justified their lives with falsehoods in the past. Why, just look at religion!

    Sure. You are smart as long as you tell yourself so and associate with people who help you uphold that belief. What we have here proof that Nietzsche was on to something. He who battles monsters should take care he not become a monster.

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  9. the best part about criticizing someone for making a boring pee joke: impassioned defenses of pee jokes from people who think it makes them appear more worldly

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  10. Did anyone say 901 is good, though?

    Put another way, would you prefer that xkcd got better and are glad that 901 is going in the right direction, or do you just hate America?

    Put yet another way, search Youtube for any Laurel&Hardy. Notice the same joke being used over: someone clumsy trying to do something serious ends up making an unexpected mistake causing unintended or confusing consequences at his expense. Don't think it's funny? Unable to see why anyone else finds it funny? Then you are as insightful as a deaf simpleton yawning through Carmina Burana.

    Put a fourth way, I've absorbed the pithy letters of Pliny, the timeless plays of Aristophanes, the enquiring heroism of Homer and the standard-bearing eloquence of Shakespeare. But I can still appreciate a guy getting slapped in the face with a wooden plank. If you can't, just GTFO.

    I await your countertroll, peasants.

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  11. Rob, you're a fuckload worse than Randall Munroe.

    Guest reviews for 90% of the comics isn't enough.

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  12. am i
    is this william monty hughes?

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  13. sure is sockpuppet in here.

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  14. Arrested Development was a poor show. The characters were too ridiculous and it relied too much on tongue and cheek. If you liked that drivel, you have a bad sense of humor.

    PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.PROVE ME WRONG.

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  15. Look, if every time you met a new person in your department at university the conversation began, "So... have you heard of these guys named Laurel&Hardy?" you'd probably become a card-carrying member of the Laurel&Hardy-Sucks blog.

    XKCD has ceased to be an awful comic. It's not a good comic, but honestly? I don't care. Occasionally it makes me smile. But the bordering-religious hype that focuses around this is unnatural and honestly restricting to the geek community as a whole. By binding ourselves to this paltry vessel of sketched stick figures and crass sex/high-school-level-math jokes and heralding it instead as "the greatest thing ever!" THEN we are being blind.

    So no-- if you think XKCD is "okay", and wouldn't bother bringing this up unless the context demands it [hint: it will very rarely ever] then you are just peachy. This site exists as a parodic counterbalance to this CULTURE, rather than the webcomic itself. But making fun of individual people we hate is pointless and no one will get it. So instead, we write awful reviews over a webcomic that is neither complex, though-provoking, or particularly well-written.

    This site is evidence that the term "Hipster-geek" has meaning, and these denizens are surely them however they deny it.

    And just to be needlessly vulgar/ froward/ internet, More like sure is COCKpuppet in here, amirite?

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  16. Oh, there's a new review, which means my last post is doomed to darkness. I'll just stick it here.

    "@10:33
    My response was prompted by 5:39. I realize the jab may have been too subtle for you, but try to keep up, will you?"

    Captcha: ungske. My favorite composer.

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  17. tl, dr: Fuck Randall Munroe with a Dr Seussian hat.

    Captcha: cajout. I'm in cajouts with Lucifer.

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  18. 901 made me smile for a second... but then: 'Wait, this doesn't make any sense! That's not how pregnancy tests work. Silly Randall, this isn't even your Dane-Cook-esque style of pointing out random observations about life and then laughing at them. But this is creepy, sexual, and makes no sense, so that's pretty par for the course.'

    Alternate explanation: Randall ate out a pregnant woman and then smoked a pregnancy test to see what would happen! In which case this is Dane-Cook-esque and nails both his fetish with oral and lactation/pregnant-women all in one go. And you served the cause of SCIENCE. Very impressive, Randall. At least I can think highly of you because you're not a naive, geeky white virgin.

    Teehee, Randall not a virgin. That's just crazy talk.

