Thursday, June 16, 2011

Comic 912: Never Forget

[Noted hobo "Seth" has sent me this guest review, further proving that the quality of guest reviews is going way the fuck downhill. -Ed.]

manual override
[Title: Manual Override; Alt Text: "I think you mean GNU Info Override"]

So! What to say about this comic here. Well, there's a lot one could say about it. There's a plane (with no snakes) that's crashing, and something about a GNU page. My question is, who cares. Who cares about this plane and this GNU page I don't even know what that is. I'll tell you what's more important than this stupid crap, and it's a little thing called Friendship. That's right boys and girls, today we're going to discover the importance of our fellow man.

The story I'm about to tell you is one of hope and perseverance and learning to trust others, even on the internet. I know this isn't your usual thing but just try to open your mind a bit and see where life takes you. I promise it will be worth your while.

There was once a man who was questioning his sexuality. He had, until recently, had a fetish for the mutilation of barn animals, and had developed a small internet community around that subject matter. Running that website became a way to escape the monotony of his minimum-wage job and disappointment at his various failures in life, and he made a great many friends who had bonded over their mutual object of obsession, an especially close bond when the object tends to be a fetish that is not accepted in mainstream society. He had laughed and loved and felt passion every day when he sat down at his computer, his pants around his ankles. These people, even though he had never seen them, became closer to him than any member of his family. Despite his inner shame at the objects of his lust, he grew as a person among the community of perverts he called home.

One night, as he had finished yet another round of fapping and discussing the day with his internet-friends, a magical genie appeared out of the pile of used-up tissues next to his desk. The genie said that he was born of the combined potential of the many many possible offspring he could have fathered over the years, and as the man was never going to be able to have a child in his current state, the genie offered a gift to the man. He would take away this strange fetish of his so the man could live normally and develop normal relationships and, hopefully one day, father a child. The man thought for a long time, and considered the genie's proposal heavily. One one hand, he wouldn't have to live in shame anymore. He could devote his time and skills to creating something worthwhile and die as if his life had meaning. On the other hand, not only would he be forfeiting all of his online relationships, he would no longer be able to find exposed horse intestines sexy, which they obviously were.

The man looked up and told the genie that while he appreciated the offer, he would have to reject it. The genie, incensed that he was doomed to live a life of crusty tissue hell, placed a curse on the man and all the people he knew. Instead of becoming a mutually caring community based around a disgusting fetish, he and all his friends would instead devote the rest of their foreseeable futures be forced to read and hate a terrible but harmless webcomic, and instead of breeding camaraderie and trust, the members of the community would tear themselves apart with misplaced hate and forced irony until the only thing that made the day tolerable was striking down their fellow members in the comments of each discussion about the comic. And the man would not only gain three times his current bodyweight in fat, so as to be permanently unlovable, he would be cursed with the added gift of seeing the stupidity of his fellow man with remarkable clearness until he becomes completely jaded, and he would be the one to run the site and be forced to watch his former friends become the objects of his disgust. The man cried out in despair but the genie was not merciful in the least. As he lay blubbering and sobbing on the floor, the genie bent down and with a wicked smile whispered in the man's ear:

"Abortion is murder, bitch."

And that's why we should work to overturn Roe v Wade guys.

59 comments:

  1. I just wanted to let you know that I only read the last two lines of this review because I'm really lazy. So I will have to assume that they are completely serious. I will also assume assume that Rob wrote them, and conclude that he is misogynistic and probably mildly retarded.

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  2. Rob you just hate this review because you're a pinko terrorist muslim who wants to eat are freedoms and abort grandma

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  3. So I came here to read a review and I got some shitty story instead. Thanks Rob.

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  4. get some people to write better guest reviews

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  5. He posted this two days later instead of making it comic 911 on Monday. Well played, Randy.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Gamer that sexy piece of work wrote a review of 913 already? More man than anyone here, clearly (except maybe Seth).

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  8. GOOMHR, I live on Earth too! CrAzY!

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  9. This was hilarious.

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  10. This might be my favorite review so far, only because at first I thought the protagonist was Randall, and then it turned out to be Rob, which just means that this is more evidence that they are the same person.

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  11. A++ review would read again

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  12. xkcd sucks cuz i dont know what a gnu is

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  13. Truly, this story proves without doubt that friendship is magic!

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  14. Seth, is it?

    Fuck you. That was awful.

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  15. I'm surprised that Rob wrote a story that wasn't flattering to himself. It's still terrible though.

    I unfortunately had a GOOMHR moment when I was reading 913. When ever I'm reading about the human anatomy, I realize that it's happening inside me. Right weird. Unfortunately it isn't humorous, and neither is 913.

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  16. By dissing GNU, Randall has brought on himself the anger of THE HERD.

