Comic 773: Not the Info You're Looking For

[alt: People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!]

I think no word describes this comic better than "boring." Or, if you allow me three words, "Really, really boring." Not only is it a graph joke - the last refuge of the crappy comic author - but a Venn diagram comic, a place which I think deserves a special place in graph-comic hell. Not only because they take little to no thought, but also because they are boring to look at, especially the two-circles-and-one-overlapping-area ones. That's not to say that all Venn diagram comics are bad, just that nearly all of them are.

This is, of course, no exception. The joke is about the relative usefulness of college websites. What Randall is doing with this, having been out of school for several years, is beyond me. Actually, no, it's not - given that most visitors to the main page of a school's site are prospective students, I know exactly what he's doing: Appealing to high school students, as usual.

But in this case I'll ignore that, because there are bigger problem with this comic. First off, the joke. The punchline comes in the overlapping segment, as is usual with Venn Diagram jokes (for example.) I don't think anyone would disagree that the punchline to this comic is "the one thing that university websites have that people are actually looking for is the full name of the University." Now, step back a bit and read that again. I basically did a double take with this punchline where I read it, shrugged, thought it was dumb, and then had this realization that it is not merely "dumb," it is in fact mind-blowingly shitty. What college has so complicated a name that you need to get the entire thing written out for you? I mean I am sure there are a few where you don't know the exact phrase (like "ohio state university" vs "the ohio state university") but a) that happens in only a tiny fraction of colleges and b) it doesn't matter. If you all made a list of the 25 reasons you go to university websites, would this be on there? Of course not. So why is it on this list? Alas, humor is generally about using unusual means to get at the core truth of a topic, and in this case, there is no truth there. It's based on random stuff he made up that no one can relate to.

Now, it could be said that one might be able to relate to the general concept of not being able to find what one needs on a college website. That's a terrible joke for a few reasons (including the fact that colleges generally spend a lot of effort to make fancy, well designed sites, so this is just wrong, and the fact that if you want to mock crappy websites a venn diagram with an out-of-nowhere punchline is a crappy way to do it) but let's pretend he has a point. Are University websites poorly designed?

Of course, there's no clear answer to that, because they vary. So I just picked two completely at random and looked at whether it was hard to find the information Randall claims people are looking for but cannot find. The first randomly chosen school was Christopher Newport University, where Randall went to college (click for actual size):
You'll note that I've highlighted a few relevant links from - gasp! - the front page. Let's take another example though, say, i don't know, MIT, the place Randall wanted to go to college and likes to pretend he is currently attending:
Again, a few relevant links are highlighted.

Now it's true that there are some things Randall says people are looking for when they go to a University website, like campus police phone numbers, that are not on these sites. Well, to be accurate, they are on the sites, just not on the front pages. Now we get to another central problem here: Randall is comparing "what people want" with "what is on the front page." But there's no good reason for him to do that. People want any of a thousand things when they go to a University website, but you can't put them all on the front page. It would be impossible to find your way around and it would look like shit.

Luckily, most web designers have learned that you can created other web pages, and merely link to them from the front page. So if you have a long list of course names and numbers, rather than put all the names and all the numbers on the front page, you can have an "Academics" link that takes you there! Astounding. Likewise, a visitor to xkcd.com may be looking for a certain comic. Say (to take one actually at random this time), the one about accidentally hearing the power rangers song whilst sexin' it up. But HOLY FUCKING MOTHER OF GOD, it is not there on the front page of xkcd! Someone might be looking to purchase xkcd merchandise, yet to do so, they would have to click to another page, oh my god. This is what I would call "web design for complete idiots" and yet it seems to be confusing Randall Munroe for some reason.

It's almost like Colleges have an image of themselves they want to present - usually something along the lines of, "our students are happy, our faculty make amazing discoveries, and our alumni do great things." They're presenting a brand, basically, and - sweet jesus! - their websites reflect this. stop the mother fucking presses. Not everyone wants to see the campus police phone number prominently displayed on the main site? Well glory hallelujah. If only there were a simple 3 digit number that you could use in case of emergencies! Something that started with 9 and ended with 1 and had, I dunno, a 1 in the middle. No, that's silly, in an emergency most people will have time to visit exactly one website and won't have time to click on a single link, so yeah, the best option is to put it on the front page.

You've also got some dishonesty in the left-hand circle. "virtual tour" is totally something an applicant might want. Maybe not 100% of them, but some would. "Campus events" ? Why is that so bad? Does Randall really think no one wants to read about those? It certainly seems more likely than "Academic Calendar." or "parking information."