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  19. @Ravenzomg I'm the Laurel&Hardy analogiser and I dislike xkcd and Randall's fanboys as much as any sane person. This blog has often been far more hilarious than xkcd and is an important ingredient in any antidote to geek hipsterism (praise be to its contributors, including you).

    But sometimes it descends into a seizure of hatred which both reduces its entertainment value and punches a hole in its otherwise watertight position wrt/ everything xkcd stands for. Consider what Hislop said about satire: People say, "You satirists attack everything," Well, we don't, actually. That's the whole point. (Third Way, 3/95, p.12)

    If you have something funny to say, say it (e.g. Rob's constant reductio ad Megan can get annoying but surely brings out a smile in enough people). If you have something witty/milky to express, express it. But a mindless, indiscriminate BLAAARGHH THIS SUCKS!!! alienates you. It's also very easy - and one of my main criticisms of xkcd would be that Randall's output smacks of lack of effort.

    For the final slice of bread in this criticism sandwich: I am a less angry person for this blog because each new release of xkcd once made me angry but now it makes me go here instead. So please carry on - even if you're not doing it for my sake, I'll assume you are.

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  20. but xkcd is very rarely actually funny, or even has anything of redeeming value. i'll sometimes say if i think it does, but i don't think 901 has. i wouldn't say the execution is decent because it's not, it just isn't randall's usual standard of sucking (excessive words.) it just seems condescending to congratulate randall on not being quite as terrible as he usually is. like those awards for trying "super hard."

    although i'm not really interested in gag comics anyway, so what do i know.

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  21. Wow it was never this bad when Carl wrote these things.

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  22. that's cos Carl didn't actually write them, it was Jesus

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  23. Anon 7:09, your whole defense of 901 only works because you assume that xkcd 901 was a decent joke.

    But alas, it is not, so if you want to defend 901, try at least to explain why it is a good joke.

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  24. Nobody in particularMay 22, 2011 at 11:46 AM

    WAIT.

    WAIT.

    GUYS.

    HOLD UP.

    Is the joke that Randall had a pregnant woman pee in his mouth?

    Is that actually what happened?

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  25. So... niggers, eh? What's up with them?

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  26. They're niggeriffic!

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  27. ...at this point I wish I didn't like xkcd just so I wouldn't be associated with these people.

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  28. ...but not enough to just pretend I don't like it apparently.

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  29. @Anon709 [who I'm going to refer to as Laurapologist now because it makes you sound like a philosopher dinosaur]: The major problem with this whole "sometimes they're good, admit it!" idea is that there are a group of contributers who are ultimately funneled through Rob [or occasionally Aloria, but she's mostly just a wildcard element rare enough to be novel].

    And we don't seem to have similar tastes -- some of the XKCDs I like but everyone else hates, sometimes we all hate it, sometimes they just make us universally apathetic. Rob tends to wait for the angriest-sounding review, or otherwise defaults to writing one himself, or if THAT is too much work he'll post a Ravenzomg Review maybe. So bottom line, if I think it's good, I probably won't get the review slot because odds are someone else hates it and Rob posts hateful things.

    That, and this site is mostly a creative writing experiment in getting angry about next-to-nothing. Alternat[iv]ely, I direct you to this chart which basically answers every question ever about this site.

    Captcha: bables. Ravenzomg bables a lot, just ignore. =\

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  30. villiam why would you say such hurtful things

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  31. are kikes people? The world may never know

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  32. 901: Randy "Randall Man" Savage imagines a scenario where he gets pregnant and lactates copiously. No longer a slave to Megan's forbidden milk buttons, he sits alone in a dark room, breast pump in hand and tears streaming down his face.

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  33. AAAARRGGHHBNSBLNFSXKCD!!!

    WHY THE FUCK DID MY POST GET DELETED?

    AND WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?


    Google is trying to silence me! I will not let them. I must write my post again!

    -------------

    Some of the comments for 901 are kinda funny:

    "...At least it will come out of the stomach instead of the penis?"
    "I managed to read 'oral pregnancy-test' as 'oral-pregnancy test'."
    "A scary thought about the comic: the conceivement."

