Comic 997: Still Waiting On Those Tits

[Comic title: Wait Wait; alt text: You can't stab Karl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.]

Sometimes Randy makes comics that make me think he's just discovered those games you play where everyone makes jokes based on a certain snowclone, except he doesn't have any friends so he just makes a bunch of them himself and then uploads them as a comic. Now, I like those games. They can be quite entertaining and more importantly help to pass the time in a world where everything is tedium--a world where the closest thing I can feel to joy or happiness--indeed, the only thing I can feel at all--is smugness.

The thing is, those things are mostly only funny at the time. There might be one or two that are genuinely funny, but you need to set up the flow of the game first. Most people with good taste simply leave the conversation in the past and move on. But some people--the Randall Munroes of this world--decide that the world needs to hear all of these not-really-that-funny jokes that seemed great at the time, all for the sake of the one or two good ones. But this isn't building up to a punchline. It's setting up the necessary frame of mind so that the punchline is something that you have a distant hope of finding funny. And the best of them--"wait wait, don't speak its name," in my vaunted opinion--isn't really that great.

Does it seem to anyone else that Randy's doing a lot more shotgun humor lately?

Comic 996: SHOW ME YOUR TITS

[We've got a special treat for you today here at xkcdsucks. First, a guest post by "Ann Apolis," noted awful person. Then, some more words by your editor. -Ed.]


[Comic title: Making Things Difficult; Alt text: "Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!"]

1. CANCER CANCER CANCER (oh yeah I hope you've noticed that "Some context for the cancer comics". "GUYS JUST IN CASE YOU FORGOT: CANCER. I KNOW I DON'T MENTION IT MUCH SO")

2. lol boobs

3. stick figures wearing clothes makes them look like creepy hunchbacks

4. "nuh-uh": why do nerds fetishise adults behaving like children? the ballpit thing is like this too. hence you have forumites saying "Anyways, I really hope Randall's wife does this in real life" and such. protip: maybe it would be easier to argue that liking animation and graphic novels isn't childish if they people who read them didn't tend to behave like children all the time

6. the alt-text is 'why can't women be more like computers amirite guiz' and 'lol boob' and 'mmmmm nipples' all at once

7. so yeah slitting my wrists see you all in hell

===

Hello, cuddlefish, Rob once again. I have a special request! I want you to remember this comic every time you are tempted to say that I'm making up Randy's creepy fetishes. One boob for milk, one for charging his Android.

That is all.

Comics 993, 994, 995: Christmas Edition!

Merry Christmas, cuddlefish! I got you some shitty, one-sentence reviews. Sorry they're late (except not).

993. Randy has discovered minimalist design philosophy, and hasn't yet realized that companies already make a killing using it.

994. Randy is living proof that Zeno was correct: he is always halfway to a good comic but never actually gets there.

995. Wouldn't it be wacky if someone tried to feed chocolate coins to one of those Coinstar machines?

Your regular shitty two-sentence reviews will resume eventually, maybe.

Comics 991-992: Ten Years!

991.


The going theory on this one is thatt itt is meant to be a reference to the imminent re-re-re-re-re-release of Star Wars (ONE LAST TIME), this time in 3D! WOO 3D! YEAH! I guess the joke is thatt these people have been waitting for sometthing like ten years? And are still waitting? Is this meant to be funny? I can't really tell how.

992.


Look att me! I'm making a list of LOLRANDOM humor, coupled witth various geeky mnemonics! This time the mnemonics are also slightly geeky! OOOO!

I have gone on record before saying thatt I hatte this fucking shottgun humor. Itt doesn't help his case thatt some of the existing mnemonics are already reasonably amusing--"King Philip Came Over For Good Sex?" Thatt's seriously the mnemonic you're replacing witth your boring alternattives aboutt Katty Perry and kernel panics?

Itt turns outt thatt if you throw enough jokes outt there, some of them will stick. WHO KNEW?

Comics 989-990: Frozen Humor

989.

[Comic title: Cryogenics; Alt text: 'Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.' was the slogan of my astonishingly short-lived tech startup.]

So basically this comic betrays Randall's true nature--that is to say, the fact that he is not an engineer but a passive consumer of goods, but he still thinks of himself as an engineer.

Engineers are, of course, the people who are working to produce new things--something Randall hasn't done in a very long time. The idea of an actual engineer, someone who is actually working with technology, deciding to go "eh, I'll just wait thirty years for the tech to become interesting," is kind of implausible. Why would you not want to be a part of that leading edge of innovation? Why would you want to just skirt along on its coattails? Certainly, we want to live in the future we're creating for ourselves, but to be a human, to be a creator, an innovator, is to want to be a part of that creation, however small.

