[Comic title: Family Decals; alt text: My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.]
This comic is so incredibly boring I'm not even going to comment on it, except to make this observation about the art:
It looks as if Randy has spent a great deal of time to make these cars, no doubt working from a photo he himself took. And yet there is something fundamentally off about them. They look acceptable, sure, but it is immediately apparent even at a glance that this is not the work of a talented artist; this is the work of a man who, given ample time, is capable of making something which looks acceptable.
Normally I'd say his gifts lie elsewhere, but unfortunately he hasn't yet demonstrated that he has any gifts to speak of, and like Marlow before me, I hate lies. They smell funny.
[Update: hahaha I linked the comic URL instead of the comic image, MY BAD]
[Further update: IT'S ALL FIXED NOW HAPPY?]
I find teh cars extremily well dranw.
ReplyDeleteIt's cos his lights look more like they are made of a load of separate panels, cos he didn't shade in the reflections but rather drew them in as straight lines.
ReplyDeleteRe: #947 - seriously?! He can't do basic math my 14 year finds simple?
ReplyDeleteIt looks like Randall has finally found the gradients tool in photoshop.
ReplyDeleteApparently Randall finds '7's and '1's indistinguishable.
ReplyDeleteRob! That is not how we embed images. href ==\== src.
ReplyDeletere #947: Rather than get into Randall's straw-man of investing, I'll just say that you don't need to invest if you think you're going to die within the next 5 years.
Just when you think Rob couldn't give any less fuck, now he can't even bother to embed the image of the comic. To think: the reader is required to visit the very website he (or she) is expected to hate with every fibre of her (or his) being.
ReplyDeleteTruly, xkcdsucks has officially and irreversibly jumped the shark.
Pretty sure Randall is just nerd-sniping with his compound interest result. The forumites are like bats out of water, screeching about "omgomgomg i can't get his answer, what is wroooooong with me?" and it's kind of hilarious in a sad way.
ReplyDeleteAlso, everyone knows how to invest better than everyone else, what a coincidence! And everyone knows how to safely get 8% interest in the American market? Good thing they came here to enlighten us without actually telling us how they achieved this! Truly, we are amongst gods here, gentlemen. GODS.
Whole conversation makes me think of those bitcoin people.
The shading on the cars looks like the kind of wankery I indulged in a week after buying a $49 tablet. Set pressure to colour dynamics, black at one end and grey at the other, kind of waggle the pen at the appropriate areas until things look kind of properly graded, then go to town with blur.
ReplyDeleteSo basically, the work of complete newbie and an hour of trial-error. Not to imply Randall was ever all that good at drawing, but is this even the same guy who made 766 or 254?
Oh yeah and i guess the new one sucks or something
Rob, you are correct.
ReplyDeleteYou know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
Extreme ways are back again
Extreme places I didn’t know
I broke everything new again
Everything that I’d owned
I'm so tired of playing
Playin' with this bow and arrow
I gonna give my heart away
Leave it to the other girls to play
For I've been a temptress too long
I made a thousand dollars on bitcoins without any investment at all. Suck on it uneducated fucks.
ReplyDeleteHey Randall, your interest rate sucks.
ReplyDeleteThe image links to #846.
ReplyDeleteDearest U Kitten,
ReplyDeleteRemember, the compounding period is 'short years' as stated. Like the Yankee short ton(2000 lbs), not really like a British long tonne(2240 lbs) now is it?
Perhaps he used a Brit Long Yearre compounding formula instead of a Yankee Short Year formula by mistake.
Try your calculation with 12.4 years instead of 10. 10 Long Yearres equal 12.4 Short Years.
@ Anonymous @ 9:04 AM
Oh dear.
Moby and Portishead together. Combined with a quote from "Heart of Darkness"?
Who do you think you are? Me?
Well work hates me and won't let me leave a comment whilst logged in so I'll do this "anonymously"
ReplyDeleteIs it bad that I at least chuckled at the premise of this comic? The alt-text sucked and wasn't funny but it seemed kinda funny but maybe that's because I know people who brag about this all the time. Maybe I am a flawed individual :(
For my last comment, at least for 7 or so months, I was going to regale y'all with a 'getting on that plane with Victor" paraphrase from Casablanca but, I've run out of time.
ReplyDeleteI still have to fill my iPod with Death Metal so my OmMiBod will keep me entertained o'er the long flight(s).
'Ave atque vale' my friends.
We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again, some sunny day.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do,
'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.
Innit?
So the family on the right sold the kids' organs?
ReplyDeleteAnon1149, everyone knows children are more valuable on the black market whole.
ReplyDeleteso much easier to trace a whole child though
ReplyDelete[Update: clicking the image still directs you to the wrong strip]
ReplyDeleteman i was real tired last night
ReplyDeleteWe understand, Rob. All that sitting around must be exhausting for you.
ReplyDeleteRob, you need some sort of blender/funnel attachment for your mouth. Let it be fed with xkcd printouts.