    Then someone GOOMHRed without even giving a reason, shocking behaviour from an xkcd fan.

    You'll be glad to hear a lot of people didn't like this comic. Then there was this post at the end:
    "Though if there's going to be a part two this could end up being awesome."
    Yeah, but it would probably end in a miscarriage. Zing!

    And on to the number line thread. It's strange how some people just don't 'get it' thinking there must be a deeper meaning when there clearly is none.
    "Not educated enough in math to get this sadly..."
    "I feel like I'm really missing something by not understanding why 8 is the largest even prime..."
    "I must agree. My cohort and I have spent the last 10 minutes or so since reading the comic trying to figure it out."
    Those posts were all made within the space of five minutes.

    Then the thread got sidetracked into the 0.999... = 1 debate, and there's nothing more I can say.

    I'll leave you with two of the funniest xkcd remixes from the 'xkcd slightly worse' thread, because they're funny.

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  34. incidentally Raven's post at 6:29 is basically my opinion on the matter as well but honestly, it seems all i do around here atm is agree with them, so y'know, fuck that, Raven MOAR LIEK DUMBVEN

    (because she's dumb)

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  35. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7014027/1/

    amirite?

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  36. Pretty sure that was already a Pokemon episode.

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  37. You troll me and I'll troll you.
    Cuuuddleefiiiisshhhh

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  38. new comic up

    Spoiler: it sucks

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  39. WTF??? OK, Google/Wikipedia tells me that's from an episode of ST:TNG. I didn't know the reference, but I guess I get the comic. Apparently I'm not in the xkcd demographic if I don't know every episode of TNG?

    Call me a hipster, but sci-fi shows on network TV are a little too mainstream for this nerd. I'm OK with various Star Treks being nerd signifiers, but c'mon Randall. Jokes about the major characters are fair. I know everybody hated Wil Wheaton's character. I never need to Google xkcd's 8th grade math and science references. Take it to (lemme Google it the Star Trek wiki's name....) Memory Alpha if your doing episode specific humor.

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  40. Explanation for why 901 might be found funny: it subverts your expectation of the "result" of an electronic thermometer with a bizarre but still relevant alternative result (still relevant because of the similarities between electronic thermometer and pregnancy test results, as opposed to a complete absurdist-style humour non-sequitur.) The alt-text than loops back again to connect the unexpected result to the original subverted result in a surprising manner. To this effect, the style is minimalist and the comic textually scarce, so as to emphasize the subversion via a "show-not-tell" approach.

    Understandably one might not find such a joke to their taste. But for anyone who would argue, for whatever reason, that this comic should and could never be considered "funny": I would challenge you to provide ANY EXAMPLE OF A SPECIFIC COMIC AND/OR JOKE that you consider so objectively superior. (Hint: it can almost certainly be dismantled and dismissed by the exact same attitude as applied to this one.)

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  41. 11:19, what are you on about? This is criticism, dumb ass--not fucking show-and-tell.

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  42. Gone are the days i'll actually bother to look up an xkcd reference i don't. Its not really worth the typing into the google is it.

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  43. I'm a Trek fan and love that episode and still think that was stupid. A 20 year old episode too.

    And it's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" not "Kalenda". Randall Munroe, arch-Wikipediast couldn't even look it up?

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  44. I watched 'Bad Boys' again for the first time in a while today. Good movie.

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  45. Anon 11:19, I think "Hark, a Vagrant" is superior to XKCD most of the time. Yes, it can be silly from time to time. But Kate Beaton proves that she can make good jokes about things most people consider geeky.

    Consider these three Victoria and Albert jokes for example: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=187
    All three well executed, no unnecessary dialogue, no unneeded superciliousness, funny jokes. The first one is also subversion of expectations, so it compares nicely to XKCD 901.

    Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps I only prefer "Hark, a vagrant" over XKCD because it I find it more to my personal taste. But still, I do not find anything funny in 901, it is just another dumb 5 year-old's poop joke (or a creepy Randal pregnancy/lactation joke, if you like). If the joke really is: "Haha, he put a pregnancy test in his mouth! God, is he dumb or what?" then yes, it is vastly inferior to anything that Kate Beaton has produced.

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  46. The worst part about 902 is that he had to write "WIIIIIINK" to show that the character was winking

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  47. i'm pretty sure he was actually saying it. it works better that way

    uh, this comic wasn't that bad. the execution's decent. i don't get the reference though so i'm not sure how pandery this is.

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  48. Okay, 902 is a decent joke if you do the effort of googling the obscure Star Trek reference.

    But the drawing sucks hugely. I did not recognize Deanna Troi and Picard at all when I first read it.

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  49. I'll do a Start Trek joke!

    Cardassians MOAR LIEK KARDASHIANS!!!

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  50. Holy fuck Randall's ST aliens are creepy

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  51. When I first saw Picard, I thought it was a guy with part of his scalp removed.

    Is the joke in this comic that the alien wants to hook up with Picard? I've never watched a Star Trek episode before, so this is all coming from what I found on Wikipedia.

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  52. Finally a character for whom Randall's trademark meaningless waffle would be appropriate, yet Deanna just stands there saying nothing.

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  53. Going back to 900... was it intended as a jab at religion? Really? I'm Catholic and wasn't offended in the slightest; if anything, I laughed a bit at the rapture/raptor joke (even if it has been overplayed) and let out a slightly-amused chuckle at the rest of it. The two characters just looked like they were your archtypical XKCD characters trying to "get into" religion in their own, "quirky" way, but failing as per the course for XKCD archetypes.

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  54. re 902: I've never even seen that episode but I got the reference. I thought that episode was culturally pretty "out there", no? I guess I'm wrong [I guess you're not the target etcetera].

    It's kinda cute. Randall gets points, excepting the fact that he had to write "WIIIIIINK" instead of "wink!". God damn it all.

    Also, happy Victoria Day you monarchless barbarians.

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  55. Oh my god 902 is fucking hideous. Randall's attempts to draw facial features while still keeping his stick figures faceless have always been ugly, but...jesus.

    Also, it's a boring joke about a mediocre episode of an okay show that aired 20 years ago.

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  56. @Ravenzomg
    "That, and this site is mostly a creative writing experiment in getting angry about next-to-nothing."

    Maybe it is for you, but I only write a review in one of two situations:
    1) The comic legitimately infuriates me, and I want to vent about it.
    2) The comic is actually good (or could be good), and I worry that someone else's review won't do it justice.

    If you have to justify your writing (and xkcdsucks as a whole) as "hey guys i'm INTENTIONALLY getting mad about nothing!" you're no better than the mindless xkcd fans who try to defend Randall's non-jokes.

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  57. @Gamer_2k4: I keep trying to send Rob positive reviews but he just says "not angry enough!" or "not until you're more coherent!" and then writes the type of crap you see above.

    Re Justification: I don't justify my writing with anything other than "I enjoy it". I'm a[n unprofessional] writer, and I enjoy writing these ridiculous reviews. If you cannot justify your reviews by saying you like writing them, but instead think that you're righting some wrong that XKCD's presence generates or Rob's incorrectly negative reviews would realize, then I respectfully suggest that you are misreading this site's general ethos as succinctly summarized by the tagline.

    No, I'm really not better than the mindless xkcd fans. None of us are. We're just a different stripe of mindless idiots who will all die one day. But I'm damn proud of what I am not, which is someone who parades a stick-figure comic about juvenile jokes as the paragon of hilarity and the must-know for all those in-the-know.

    Mindless? Yes. Better than the XKCD fan? No. Different from them? Yes.

    To truly get anywhere you have to acknowledge that you're getting nowhere.

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  58. I always thought the tagline at the top was put there ironically or mockingly, with maybe a hint of truth.

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  59. I disagree, Ravenzomg. We might not be better than the sort of people who watch reality television, but we ARE better than the average XKCD fan.

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  60. If v is a soul's quantity of love for xkcd and g is that same soul's goodness as evaluated by St Peter at the Pearly Gates then I think we can all agree that g is decreasing on v. Whether it is strictly decreasing depends on how petty the gods are.

    My learnings on life so far confirms that all deities are very petty, so your salvation depends upon reducing v.

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  61. @Ravenzomg
    "I keep trying to send Rob positive reviews but he just says 'not angry enough!' or 'not until you're more coherent!' and then writes the type of crap you see above."

    I find that hard to believe, because I don't think I've ever had Rob reject the reviews I've sent him. I'm not saying you're wrong; it just seems odd.

    "I respectfully suggest that you are misreading this site's general ethos as succinctly summarized by the tagline."

    Succinctly summarized, perhaps, but also wrongly summarized. How do I know this? Because the specific ethos (the non-summarized version) reads, in part, as follows:

    "...the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them."

    In other words, whatever nastiness is presented is considered to be fully warranted, because xkcd is "terrible" (not "harmless" or "silly").

    I wouldn't say I "enjoy" writing the reviews I do, but, as I said in my other post, they give me some some way to vent my feelings if they're potent enough. Furthermore, I believe if you're not writing for yourself - if you're not writing from your heart - you might as well not be writing at all. To me, writing for the sake of writing is pointless.

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  62. What about writing for money?

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  63. That's just prostitution via a different orifice.

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  64. I wrote a legitimate reply and then I hit "back" accidentally, so fuck the internet.

    @Gamer_2k4: we all come here for different reasons and we all contribute different things in different ways. I legitimately want to thank you for your reviews, because your reviews are a fruit that this cornucopia of hatred would be less appetizing without.

    I think that Carl's explanation you cited is antiquated. Three years of reviews, and I think we've pretty well covered it all. The reviews are "placeholders" largely, and the community has always been the point -- these inane threads.

    Regardless of how we view the actual reviews, we stand united in the decision that the XKCD hype is misplaced, and that the comic ranges between bad and mediocre, with the odd smirk or the odd fit of anaphylactic rage.

    But through it all, this community stands pissed.

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  65. Someone wave a flag around behind her, quick.

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  66. To get back on topic...

    LA under Obama: drowning in an ocean of fakery; xkcd and many things like it published and admired.
    - vs -
    Moscow under Stalin: tough but productive; Randall sent to Gulag.

    Which would you prefer? In b4 "of course I prefer freedom even if it means having to live around xkcd fanboys" - the freedom to be popular for spewing crap and to be drowned out if you say anything interesting is overrated.

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  67. If the internet has taught me anything, it's that Moscow can only contain great things, like Germans.

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  68. Wait... I had supposed the knee-jerk hatred was another level of this mockery. In ohter words, that the criticism here has stepped beyond merely mocking the object of contempt to mocking the knee-jerk love of that object by its fans.

    I think I will choose to continue to believe this.

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  69. "Writing for enjoyment is pure hackery. Integrity is born out of anger and hate." - Darth Gamer

    Randall would be a hero in Stalinist Moscow. There would be stick figure statues and his cartoons would be on billboards, keeping the nerds in line. XKCD would be state-endorsed propaganda.

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  70. We're like Lost -- you can choose to believe whatever you like to think is actually happening here, because it's far better than the actual truth.

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  71. @Ravenzomg

    "I think that Carl's explanation you cited is antiquated. Three years of reviews, and I think we've pretty well covered it all. The reviews are 'placeholders' largely, and the community has always been the point -- these inane threads."

    See, I disagree with that last sentence. I think the "community" only became the focus once the reviews started going downhill. In fact, saying this site is all about the comment threads is justification on par with saying that we only make reviews for the sake of making reviews (and not because xkcd is inherently deserving of criticism).

    This is a big deal to me, not because I have some obsession with xkcd or with bashing xkcd, but because if it's going to be done, I want to see it done right. If this site disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me. But, as long as it's going, I'd much rather see quality than people making excuses for the lack of quality.