Randall has, apparently, lost this. This isn't surprising, of course. I've mentioned that Randall is a creature who sedately consumes in the review for comic 662. But what is surprising is that he still considers himself an innovator although he is patently not one, and that he seems to believe that all other innovators are like him.

Everyone who is excited about the future, he suggests, would rather skip all the boring bits of "invention" and "design" and "innovation," and instead just want to live in the world where all that shit is done for us!

It makes me truly, profoundly sad to think that there are people out there capable of making this comic.


990.



[Comic title: Plastic Bags; alt text: The high I feel when I actually remember to bring my reusable bags to the store--and take them inside rather than leaving them in the parked car--can last for days.]

So, for some reason Randy is writing a comic about how he (a) doesn't ever remember to bring a reusable shopping bag (b) doesn't like how many bags the people at the grocery store use to bag his order. Okay!

Maybe it's because I have a giant messenger bag that I use for all my shopping, but I do not understand in the slightest why this is a comic. Maybe someone else can enlighten me.

Comics 986-987: Songs From Fiddler On The Roof

[Hated Raven "Ravenzomg" sent this review, which, okay. -Ed.]

Hello, this is Ravenzomg of Ravenzomg fame here to give a very special double review because we're all tired of hitting the "next page" button!


Title: Tradition. Tooltip: An 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice.


Title: Potential. Tooltip: Who even cares, that's why I won't fix the html reference.

Rather than talk about how generally uninteresting these comics are, I'm just going to quote comments on a forum post advertising xkcd.

"fuck xkcd

i've no problem with people liking it, but randall munroe is a lazy, complacent asshole. and that is my opinion about things.

first 200 strips are good, though"

"XKCD is pretty hit-or-miss with me. I really like the strips where he kind of pokes fun at his own interests, but in some of the others I just feel like he's trying to show off things he knows or believes in. Too much reliance on the "smart/right" character revealing something to the more "common" person, who's then like "huh, guess I was dumb". "

"Well it can't be helped that the kid has only been alive for 12 years or so, and hasn't even had a regular education! I mean, he was practically raised by hippies. It's not his fault for his lack of knowledge!"

"the only thing xkcd is good for is getting you to google shit you don't care about"

"I used to utterly loathe the comic with a burning passion; it was so offensively mediocre that I could spend hours extolling the sins of individual strips and the comic as a whole; I could froth endlessly about exactly WHY putting a heart under a radical was such trite garbage and why any individual should feel bad about appreciating it; I would eagerly await new comics simply so that I could be angry at them and wax vitriolic. Now though, I simply can't muster the energy or the desire. It's been bad in exactly the same way for so long that there's no point in it anymore. All the punchlines are the same. All the strips are the same. There are three or four premises that Munroe has, and he's realized that people will eat them up forever and there's no reason for him to ever try new things. So he doesn't! I would have a difficult time deciding if "complacency" or "mediocrity" would be the one word I'd use to sum up the entire comic, but either one would fit."

And my personal favourite:
"Also, just because one can draw a comic in 5 minutes doesn't mean that should be the update rate. Otherwise all we'd get is random thoughts and forced jokes."

I really. really. really. love this.

And on that note, I wish you all a very merry christmas. Oh wait, something's different--

It's this:


As we all know, Randall Munroe makes his income without the use of ads, and so relies entirely on Merchandizing income. And as usual, he's relying on nostalgia [hey remember that bobcat comic guys? remember how you loved it 3 years ago?] to sell stuff.

I won't comment any more on this fact. That's why you guys are here <3 -Ravenzomg <3 <3 <3

[The hated raven also wanted me to point out that the poster went down in price from $150 to like $95. Raven says this is only $35 more than it should be; in my estimation it is actually $200 more than it should be. -Ed.]

Comics 985 and 986: Something About The Time Cube Guy

985. Randy has revealed that he has a superpower: he can detect ambiguity where none exists, as well as inventing problems that do not actually happen in the real world. He also lists several things that would be bad for a politician to do, and then lists some crazy people who support those things. It is extremely hilarious.

986. In this comic, Randall lets his readers know that he has a kidney disorder. This is a very hard time for him, as he can no longer satisfy his milk fetish for very long at all without having to interrupt himself to go urinate.