ReplyDeleteComic 947. Investment.
ReplyDeleteHere we can clearly see that compound interest is flawed. Since a net benefit of 27.9% over ten years is such a small amount of money it deserves the condescending "Yeah, I'll just try to make more money."
Yeah. I'll just try to make more money.
Honestly if you don't get the enormous joke at our expense, you're not even smart enough to get the joke he MEANT to make.
This comic actually made me angry, if anything, this struck me as a dig against the less fortunate than Randall, who were born without the ability to be mystifyingly appealing to nerds. A joke about the people who have to get entry level position in fast food right out of college.
A viscous and cynical jab at the working men and women on whose shoulders our society is built.
LOL SILLY POOR PEOPLE, WHY YOU NO GET HIGH PAYING JOB LIKE I RANDALL? WHY YOU SAVE YOUR MONEY LOL? DON'T YOU GET A CHEQUE FROM THE INTERNET EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A BIG CHART?????
Seriously, fuck him.
"Since a net benefit of 27.9% over ten years is such a small amount of money it deserves the condescending 'Yeah, I'll just try to make more money.'"
ReplyDeleteUm, you have to go without that $1,000 for ten years. Is that worth $279 to you? If so, please find a better investment vehicle.
Inflation this year is more than 2%, so you don't even need to do any math to know that a 2% annual return is a real loss.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Randall's been reduced to grade school math exercises. I think his target audience is now 12 years old.
"Inflation this year is more than 2%, so you don't even need to do any math to know that a 0% annual return is an even bigger loss. " FTFY.
ReplyDeleteBanks: Not great, but still better than a sock in your dresser.
My point wasn't to say that cash is better than a bank deposit. My point was that Randall's comic is not very insightful.
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of recursion, the comment that Randy's comic is not insightful is not very insightful. But then again, you're not paid to make these comments. Randy, on the other hand...
ReplyDeleteUnrelated question: Why don't you sign in, and/or get an avatar? Stylistic, of course, but it makes you stand out from the riff-raff.
Why does a person have to worry about the fucking inflation rate? Why have we created such a hellish cage of a society?
ReplyDeleteTake an economics class for a general idea.
ReplyDeleteOr save yourself some money and google it.
"Why does a person have to worry about the fucking inflation rate? Why have we created such a hellish cage of a society?"
ReplyDeleteAHHHH MATH GET IT OFF ME
@fuck you: Often we don't.
ReplyDelete(1) The way an inflation rate is calculated is not unlikely to be unrepresentative of your particular purchasing habits: it involves taking a large set of items typically purchased by at least some citizen-consumers, possibly or possibly not including housing and other essentials, and seeing how the price has changed since last time they were checked;
(2) Inflation rates are, like most modern statistics, massaged to suit the message of some ideology. So the weighting or the selection of products will change if the government is trying to make inflation look lower (and occasionally higher) than it previously looked to be.
When people say stuff like "oh inflation is 4% so a bank giving you 2% interest is a real loss LOL I AM SO SMART 2 MINUS 4 IS LESS THAN ZERO" they are betraying their lack of attention to detail. If you are a middle age geek living in your own house and you've already paid the mortgage and your main expenditures are food (which you try to source locally), second hand books and electronics it may still be that shit is getting cheaper for you from year to year.
But, yes, capitalism is a joke and a yoke, and small-scale investment is for chumps who like chasing the dragon. Don't forget to tell Sid.
GOOMH when I grow old I also want a large number in a database entry which also contains my name.
ReplyDeletePretty sure 947 is supposed to be subverting the idea that whenever anyone travels to the future their bank account has a trillion dollars in it when in the present it has 4.
ReplyDeleteOf course this is retarded because this is the one science fiction trope that everyone is familiar with in their daily lives. No one travels through space every day, so for them it's intuitive that sound would travel there, and when that's subverted hey, maybe some people never thought of it like that before. But uh, people know how bank accounts work. No one was under the impression that compound interest was magical.
Looks like Randy "no do overs" McRoe has covertly replaced the image known as 'investing.png'.
ReplyDeleteWow and he claims he doesn't do do-overs
ReplyDeletepretty sure randall editing his glorious comic would be evidence of fallibility, which is absurd
ReplyDeletemove along
What'd he do, change the number?
ReplyDeletecptnoremac: if you dare to browse the fora you'll see lots of people trying to justify the result of $1279.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious. Who are all the anonymous posters here? Are they regular members who temporarily post anonymously because they don't want that post attached to them? Or do we have lots of one-time visitors? Or is there just some group of regulars here who never bothered to come up with an alias?
ReplyDelete"if you dare to browse the fora you'll see lots of people trying to justify the result of $1279."
ReplyDeleteWow, they really are a bunch of cock suckers.
Personally, it's not important enough to me to register a blogger account, so I just post anonymously. I've been reading since around the 600s (I think, God that is a long time). Carl's posts actually made me realize how much XKCD sucks.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually a bit staggering to realize that, if this blog's history is any indication, xkcd has been sucking since at LEAST the 400s. How long do you have to be awful before everyone just REALIZES it?
