Comic 870: False Advertising

[Comic title: "Advertising"; alt text: "I remember the exact moment in my childhood when I realized, while reading a flyer, that nobody would ever spend money solely to tell me they wanted to give me something for nothing. It's a much more vivid memory than the (related) parental Santa talk."]

You'd better be fucking happy, Randy. You've finally produced a comic with so many blatant flaws I'm writing an actual goddamn review of it. Are you content now? Are you at ease, now that you have a few days where you can attempt to replicate what Megan's milk must taste like without being pestered about how creepy it is? Fuck you, Randy. Fuck you.

Let's start with the first panel, shall we? This one is annoying for the same reason 169 was annoying. Most notably: nobody actually uses that phrase. He's combined "up to 15% off all items!" and "save 15% or more!" into one utterly retarded phrase. Randy, you see, is a disingenuous fuck. He desperately wants to seem like someone who is smart, so he creates situations in which people do things which bother him, because he is smart and they are not.

The second panel is what really pisses me off, though. It's dumb on so very many levels. First, this isn't a mathematical complaint. Randy is trying to leverage game theory here to prove some trait about human behavior. This is about as stupid as it sounds. The biggest problem, apart from the fact that game theory is not, in fact, a hard-coded law of human behavior, is that the game Randy has constructed is flawed. It seems to assume that the only form of expected value possible is monetary.

The basic assertion he's making is that people don't pay money for advertising unless they expect to recoup that money somehow. He feels that this is somehow disingenuous of advertisers to call it "free." And he thinks he has proven this mathematically. This is phenomenally stupid, given that Randy is a webcartoonist. While perhaps he is ignorant of this fact by virtue of spending about 95 percent of his brainpower imagining what Megan's nipples look like, webcartoonists are (a) offering a free service (b) pretty keen on buying advertising for that free service. Most of them, no doubt, are hoping to make money off their webcomic eventually, but I imagine a large sum of them are just interested in getting viewers. They are buying advertising because they expect that it will net them more readers--even if these readers do not make them any money whatsoever. I know I've considered buying advertising for my personal projects, which have no advertising and which will almost certainly not make me any money. I would only do this because I like having readers, not out of any desire to have money.

I'm not going to list all the various and sundry things that people spend money on advertising that are free. There's lots, though. This second panel is just another disingenuous attempt at Randy to pass off his incredibly poor understanding of human nature as some piercing insight into how the world works, or some savage denunciation of the treachery of the advertising industry. "How dare you claim that the things you aren't charging any money for are free, when you expect to recoup your losses through other means!"

The last panel--well, I wasted all my rage on the second panel, so it's hard to get that annoyed at it. I mean, sure, Randy's statement is incorrect: while there is a sale on, the more you spend at that time will save you more in the future, provided you were going to purchase those items anyway and provided you don't alter your rate of consumption because of buying in bulk. But he is right in suggesting that the principle is misleading, though, again, it's not because of any sort of mathematical property. It's just because sales are meant to exploit various bits of human psychology that mean you'll buy things you otherwise wouldn't. But if I'm saving $20 on an item that I just purchased, if I buy six of them I just saved $120 on those items. The more I spend on them, the more I save, as a flat rate. (Percentage-wise, of course, it remains the same, and as it applies to the money I personally have, the more I spend the less I'm able to put into savings, but that's not what "save" means here.)

And of course he has to point out that the slope is negative. Good one, Randy! COULDN'T SPOT THAT ON MY OWN.

I feel a momentary twinge of pity for Randy when I read the alt-text. Maybe he just remembers it because of one of those weird quirks of memory, but he makes it sound like he remembers it because it was a life-altering experience. "That's the moment I became a cynic," he seems to be saying. (Though he's probably the sort of dick that uses the word "realist" instead, the useless fuck.) "That's the moment I came to understand the world."

I can understand a child finding that an interesting revelation. I'm sure I thought that companies gave away free things just because they were really cool, and not because they thought it would improve customer loyalty or make money. But to look back on that moment as something profound is kind of sad.

Comic 869: You Can't Always Get What You Want

[Comic title: Server Attention Span; not reproducing the alt text because it's long and I'm lazy]

Randall is a man of simple desires. He wants to touch the hem of the Cheetos-stained garment of a genuine programmer. He wants to spend all day reading Wikipedia and Reddit. He wants someone to tell him that he is beautiful. He wants to slurp the delicious fluid secreted by Megan's delicate pink milk buttons all the live-long day. As simple desires, Randall expects that the universe will have no difficulty accommodating him.