In short, there is nothing about this comic that isn't neuron-crushingly stupid and it's all in the service of an illogical, made up joke that just bored the loving crap out of me. GOOD JOB.


update: It gets better - I looked up Christopher Newport University on Wikipedia and guess what? Apparently it isn't the tech/engineering school I thought it was. It is, in fact, a liberal arts college. So the next time Randall mocks the liberal arts - which includes a lot of math, keep in mind - think about the fact that he went to a liberal arts school.
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Assorted and sundry other thoughts:
--I've finally, FINALLY, gotten around to reading Dr. McNinja. I really enjoy it! I just finished the second part of Dare To Resist Ninja Drugs and Ninja Violence. I don't tend to read comics that have long story arcs, because they tend to be boring (not their fault, it's really hard to tell a long story that has a lot of regular laugh points throughout the whole thing) but Dr. McNinja stays funny and entertaining. I hope it stays this good.

--That said, I don't like the Dr. McNinja / Axe Cop crossover that's going on now. The joy of Axe Cop is that it's all told through the crazy imagination of an actual six year old. Giving him characters made by adults doesn't work, and just feels super gimmicky (which it is). I can see why people would compare the two comics, because they do have a lot in common, and I can see why someone would even think of doing a crossover like this. But that doesn't mean it is a good idea.

--Penny Arcade TV finally reached the point of running out of new topics and doing an episode of the show about the show itself. Quite frankly, I'm impressed the made it as long as they did without resorting to that. And it's understandable that they'd do it; as Robert Khoo mentions, you just plain run out of things to make episodes about if you want them to be interesting and new. So I guess that means it's a good time for the first season to wrap up, and I'm intrigued by the idea of new folks coming on to make the next season. But that said, I think the Two Player Productions people did an absolutely fantastic job with this series and I really enjoyed watching it. I hope the next crew is as good.

Comic 772: Accidents Happen

[alt: I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.]

I was all prepared for this to be another boring xkcd sucks post. I was going to talk about how it was another in a series of comics that said "what if this video game...was more REALISTIC?" Like 161 or especially 724, or 637. And I would have mentioned that the joke would have been better if he had introduced it first as trying to make Frogger more realistic and then made the punchline what it as, as opposed to awkwardly fitting that in as the alt-text. Also I would have mused that seeing the game from the truck's point of view, with a giant frog jumping in front of your truck, might have been amusing. And I certainly would have linked to the best Frogger joke I have ever seen, a Seinfeld clip with George trying to move his Frogger console across a busy street.

That was the plan, at least, until about 3 seconds after midnight when people started to e-mail me and leave comments about this Robot Chicken clip:

[update: apparently this clip only plays in the US. here it is on youtube.]

I know I've said this before, but this time I'm really serious - can a true defender of xkcd PLEASE try to tell me how these jokes are different? I'm truly interested in this. To me it seems like: Frog crosses the street like in regular frogger game. Cars swerve to avoid him. Cars crash. I'm serious, if you think you have a reason they are different and think I've missed your comment, send me an e-mail. I want to hear this.

Now, this is not the first time there's been a problem like this. You can read the whole list of copied jokes, but the point is: He does this fairly often. When he does, I usually think about 3 basic categories that the incidents have: 1, how similar the jokes are to each other, 2, how prominent the other joke is (ie, how likely is it that people will have seen the other one), and 3, how recent was the other joke. I think this case is just about as bad as you can get on 1 and 2, though not so much on 3. How much more pathetic can you get than copying a joke off of Robot Chicken?

Now granted, I don't think Randall did this on purpose. I don't know if he watched the show or if this idea is just so obvious that he thought of the exact same thing. As I say in all these cases, if he claims that he thought of it on his own, I'll believe him. I have no evidence that he saw that episode of Robot Chicken. But what he absolutely cannot do is ignore the situation. All I ask for is a simple blog post - "Turns out a comic I drew was basically the same joke as a Robot Chicken sketch. That's crazy! I had no idea when I made the comic that they had done it." Just an acknowledgement that these two things are too close to call. But he never, never, never has. Why not? It just makes it look like he's trying to deny the problem for some reason. I wonder - can any of the folks who read this blog who hang out on the IRC chat ask him about this? I'm curious what he'd say.

Whenever a situation like this comes up, xkcd defenders almost always say the same thing: "You can't expect him to come up with new stuff every time. There's nothing new under the sun." These people apparently believe that if something is an aphorism it is always true. Well, as you can tell, those people are fucktarded. There's plenty of places you see good, original humor on a regular basis. Read "The Areas of My Expertise" by John Hodgman, or watch Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job. Or lots of other examples - it's completely possible to be original and very funny. Of course, it takes some goddamned effort which is why I guess we never see it happen in xkcd.

It's also true that it might not be possible for Randall Munroe to come up with something new every time he makes a comic. But that doesn't excuse shitty comics! It means he should get out of the fucking webcomic business. Yeah, most people can't come up with good clever humor. But those are the people who aren't trying to make a living off their good, clever humor! If xkcd isn't going to be good, it shouldn't exist at all. And just because it was good for a while in 2007 doesn't mean it is always going to be good now. Why the fuck don't people understand this?