    Yeah, if Randall can reuse his jokes, I can reuse my old xkcd edits too!

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  17. Wait, it should be "THE HURD".

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  18. That was poignant as FUCK

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  19. New comic is also about wikipedia. Jesus christ.

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  20. you are not a funny person. that doesn't mean you are allowed to criticize other people's creative efforts, no- many critics are bad at being creative. what it does mean is that you should stop trying to write little vignettes in your reviews.

    people sometimes suck your cock in these comments page the same way cuddlefish suck Randall's cock on his forums. they see themselves as being "on your team" so they praise medicore-to-awful bullshit and maybe even convince themselves that its good. or maybe they're just stupid. whatever.

    when I say your shit is bad, I am not doing it to hurt your feelings. that is incidental. I'm doing it because I honestly cannot stand how terrible your writing is. I taught creative writing 101 for a few semesters in grad school and I saw better writing from autistic engineering students taking their one humanities credit. actually, that's hyperbole. I saw SIMILAR writing from those autistic engineering students. that's still an insult.

    this is painful to read. you are the worst type of person. please stop.

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  21. anon 5:35 thinks he's a good critic, but, rather, is a homosexual.

    I assume this because he hates vignettes (a word superficially similar to vagina; coincidence?), and because he mentions feces and male genitalia several times in his post.

    Also because he is angry and hates God.

    Faith in Christ.

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  22. Eh, I thought the "review" was reasonably funny, humour is subjective to be honest. Which, really just negates the point of any review of it at all.

    Even talking about the poor humour in a review pointing out the poor humour in a webcomic is stupid, but to do it with poor humour is okay at this point I'm mostly just trying to use the phrase poor humour some more so as to be recursive.

    I don't even know if that's the right word but then again I didn't take a creative writing 101 class.

    And yeah, I read the thing up there about art not being subjective but, national and cultural societies differ in what they perceive as being objectively "good", heck it even differs from person to person.

    Which is better art, a great lamp or a great flashlight, who cares? Who are you Philippe Starck?

    Anyway I entirely forgot the point I was making but just as much as the entire premise of this website is pointless, criticizing it is also pointless.

    It's entertainment. You're either entertained by it or you're not. Just as with XKCD. They're not mutually exclusive, you can be entertained by both (or neither). It really doesn't matter.

    Just grab whatever entertainment you can out of this short, pathetic life.

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  23. I'm guessing 5:35 is actually a high school student who's lying to us to make his whiny little rant have more bite.

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  24. @5:35: What does it mean to "teach creative writing"? Maybe I'm a latent faggot, but I can't get out of my head the image of some spotty bearded geek in his early 30s standing at the front of the class showing a bunch of spotty unshaven geeks in their late 20s how to optimise their masturbation technique.

    "THIS, GENTLEMEN," you announce, "IS HOW TO WRITE CREATIVELY," before orgasming wildly over a yellowed exercise book. Seconds later, teacher's pet achieves his climax, and the rest of the students soon follow.

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  25. Aww, 5:35 thinks people care what his opinions are, and that he has the ability to hurt people's feelings. That's adorable.

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  26. 5:35 did you read anything other than the blog title. i mean really. no one here even likes rob. and this post was written by an xkcd fan

    also seth your story is wrong where is carl. plus you are homeless and like qc. you don't even have a glass house to throw your stones from.

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  27. "also seth your story is wrong where is carl."

    lrn2punctuation

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  28. What happened to the days when people just skimmed over the review, knowing it was widely uninteresting, to get to the hate and absolutely non sequitur shit that congeals at the bottom?

    I don't know either.

    and actual lol@R's "you don't even have a glass house to throw your stones from."

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  29. If you're a guy with an Computer Foundations: Applied Physics degree and a fetish for the scientific method and you're making your living selling posters and T-shirts rather than going to grad school and actually getting the qualifications you need to be a scientist, I don't know what you're doing with your life.

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  30. Carl is the genie.

    Why can't any of you people think about what you read? Do you need everything spoonfed to you? YOU ARE THE REASON DAN BROWN/STEPHANIE MEYER/DESPISED AUTHOR OF CHOICE EXISTS.

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  31. rob is fat and writes terrible reviews that is all

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  32. 20 bucks says randy wrote this for comic #911, realized what the number was, and punted this back a day and frantically came up with the Magic School bus shitpile.

    I have a confession though: I actually liked 913.








    hahahahahaha just kidding it was terrible GOOMHbait.

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  33. as said before, there is no comic for 404.