ReplyDeleteLove
ReplyDeleteK
ReplyDeleteC
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The problem is when you start out not sucking, everyone assumes you will continue to not suck. So everyone who liked XKCD long ago, or who has seen only a couple (namely the ones people post outside their office doors) and thought they were funny, is conditioned to like all the others. So even if a comic is not funny, they will assume it IS funny, making it actually seem more funny to them. Especially since the effort of viewing an XKCD takes almost all of four seconds, depending on your internet connection. Since it requires so little effort on our part we are less inclined to analyze its actual contribution to our amusement. We expect to view, chuckle, move on with our lives. The question is not how long you must be awful before everyone realizes it, but how awful you have to be to preclude that nearly-reflexive chuckle that is the hinge of XKCD's existence.
ReplyDeletealso brand loyalty. it's a part of geek and internet culture, unfortunately
ReplyDeletebut doesn't that bias affect pretty much everything?
Yes. It's just more apparent with things like XKCD that exhibit a dramatic change in quality level without exhibiting an equally dramatic change in fanbase volume. I only brought it up because it is the most likely explanation for XKCD's continued, unreasonable success.
ReplyDelete"but doesn't that bias affect pretty much everything?"
ReplyDeleteObviously.
I really, really hope the Anonymous who wrote the comment at September 5, 2011 3:42 PM is some zealot xkcd fan who is aiming to make this blog look bad or trying (unsuccessfully due to the excessive amount of vitriol) to be sarcastic. I think both ARE possible and hope one of those is the truth.
ReplyDeleteBecause if the comment was actually written by a person who meant it... that is only, in the best of cases, lame.
sgirl is boring me now. someone send in the next troll
ReplyDelete@Ravenzomg: because I am lazy.
ReplyDeleteSorry... why troll?
ReplyDeleteThanks.
>implying there are girls on the internet
ReplyDelete>implying SGirl isn't some 40 year old in his mother's basement
Also, has anyone noticed the lack of a certain odious personage? A certain slanty-eyed gook?
because you are a troll, and furthermore you are boring. come back when you are interesting
ReplyDeleteIf you'd read her last post, you'd understand.
ReplyDeleteOh she finally fucking left! Mad props to her, may she never grace our sacred halls again
ReplyDeleteShe's gone on a trip to pick up transsexual child prostitutes, please read the threads more carefully, cuddlefish!
ReplyDeleteIch bin ein nigger
ReplyDelete"Obviously"
ReplyDeleteOUCH!!!
I am a troll because I am a troll... please.
ReplyDeleteI really don't think my comments in your blog fall into the definition of "trolling", but if you do say so... you might as well explain why. It shouldn't be so difficult.
except then i would be interacting with a really boring troll
ReplyDeleteYou are interacting with someone you call troll. Thanks for answering, I can honestly say I am not coming here to "troll" your blog.
ReplyDeleteOk, here it goes again: why and how am I a troll? You just keep repeating yourself instead of giving arguments, which you obviously have since you consider me a troll. So which might those be?
the general trollishness, mostly
ReplyDeleteSGirl, give it up, stop trying to troll Rob and everyone here.
ReplyDeleteWe're all sick of it.
Sgirl you were talking to me, soz, meant every word.
ReplyDeleteRob, that is just LAME. As soon as someone questions you, you simply avoid a discussion by throwing an accusation like that and then you "prove it" by the method of repeating it over and over. Incredibly lame.
ReplyDeleteErect, could you try to explain why am I "trolling"? Thanks, I hope you won't start the same cycle as above. I am sorry if I actually made you sick, that was never my intention.
Soz, you're taking a joke too seriously (whether it is a good joke or no, that is another matter, of course). Reading your previous post it would seem that the xkcd guy is a cruel person, a privileged man who laughs of those less fortunate, who drew a strip to attack you, to hurt you and a whole sector of society... as you put it, that strip is "A viscous and cynical jab at the working men and women on whose shoulders our society is built."
You're taking a simple webcomic strip it too seriously and apparently personally, since you attack him as well. For all that, I honestly considered that comment could have been fake and made with the intention of making this blog and the people who attack xkcd (and its creator) look terribly bad.
I am sorry I was wrong.
i gladly interact with people who don't suck. you do not number among their ranks.
ReplyDelete...and why would that be? Nice to see you have a new "argument", by the way.
ReplyDeleteSGirl has placed "scare quotes" around the word "argument" to "sarcastically" imply that it's not actually a sound argument.
ReplyDeleteSGE,
ReplyDeleteIf you read the previous comments, Rob just came and accused me of being a troll. When I asked him to explain why, his answers were "because you are a troll" and "the general trollishness".
And now he came with something new, which is, I suck. So yes, it is clear that I don't consider any of those attacks to be an actual argument.
Did anyone in this blog actually need that to be explained? Or are you just mocking them?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete