Comic 724: Hell, No

Let's all say it together: it's not the worst "hell" comic he's ever done.

Before I get to what I want to say, a being named Doomerang sent me some complaints about this comic, which i've edited down here:
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The problem all lies in the title. It gives away the joke. The thing about a joke is that you are supposed to give a set-up, then a punch-line. Compare the following:

“A horse walks into the bar. The barman sees him and asks ‘Why the long face?’”

And

“‘Why the long face?’ said the barman to the person who had just walked in and was a horse.”

The latest comic is basically the latter. Imagine, if you will, reading the comic without having seen the title. You see a picture of a Tetris game, you scroll down and what is this? The bottom is curved, it is all wrong! Then you see the caption “HELL.” And you realize that Randall is saying a nerd’s definition of Hell is an unbeatable game. It sounds crap written out like that I know, but come on work with me here. Kind of funny.

What you actually get with this comic is you see the word Hell, then see Tetris and think why is Tetris hell? Then you scroll down and see oh okay the bottom is curved. Huh. And it says Hell again. OK.

This travesty of composition could so easily have been avoided! He could have just called the comic ‘Tetris’ or ‘Blocks’ or something like that. Boring, I know, but the purpose of the title is surely just so people can find the comic when they are looking through the archives? They say “I want to see the comic where Tetris is unbeatable… ah this one is called ‘Tetris’, that’ll be it”. You don’t need to put the joke there. Seriously.

I guess this is why you guys are always going on about Randall getting himself an editor!
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It's true! Having the title and the caption be the same just looks silly. Get rid of the title! It's been a long, long time since an xkcd title was worth anything and wasn't just ultra-bland.

Really, the problem is that jokes about tetris are laaaame. First off, there already exist variants of tetris which try to fuck you up, much like this proposal. In terms of sheer frustration expressed purely as a screenshot of a tetris game, there is always this shirt. [incidentally, Randall, when your joke is already basically the same as a shirt on busted tees, you have failed so hard.] There's even Roast Beef's depression+anxiety represented through horrifying tetris pieces.

In fact, on the Achewood thing, one comment on the latter strip wrote: "Nobody else in the universe would think to represent a man's thoughts by using an overly complex, never-gonna-fit Tetris shape dropping inexorably into an area where it will screw everything up." Well, what that guy didn't count on was Randall Munroe! Who, as we know, has never read Achewood.

But the best fucked-up-tetris comedy out there has GOT to be this video, from the magical fantasy land known as "Japan." Not only is it basically the same crazy frustration related to tetris (I mean, the spirit of this video is exactly the same as that of the comic), but it includes the lines "so many bathrooms!" and "why soybean??" How could you go wrong with that, I ask? Seriously you should watch that video, it's so dumb and silly yet it makes me laugh so hard.

Lastly, the alt-text is clearly designed to pander to as broad an audience as possible (mario) while still making nerds think he is referencing their "obscure" game (katamari).

well, that was obvious Update: As expected, someone's made a playable version of this comic. (thanks to Dragon2041 for the link, and sorry that i did not post the guest writing you sent me!) Go play the game. It's made wonderfully; the physics for the most part feel exactly right and I actually laughed playing it, which is not something I did when reading the original comic. There's something about seeing the futility of the whole pursuit, that no matter what you cannot make any progress and yet the game keeps giving you more shit to deal with. If i were an overworked factory person i might consider it a good metaphor for my life. Anyway - especially when my screen was totally full of mishmashed pieces, i kept thinking to myself "why did Randall just draw two pieces? This screencap is way funnier than his comic." Anyway, play it out, see what you think. To me it just confirms that this is a funny idea (if not that new) but poorly executed as a comic.

Guest Post: Why XKCD Is Pretentious

A few dozen years ago, a guy who I'll call Matt sent me an e-mail with a good essay about xkcd and how it appeals to its fans' sense of self-superiority, and then, for some reason, I did nothing with it. This was really lame of me. However, I am posting it now, so all is well (not really, i still suck heartily). Here is the post, guys.

