Comics 977 and 978: Humor Needed

977. I know someone was saying they wanted me to rage about this one but I really can't say anything I haven't said countless times before: Randall is pandering. He's pandering to map nerds. He's pandering to the sort of nerds who wear Vibram Five-fingers because they think of it as hacking for their feet--really, most of these are pandering to some category of nerd or another. It's a list of panderings. I don't personally care enough about maps to, you know, care, so whatever.

978. This one, though, is stupid. I've been making this joke for, oh, several years now--it's not difficult to use Wikipedia to create reality. It's not surprising that this happens, because, despite the fact that your garden variety internet moron will declare that you are really dumb if you link to a Wikipedia article to prove or assist a point, Wikipedia is broadly useful, though not, perhaps, good to rely on.

This is not a novel concept, and he doesn't really do anything interesting with it. "It turns out that Wikipedia cites authors whose source is Wikipedia sometimes!" Yes, and? Did you just now discover this potential?

The alt text is even worse. While I don't doubt that his claim is plausible, his refusal to identify which book and which author just makes it sound like he's making it up. To put it into perspective, it's sort of like if he said "yeah, I totally had this hot celebrity chick over and she let me drink her milk, it was totally hot. She's really famous and you all know her, but I'm not going to tell you which one it is because I value her privacy." Sure, it's technically possible that someone saying this is telling the truth, but it's far more likely they're just telling a lie that you can't go and verify.