But, as he is too often reminded, such as when Megan inexplicably starts running as he approaches with a cry of "MILK" on his lips, sometimes a man is desired even these desires so fundamental to his being that one might even call them "needs." And it is brought home to him too often for even his damaged mind to ignore: Megan, the object of his infinite desire, is too often the agent of his rejection as well. She denies him what he wants! She denies him what he needs! There is only one way to describe her treachery.

She is like a poorly designed server that misinterprets his requests and sends him to the wrong webpage!

Having finally built up the courage (or milk-lust) to shout these words at her (through the internet, of course--Randy no longer leaves his warren, not even on a milk quest), Randy entered a swoon, and on coming to, the clock flashed at him ominously. Only an hour left before he had to post a new comic!

But all he could think about was the amazing zinger he had hurled at Megan just now. That was pretty clever, wasn't it? He should write about how annoying it is when stupid Megan doesn't understand his milk requests and instead sends him to the main page of his despair. That would show her!

This took him about ten seconds. The rest of the hour was spent painstakingly drawing wiggly geometric shapes that were meant to be computers and smartphones.

Comic 868: No Diamond, Just Rough

[Self-proclaimed heroic troll "The_Autodidact" has sent me this guest review. I haven't actually read it so whatever. -Ed.]



THE PLACE: the bedroom of a one-man apartment, somewhere in Massachusetts.

THE TIME: Thursday, March 3, 2011, between the hours of 11 PM and 12 AM

A young man sits alone at a desk, watching his favorite video series: an internet atheist who makes video responses to Youtube comments written by creationists. He chuckles as the video comes to a close. “Looks like science once again has triumphed!” he says aloud. He closes the tab, opening the one for Facebook. It is, of course, on her page. The one who denied him. The only one who didn’t appreciate his genius (Besides that one fatass). The one who never laughed at his sex jokes, even when they were about her. The one who, for reasons he could never fathom, seemed offended by his constant requests to drink her breastmilk. That ungrateful bitch. Doesn’t she know how great a compliment that is? He is of course not her “friend”, and can unfortunately not see her pictures, but the very sight of her name makes his penis turgid. He can’t help himself. His hand, seemingly of its own accord, slowly works its way into his stained briefs.

“OK, no more mister sadsack,” he says as his tearful masturbation sessions comes to a close. “Time to remind the world that you are Randall Motherfucking Munroe: Internet Comedian”. He pulls up Weechat and reads through the last few pages of his favorite chatroom. He cracks his knuckles (taking a moment to laugh at all the gullible fools who have never read Wikipedia’s “list of common misconceptions” and believe this causes arthritis) and delivers a barrage of witty one-liners, one after the other. Chortling at his own wit, he copies the brilliant zingers and posts them on his favorite fora, for posterity’s sake. He then opens up TV Tropes Wiki, his second-favorite wiki ever. He reads through trope after trope, guffawing at his fellow tropers’ wit, or at least what is left of it after the fascist admins decided the wiki should be a Wikipedia clone. He comes across a familiar article, and notices something missing. “The page image”, he shouts. “They changed it, those damn bastards! I had uploaded that image myself, as it was my favorite comic! Wait a minute. Oh no, the comic!”

He suddenly remembers the comic, that thing that makes it so he doesn’t have to go to (or goto, as the case might be. He snickers as he writes that one down for later) work like some kind of common pleb. He pulls a sheet of white paper out of his printer and gets to work on the latest t-shirt ad. “OK Randall, you can do this alright,” (he stops to laugh at the thought of all the pedantic English majors squirming at his misuse of the word, if only they could hear it) “Just put something down and I’m certain something will come to you”. He haphazardly scrawls the first shape that comes to mind: a diamond. (Being a scientist, of course, he knows it’s just a square rotated 45 degrees, not a carbon crystal. Silly plebs.) “I always can fall back on a chart,” he says, and draws an “x” to denote it as such. “My audience, being geeks, of course loves chart humor. It takes a sophisticated mind to appreciate. Now what could this be? A Punnett square? No, I of course already made fun of biology yesterday. But who else does use this kind of chart? Wait, libertarians! That’s it!” He scrawls the word in his semi-legible print in the top quadrant. “I am sure many of my compatriots have encountered libertarians who care about charts! So obviously that makes the first axis ‘politics’. The next one can be…meta humor! Yes! Something that only sophisticated geeks like myself can understand! The other axis is ‘people who like diamond-shaped diagrams’! So that puts libertarians at top, other politicians on the left, but who else cares about diamond-shaped charts? Wait! What’s that thing that jocks like, that is on a diamond-shaped thing? Base…ball? Yes! ‘Baseball’! Now for the last quadrant. Um…people who don’t care about politics or diamonds….screw it, I’ll just put ‘other’! There! Now all that I need is a title. What are those charts called again?” He browses Wikipedia until he finds the article in question. “Yes, Nolan charts! That’s perfect! Surely no lowly sheeple will be getting THIS reference!” He scans the comic, cleans it up in Photoshop, and uploads it onto his site. “Oh Randall” he says, shaking his head in disbelief at his own brilliance. “You are definitely a genius!”