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Three times a week, Randall Munroe descends from the heavens and hands the Word of God to the unwashed masses. Sometimes, he brings humor. Sometimes, he tells us of an interesting new idea. And sometimes, just sometimes, he scorns us for something we are doing horribly wrong and need to change immediately.

xkcd can be awfully pretentious at times. It's really cute the way he thinks his stick figure webcomic and legion of socially awkward fans can act as an authority or instrument of social change. It's pretty annoying and it doesn't change a damn thing; so why does he bother? Well, I once had the privilege of having the great Randall explain it to me in person.

A few years ago, I was a college freshman and I was introduced to xkcd for the first time by my classmates. At first, I kind of liked it, even though I could tell it was quite bad from the start. It was something of a guilty pleasure. I came to resent it because everyone around me was convinced it was the second coming of Christ and talked about it constantly. But some time before that, I was pressured into going to a talk by Randall, who had graced our fair city with his presence.

He talked about his comic, and programming, and the usual stuff. At one point, though, he mentioned that he doesn't like the convention set by English grammar for quotation marks. English grammar dictates that you always put the period at the end of the sentence in quotes, like if you're ending a sentence with the word "cat." As a programmer, this annoys Randall.You see, the period is not part of the word, so it should go outside of the quotation marks, like if you're ending a sentence with the word "cat". (Never mind the fact that it takes quite a grammar nazi to complain if you get this wrong.) Even though Randall *can* adapt to the convention, it bothers him deeply to do so because he feels the convention is *wrong*.

He then justified being an inflexible non traditionalist by brining up the Myers-Briggs personality typology test, claiming that he and most of his readers are ISTPs. If you don't know what that means, don't worry; I didn't know either. He was kind enough to explain it. ISTPs are the sort of people who spend their lives thinking about frivolous nonsense like this and seething about it. This is a great example of this sort of thing. Now, you see, because of the way electricity works, it does not matter which way the current runs as long as you pick a convention and stick with it. This is why electrical engineers have never bothered to change the convention. Randall, however, can't get over the fact that the convention runs opposite to how electrons really flow, so much so that he fantasizes about using a time machine to get Benjamin Franklin to fix it. Normal people have moved on with their lives.

And, of course, rather than be annoyed at how pretentious and petty he's being, his fans eat it right up. They, too, are ISTPs and spend their lives wishing they could change conventions to suit their purposes. I must have been the only person in the room who was thinking "Oh my god, is he fucking serious?" when he went on his tangent about punctuation, the rest fully agreed with him. This is another reason that his fans spend their time putting xkcd strips everywhere; if they spread the Word of God, maybe they'll finally rectify some of these minor issues that affect no one.

Comic 723: Waves of Confusion

Holy crap! Another earthquake comic! Luckily, earthquakes are always a source of vast humor, so I don't mind. Also, it's another twitter comic, but I think that's really in bad taste.

GUYS! Did you know that there is a new-fangled type of "internet" which can make information move very quickly? It is true! You can send information at the very speed of light! It is called "the information super-high-way" because things go as fast AS CARS ON A HIGHWAY! so very fast! One implication of this is that it becomes possible to get information about things like the weather, etc, around the world very quickly! EVEN BEFORE THE WEATHER ARRIVES! this has been true for what, 20 years? maybe only 15.

Anyway, i guess the point of this comic is that twitter can be a funny way to watch people react to terrible problems in what is essentially real-time. Would you agree? That's not a pejorative statement - I expect most xkcd fans would agree with it. No?

OK I was sort of lying - I did mean that as an insult at Randall, but only because he did this exact joke before. Exactly. Do I even need to go into detail on this? How about this: if you doubt me, just read that review of comic 574 I linked to, and note how much of it applies here as well. And vice versa! It's like I posted an xkcdsucks post in the past....from the future! spooooooky!

tl, dr: twitter is dumb, everyone knows it



PS did you all notice that xkcd's very own bitchy whiny jerk Rob made another appearance in today's comic? Why yes, "RobM163" is the twittererer mentioned in the final panel. ROB, does your last name start with an M? (yes, it does).

