xkcd sucks wants YOU

Guys I am going to make the Profiles of a Cuddlefish page but this is clearly a communal thing. So, I need you to write a sarcastic and disdainful profile of the various Cuddlefish types we routinely battle, and then you can post it in the comments here or email it to me at mysterioustaffer AT gmail DOT com.

This is similar to but distinct from the Frequently Annoying Questions. okay go

Comic 552: Causing Problems

Well, looks like someone has been taking statistics classes. What we have is a basic little statistics joke. He is noticing a correlation about correlations! and he is wondering if learning about causation has caused him to...um...think that way about causation I guess. It's a simple joke, told in simple pictures, and I suppose it's clever for what it is. I can't get very excited about it (it's not as clever as the last statistics comic) but I can't say it's terrible either. Certainly better than memes + wikipedia, and nerdy in the way xkcd used to be. This one totally feels like he could have written it in his notebook in stat class.

A different angle: like with some previous comics, this one seems like a general attempt to make an easy joke that stat people will like, print, cut out, and put on their walls. "A special xkcd, just for me!" they will think. Please: do not blindly e-mail this comic to all of your friends who use statistics. It is annoying. It is not nearly funny enough, or faliing that obscure enough, to warrant spreading like beer pong herpes.

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My heartiest laugh that was correlated to (and caused by) a comment about correlation and causation was when Nate Silver was debating John Zeigler on some dumb online tv-type show. The conversation went something like this:

JZ: But 75% of the people who heard [X] voted for [Y]!
NS: Ok, but that doesn't mean they voted for [Y] because they heard [X]. You of all people should know that just because two data points are correlated doesn't mean one caused the other.
JZ: But with numbers as high as 75% ??? Come on!

This made me laugh, because JZ was being a giant idiot. You can have as much correlation as you want and it still can mean nothing. ha ha, stupid people.

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From nowhere: I find that God's eyes blinking on this Overcompensating freaked me out. A comic like that, that is just about always static, should stay static. This is crotchety-old-man me speaking, but I just think it's weird. (this dinosaur comic is a little better because the movement is so obvious, it doesn't sneak up on you all of a suddent)


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update: See how up there I predicted that statisticsy people would spread this comic around to all their friends because hey, look, it's a statistics comic! ? Yeah well I was at least a little right: Noted smart person Steven Levitt has apparently broken his "no cartoons" rule for the very first time to bring you you-know-what. curse you, levitt!

Comic 551: Etch-a-Sketchy

The worst thing about this creepy-as-hell comic is that I knew, when I first read it, that xkcd fans were going to love it. It's so adorable! Look at how very lonely that man is; don't you just want to give him a big ol' hug??

No. I do not. I want to give him an informational pamphlet entitled "So you fall in love with tiny women inside toys: A guide for the fucked up." Honestly, how messed up is this guy? He's sitting with a kid's toy. He imagines that there is a tiny woman trapped inside the toy. And not even a normal looking girl, it's girl who looks scary as hell. And she is desperate enough that she immediately falls in love with him and he is so pathetic that he does the same.

How can you say that's an adorable thing to imagine? I don't know about Randy, but when I see old toys I do not immediately think "perhaps this item contains a potential love interest!" Well, when I see child's toys at least.

Anyway, I guess now I should just sit and wait for the anonymous commenters to tell me why I'm wrong and why this is actually totally sweet.

What's that cyanide and happiness? you suck? oh, ok, good to know

I have long felt that most of Cyanide and Happiness is basically worthless crap. Occasionally funny, but usually not. But take a look at today's comic:

Remind you of anything? It sure as hell reminded me of something - check out one of the last Perry Bible Fellowship comics to be produced:

Now for all I know this joke didn't originate with PBF - it may be even older. If anyone can think of an older incarnation of this joke, mention it. But PBF sure as hell did it before C&H, and given that PBF is one of the most popular webcomics of the last few years, and given that this particular comic is 7th from the top on their mainpage list of comics, I have no choice but to call MAJOR LEAGUE BULLSHIT on those cyanide and happiness people. BULLSHIT.

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update: ok what the HELL - I am minding my own business on Digg when I see this comic, which according to the url is from March 1st. But not less than two weeks ago Amazing Super Powers had this, from Feb. 19th. I'm not going to say anything about it, besides the fact that ASP's is significantly funnier. But what do you guys think is going on here?

Comic 550: This does indeed ruin my life

Today I am happy to say that frequent commenter poore has stepped up to the bat and will knock this ball of shit comic out of the park and into the cesspool in which it deserves to live. I have some thoughts at the end; as usual, interested guest-bloggers should e-mail me. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....poore!