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  34. also cptnoremac already made that observation about it being for 911

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  35. Some asshole gestures downwards and says "...and I study that"

    What are you pointing at, dude? Your feet (podiatrist)? The floor itself (architect)? The stuff the covering the floor (textile science/wood science/linoleum science)? Maybe we're outside. Are you pointing at the plants on the ground (botanist)? The soil under the plants (pedologist)? The sidewalk (highway engineer)?

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  36. Everyone on the Internet is a pedologist.

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  37. GOOMFH anon 1:00

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  38. LOL guys I am such a fag

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  39. The Kitten mewled:

    "....YOU ARE THE REASON DAN BROWN/STEPHANIE MEYER/DESPISED AUTHOR OF CHOICE EXISTS....."

    I've no knowledge of Mr. Brown, but Stephenie Meyer who, with the help of the 'Disney Princess Culture', has helped create a generation of 'damsel in distress' Bellas who succumb to even the most inane pick-up lines men interested in coitus could muster.

    I get laid less often now, of course.

    Innit?

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  40. This was the saddest review since the one for 614.

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  41. She didn't create them, ALT-F. Meyer merely hoisted up a banner under which they could congregate, much like how Star Wars/Star Trek was for the nerds.

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  42. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  43. This congregation and its attendant flocking, also known as: "the crowd" (Kierkegaard) and "herd morality" and the "herd instinct" (Nietzsche) were not done a service.

    What spreads faster than radiation and smoother than peanut butter?

    A sixteen year old Twilight Fan.

    I am not bitter.

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  44. Did BP get an STD test, ALTF? Did you?

    captcha: aspli. He used his aspli behaviour as an excuse for his poor writing.

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  45. ALTF, you didn't specify which kind of peanut butter it is. If it's chunky (which does not spread easily, and can even tear at the bread) then your allegory is skewed.

    In short ALTF, you have disappointed me. This is not the first time.

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  46. ALTF I would just like to say that

    you are a credit to this community and I salute you.

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  47. Can I have a definition of 'cuddlefish', please?

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  48. 'Cuddlefish' was originally coined to mean 'anonymous poster on Xkcdsucks'. The term came from this thread. More recently Rob uses it to mean 'xkcd fan'. See also, Rob's Pokemon titles from last month.

    While there is some overlap between the two definitions, and xkcd fans who post anonymously tend to attract a lot of attention, there is no reason to consider the two groups equivalent. Most anon posters are not xkcd fans, and most xkcd fans do not post here.

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  49. I doubt any xkcd fans at all post here. Posts that look like they're from xkcd fans are all in good fun. This place simply doesn't matter to xkcd fans anymore. Maybe some of them cared back when Carl was posting, but they wouldn't be insulted by what is submitted today any more than a human would be insulted by a monkey blowing a raspberry.

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  50. Anon 9:19, you severely underestimate man's capacity to become butthurt over trivial things on the internet.

    Also, considering xkcd's target audience seems to be highschoolers, and considering people of that age tend to be the most obnoxious and angsty on the internet, it's well within reason to conclude that at least some of the whining cuddlefish are genuine.

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  51. I am an obvious trollJune 19, 2011 at 12:40 PM

    This blog is so sad to see. A group of people, too dense and ignorant to understand even the simplest XKCD, so they bitch about it in the most pedantic yet inaccurate ways possible.

    And when they write diatribes directed at the few mocking posts left by their intellectual betters, they believe they are trolling them, even when they are being OBVIOUSLY TROLLED THEMSELVES.

    In case the subtext is unclear, I am an obvious troll, so it would be pointless to respond to this.

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  52. cry some more i am an obvious troll

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  53. Does it annoy anyone else that so many people never notice when it's a guest review and wasn't written by Rob, because that is a thing that annoys me.

    Also this review depressed me because in the first paragraph of the story if you replaced "mutilation of barn animals" with "yaoi" then it's BASICALLY a description of my life in the early 2000s.

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  54. It doesn't annoy me, Chaos, because much of the time it is clearly Rob using a pseudonym and trying to disguise his style. What of it if that happens to not be the case at other times?

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  55. "Does it annoy anyone else that so many people never notice when it's a guest review and wasn't written by Rob, because that is a thing that annoys me."

    Does it annoy anyone else when nobody ever notices that so many people never noticing who is writing is a pretty clear indication that the damn format doesn't work and should be changed *if* the annoyed people were to be served?

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  56. that is the worst-written sentence ever
    but seriously, people thought I was Carl every time I wrote guest posts and I had a proper byline. illiteracy is just a problem

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  57. I must say, I read the comic and thought it was fucking hilarious. The review? TL;DR

    I laughed, and then moved on with my life. Move on, people. Move on.

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  58. Who cares about this plane and this GNU page I don't even know what that is.

    Well, that's your problem, son. You don't know what the joke is about. This joke is not for you. Maybe should read some Garfield instead.

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