PS: Ayn Rand was an incompetent hack and all libertarians are BASICALLY sociopaths. Discuss.

Comic 867: Herp Derp

[Hated hell-bird "Ravenzomg" just sent me this review that someone wrote on a blog claiming to belong to noted doppelganger-haver "Capn" but also pretending to be the blog of the aforementioned hated hell-bird "Ravenzomg." Pretty boring as far as elaborate frauds go, but whatever. -Ed.]

[Obvious doppleganger troll made a post and now I'm submitting this to Rob because because, look! I apparently wrote it without even noticing! If it's not entertaining, I had nothing to do with this, unless this was particularly awful then the doppleganger was probably channeling its inner Ravenzomg. -Ravenzomg]

Alt text: Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.

It's clear from this comic that Randy has discovered phylogenetics and evolutionary biology. Good for him! It's about time he widened his knowledge base beyond maths, physics and out-of-date pop culture.

Unfortunately for Randy, he only found out about phylogenetics and failed to research it to any depth. There are a number of rather telling clues to this:

1) He says that lizards should be folded up into ornithology. Why not any other reptiles? Because Randy believes that lizards and reptiles are entirely interchangeable words, that's why.

2) He is making a reference to the contention between paraphyletic and monophyletic classifications, but he has picked 'herpotology' as the battleground, a discipline that has obvious reasons for studying the groups they do.

3) Notice how you need little to no knowledge of evolutionary biology to understand this comic? The geek references are spoonfed to us this time.

4) He acts like the whole 'birds used to be dinosaurs' is new, groundbreaking knowledge, rather than something first proposed in 1868 and known to any fucking child who took more than a passing interest in Jurassic Park. You know, geeks. How has this little tidbit of info passed by someone so goddamn obsessed with raptors?

Kudos to him for passing up the opportunity to draw a close-up diagram of genital herpes, but he again frustrates us by taking a fairly funny idea (cladistic insults) and giving it a terrible, half-baked execution. Why two conferences? Why not one with an audience member supplying one side of the debate? 'Assholes' and 'douchebags'? Why not science it up a bit, give the Latin names or use something more creative?

Because he's a lazy motherfucker, that's why. Like Rob.

Comic 866: Randy's Life

[I was unable to chase away noted Satanic carrion fowl "Ravenzomg", so instead I forced it to write a review. -Ed.]


Tooltip: The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.

Good morning my precious pets! This is Ravenzomg-58 with your latest fix of magnificent Randallian secretion!

This, my dears, is efficiently magnifiglorious. Don't let the simple style fool you, Randall truly understands how to show mood and tone [and sometimes both!] in his comics.

First, look at the posture of this faceless Void-Creature. Despite being expressionless and utterly featureless beyond his accessories-du-jour [as my Viking ancestors said], we can tell the dejected and completely vacuous hole that is formed within his soul! This creature, my friends, is crushed not by great mass [as would have occurred were our own Robyn to attend the Geometer's party], but by the great emptiness that is his friendless existence!

Now before you rush to the "GOOMH, Randall, I too am a friendless machination!" that I know you frail-but-well-read creatures must be thinking, let us continue on this journey into Randall's tangible brilliance!

Look at the off-centre* stickman, and the white Void left in the Creature's absence --- not only does Randall tell us of the Creature's loneliness ["tell"] he also demonstrates [or "shows"] it to us; he both shows AND tells! Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Now then, before you rate this a 9/10 for brilliant-but-lacking-secret-codes, beware you foolish children! For secret codes do prance amongst the Great Randall's words like fauns in the forest, waiting to surprise you at a moment's notice with a joyous reunion between the dreamer and the dream!

Unlike the common avian specimen, your delightfully brilliant Raven[zomg!] had noticed a trick in Randall's otherwise functionally florid prose. There were altogether too many Es in this note, which I recognized as statistically too many even [for Mathematics are also among my trades, besides Language, Sarcasm, and that other thing] for that luscious letter which we use with relish every time we mention our beloved Void-Creatures.

So, having discovered this quirk, the message was dissasembled, the letters scattered and reörganized into their proper meaning, the musings of our Genius Man-God!

Behold, my children, the wisdom and questing queries of the troubled wise man we have come to worship at our alters!

Is damp disco still free, my Lord? Only those who have left this existence truly know; only they will know.


*Fuck you, America!

Love and stuff,
Ravenzomg