PPS why are they both twittering in the last panel?

You Wouldn't Admit It Even If You Did Like One!

This one will be brief, because fuck you.

One of the common cuddlefish claims is that we wouldn't admit to liking an XKCD even if it was funny. It varies from "you wouldn't notice even if one was funny," which is fairly uncommon (because most fanboys believe that all XKCD is funny, so they inherently believe we're in denial) to "you'd just lie about it if you liked one."

There's one problem with this: we admit to liking them all the time. It's certainly not frequent (there is a reason we have a hate blog for XKCD, after all), but there are times when there is one that we think is at least moderately okay. I've done it, Carl has done it, most people who comment here regularly have done it.

The "you wouldn't notice" one deals with the problems of bias &c, which I've already written about elsewhere, but, again: if we like some of them clearly that's not true, now is it?

Here's a thought to leave you with: when XKCD was still good, it could have made a comic and most of us here would agree that this one was funny. Now it will get at best a handful of people to say they liked it.

Comic 722: Lights in a Box

Today's comic made me think precisely two thoughts, both rather boring: 1, isn't this just the Simple English Wikipedia joke all over again? and 2, apparently Randall has now lowered his standards below the usual high-school level and is now on four-year-old level.

Luckily, a gentleman by the name of Charlton Cheslewite without even knowing that i had no clue what to write about said this comic inspired just a divine fury in him that he simply must guest write about it. So, here is what he told me:

When you really think about it, all that happened was a few chemical and electrical processes that were happening a few minutes ago aren't happening any more. I don't see why you would find that so upsetting, officer. Maybe my knife in his chest had something to do with it, maybe it didn't. It was just some chemical and electrical processes anyway.

Oh hey folks. I didn't see you there, staring at your screens of lights. Potentially you might have been interpreting some vibrations using membranes and novel bone structures. I expect that you've already come across this xkcd comic. I often find it somewhat amusing. Not because I think it's funny, but because Carl's day seems like it was made marginally worse by having read it, hoping to find some sort of humor in it. But today it seems to have bothered me more than it bothered Carl.

Look, I don't know Randall Monroe. I probably don't like him, but I don't like most people. This doesn't stop most people from coming up with things that are kind of useful, new, or interesting.

This newest xkcd is none of those things. Firstly, the joke isn't something new or interesting. I've read lots of versions, but I first heard it on play grounds as a child. People would lose a game of kickball, and vindictively announce that it was just a bunch of dorks running around kicking a ball. And they are correct. School was just sitting around in a class, writing stuff or maybe listening. Jobs might just be picking up a phone, muttering things, and putting it down. Everything in the world is able to be reduced to banal and stupid sounding things if you are willing to try hard enough.

Mind you, that only really addresses the first two panels. I've seen some comments on here hoping that the last panel had some hidden message, some additional meaning. Some posters have even come up with ways in which this last panel was secretly where the joke was. But I believe that the simplest solution is the most likely. Randall didn't want to just use two panels and no alt text. So he came up with another panel a some random crap about his cat.

Oh, his cat. What the fuck did his cat have to do with anything? It added nothing to the comic. He really just felt there needed to be an alt text and had drawn a blank. On the other hand, this was my favorite part of the comic. One of my favorite things is having people I dislike telling me about them getting what they deserve. It's right below people I dislike getting what they deserve on the list of things I like, and right above olives. Hearing that Randall's life is so empty that he frequently talks to his cat, who, I assure you, doesn't give a shit, was the best part of the comic.

When I first started reading this comic, I had really hoped that the man just played with lite brites all day. The comic referred to the buttons he pressed, making clear that he wasn't that cool. Likewise, while the world would be better off if he did, we can conclude that Randall isn't that cool either.

Actually, are any of us that cool?
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