    Once upon a time, Carl wrote decent reviews. Once he left, xkcdsucksredux sprang up and produced some excellent reviews until it imploded. It's still possible to do, if people are willing to put forth effort. Unfortunately, they're not.

    Admittedly, this would be easier if Randall WASN'T such a hack (strange as that sounds). For example, I look at 902 and it's quite obvious it sucks. It sucks immensely. And yet, what's there to say about it? What greater criticism of it can be presented than the strip itself? What more do you have to say to someone besides, "LOOK at it! It sucks!"

    I admit it. I come here for the reviews, and only read the comments because it's something to do instead of working. My appreciation of the blog comes from its criticism; if I was interested in a bunch of nameless commenters going back and forth mindlessly, I could go to absolutely any corner of the internet and get that. That's why I try so hard to write serious reviews, and why it frustrates me that everyone else seems to think the blog is a big joke.

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  72. raven you whiny bitch i've only ever not posted like two of your reviews, usually because they are fuck-off terrible or because you've been particularly annoying about getting them posted.

    also what the fuck are you people doing having a serious argument about the site? THIS IS THE INTERNET

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  73. Rob is the leading cause of childhood obesity in America.

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  74. And on the Internet, only I care.

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  75. A failure to reach the Godwin limit is often observed when an Internet argument is sidetracked by each side claiming to care less than the other about whatever it is they're fighting about, a classical Mexican occupatio.

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  76. You can't reach a limit; you can only approach it.

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  77. You know who else thought you couldn't reach a limit? Me, before I got that speeding ticket.

    Also Hitler.

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  78. @That's what she said: I offer as counterexamples continuous functions (by definition) and The Legion Of Kittens (by cuteness).

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  79. @Gamer_2k4 You wouldn't agree that reviews like these are a more emphatic way of saying "LOOK at it! It sucks!"?

    I can see how someone might find it boringly repepepetive, but for some, the act itself even when only observed, is catharsis and rebellion. But I suppose that's a matter of taste...

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  80. The xkcd individual comic thread forums are filled with nothing but obnoxious assholes who trip over themselves to deepthroat Randall's dick over his latest comic as a knee-jerk reflex, offering no real substantive praise of his work anymore.

    The xkcdsucks blog posts are filled with nothing but obnoxious assholes who trip over themselves to shit all over Randall's latest comic as a knee-jerk reflex, offering no real substantive criticism of his work anymore.

    But then, xkcdsucks's logline is a vitriolic and bitter collection of unwarranted nastiness about a silly and harmless comic, whereas the xkcd forums actually think anyone should take them seriously. So I think it's pretty clear which one is tolerable.

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  81. @2:06 - Oh man, it's the Herman's Hermits guy! Hey, can you do "I'm Henry VIII, I Am"?

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  82. Panels 1 and 3 of comic 900 might have been vaguely amusing had they been individual comics. As it is, they're just shoehorned into one strip that makes not a lot of sense as a collection of three panels.

    Comic 901 is weird and indecipherable.

    Comic 902 would have been funny if not for a couple things: one, that the drawing is so bad that I would not have been able to tell the Tamarian captain was winking if not for the huge, idiotic, unfitting, exaggerated "WIIIIIIIINK" sound effect; and two, the line is "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra". TANAGRA, Randall, you fuck, not KALENDA. You knew the name of the alien species, but not the quote? Or even worse, you looked up one and couldn't be bothered to look up the other?

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  83. In what way is this log-linear?

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  84. No, it's supposed to be Kalenda. That's 2 of you making the same mistaken criticism. Did you guys completely miss panel 3?

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  85. HEY GUYS LONG TIME READER FIRST TIME COMMENTER. THIS POST REALLY MADE ME LAUGH. JUST THE FIRST PARAGRAPH, STARTING THE POST WITH "UGH", REALLY STUNNING MOVE THERE, NO IRO. OKAY KEEP IT REAL, LATER!

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