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Ok, as a former /b/tard and someone who has been called a "meme machine" on multiple occasions, I feel unusually qualified to comment on today's xkcd.

Let me first say that meme humor in general is difficult to replicate in ANY form other than its most common - forum threads. The simple reason for this is that much of the humor derived from memes is the real-time generation of the content, and the interplay between all the posters contributing to a given thread. Like a Tristan Tzara performance, a good jazz set, or Foxy Shazam, it's an experience you can't really appreciate until you get to see it live.

Once you translate the living, breathing concept of meme humor to a static medium such as a webcomic, you've already removed a large part of what makes this particular brand of humor special. That being said, static meme humor CAN be done well; it's difficult, but not impossible.

Actually, let me elaborate: it's not impossible for someone who takes the time to really analyze the nature of Internet humor and then dedicates a large span of time to carefully crafting a joke that fully utilizes the knowledge they've gained.

Randall Munroe is no such someone.

What Randall failed to realize is that just quoting memes is not funny. As it turns out, this fact is part of the genesis of the moniker "/b/tard". While there are a few truly brilliant comic minds lurking in the shadows of Anonymous, most of them are drooling idiots whose only method of communication is "Ctrl+c", "Ctrl+v" and whose pathetic brains are utterly incapable of generating anything vaguely resembling an original thought.

Randall - you just dove headlong into the midst of this pathetic, throbbing mass of humanity, and I (and most of your readers, I should hope) am left wondering,"why?" Is this some elaborate attempt at self-parody? Are you trying to be meta? Are you just throwing a bone to the /b/tards to buy their loyalty?

I suspect the latter, but I digress.

As I said before, just quoting memes at random is not that funny. However, Randall did try to spice it up a bit by making himself (err, the anonymous stick figure in this comic) bring up a bunch of random memes in an inappropriate situation. Unfortunately, quoting memes in inappropriate situations is only occasionally funny, typically when there's a high shock value. While bringing up random memes during sex might be kind of inappropriate, it comes off as more "wow, that guy's dumb" than "oh my god, did he REALLY just say that?"

Think of it this way: it's the difference between saying "So i herd u liek mudkips?" in the checkout line at the supermarket (which is just stupid and not all that funny), and yelling "That's what she said!" during a solemn silence at your grandmother's funeral.

If you want to really be funny with memes, you have to apply them in highly-appropriate, well-timed situations, but these opportunities very rarely present themselves, and even then it requires that everyone involved be familiar enough with the particular meme being referenced to understand why said meme is appropriate and well-timed in the current context in order for maximum humor saturation to occur.

Had Randall spent the time to craft such a situation, this comic could have been great. Instead, it's just retarded.

As a final note, why would messing up a single sexual encounter with a woman completely ruin your life? Do I detect a little bit of insecurity, Randall? Perhaps a sense that yet another failed relationship will cast doubt upon your sexual orientation? Have you just given me another piece of highly-speculative, grossly-misinterpreted piece of evidence for your latent homosexuality?

I THINK YOU HAVE, RANDALL. I THINK YOU HAVE.

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OH NOES PEOPLE poore used all caps at the end there! Attack! attack my loyal commentors, ATTACK!

I'll add just a few comments to the end here:

Part of the issue with the memes, as poore alluded to but didn't, I think, say explicitly, is that they work in conversation, as part of the interplay between people. Part of it is also that it is fun to try to twist a meme into new situations (think lolcats --> lolphilosophers, lolpresidents, lolinsects, etc). this is why I enjoyed rickrolling: people got really creative in terms of how and where and on what scale they tricked people into hearing that song (a meme from 4chan going all the way to a Mets game is freaking awesome).

Putting memes into a comic generally destroys both of those: The conversation is not present, of course, and also the artist can construct however many crazy situations he wants in order to work his meme of choice in. Clearly, this is what happened a few months ago. There's humor in taking the situation you are actually in and applying an outside idea to it; when you create the set up for your own hi-larious punchline, no one cares.

And it should go without saying, but I am just damn sick of meme comics in general. In addition to all the problems above, Randy just relies on them too damn much.

Also: Dammit randall, we know that you are trying to influence the culture of the internet. You told us at the end of the year that you wanted "yo dawg" and "accidentally ____" to be the New Hit Memes of 2009 so when you jam them into your comic two months later it just reads as transparent and pathetic. We know that you are a 4chan reader randy, but that doesn't make you cool no matter how much you think it does.