I think it's interesting to compare this version of the joke with the Robot Chicken version. The Robot Chicken one is better, despite their huge similarity. Why? Because it has a point. XKCD is just "what if the cars swerved? ha!" and then that's the end. But the R. C. joke ends with all the frogs crossing together, and you see that it was all a scheme to help more frogs get across the screen. In other words, it has a point. And in any case, as with everything on that show, once it's done you immediately zoom off to another sketch. Robot Chicken does not have time for your shenanigans. It's got two dozen more jokes to tell. So if this joke is simple, ok, but you know it's because they had to write (and animate! and edit!) 30 10 ridiculously densely packed minutes of TV every week. Whereas when Randall does the joke...that's it. No other jokes, no other work, nothing else but this in the spotlight, nothing else for two days.

Comic 771: History Repeats Itself

[Alt: The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.]

In the future, people will not have a good sense of how history happened:

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OK, I've let my copy and pasted comics speak for themselves for a day, I suppose I should write a few words.

There are two basic facts about this current comic that bother me. The obvious one, which the other comics here are meant to illustrate, is that this idea is dumb and old. I find it incredibly similar to the PBF quoted above - particularly because the scene is presented as future-theatrical representation of life happening in our era. Both present things from all different parts of history as though they happened at once. Of course, it's telling that PBF was able to do so without explanation, while xkcd needed a caption to explain what the hell what going on. But that's a separate matter.

And of course, the whole "blogger reenactment fair" thing is a straight out repeat of the other xkcd above. The whole concept of people in the future misunderstanding what is now the present is copied exactly as well.

The other problem is that the comic is simply not true. The comic is not really about the future, of course, it's about the present, and saying that this made up thing in the future seems silly but the humor of the comic is supposed to come from the fact that we are doing the same thing today (after all, a comic that just said "a few centuries from now, politicians will wear funny hats while covering themselves in honey and eating rocks" is just random, and not funny. you can make up anything about the future!). So is it true? Does all language older than say, 100 years, sound the same to us? I'm not sure. I don't know a lot about language. Someone who does, though, is commenter A, who wrote the following comment below (hope you are ok with me posting this A!)

But the English people used in say, the 1700s sounds completely different to the English used in the 1800s. Comparing even the early and late 1800s you can see the difference, it's like, the difference between an Austen novel and Dracula.

Then again, I'm just an English literature student, and that's no hard science so what do I know.

This point is great. Yes, English from the 18th century and English from the 16th century might sound similar to someone like Randall Munroe, who has never studied it (or, for that matter, me). To someone who has, 16th century language and 18th century language are as different at 18th century and 20th century.

To put it in terms xkcd might understand, show the average dude a calculus proof and a physics proof and they'll look the same. Here, try it yourself: i got this one googling "calculus proof" and this one for "physics proof" and see if you can tell the difference. Here's something wikipedia tells me is calculus, and something wikipedia tells me is physics. For the record, I can't tell the difference at all, which means that I may be wrong and these are both the same thing. So who knows. The point is: If you don't know what you are looking at, it's not going to be meaningful.
(update: The original links I posted were, in fact, not very good examples, as pointed out by a commenter. hopefully the new ones are better.)

Which would all be well and good if Randall Munroe didn't have a history of mocking the non-math based disciplines. Come on! You can't on the one hand dismiss these fields as dumb and not worthwhile, and on the other hand laugh about how little anyone understands the differences in language over time. Maybe those fields of study aren't so stupid, huh?

No, he won't admit that. He'll keep having it both ways, and the people who hate English or Literature will keep siding with him and thinking it's hilarious and the people who think that hey, maybe things you don't like are still worth studying by some people. You don't have tpo even study them yourself! You just have to stop denigrating the people who choose to study what they love. Is that so hard? It really shouldn't be. And yet, somehow, it is. I hate it.

Comic 770: So Much Love

[Alt: You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.]

In some ways, I'd like to think that this blog, and the greater world of xkcd-related-anger that it tries to tap into, is self-sustaining at this point. What I mean is that there's a big part of me that thinks that I shouldn't even have to write a blog post at all: not only is the horribleness of this comic self-evident, but the entire pattern of creepy, unfunny "romance" related comics that this is a part of is self-evident as well. But that would hardly be sporting of me.

I'll start with one big thing that this comic is not: Some people seem to think that this comic is in some way about pedophilia. Probably all these people are trolls, but i am not a human by birth so I can't quite tell if these people are being serious or not. Of course, the only piece of "evidence" these claims have is that the girl is shorter than the guy. That's true, but it hardly proves the point that she's much younger. Guys are generally taller than girls. It may not be true in xkcd world, but whatever, xkcd hardly has internal consistency. XKCD has plenty of flaws that are real, so guys, let's stick with those.

For one thing, it's a near identical copy of comic 44. Now that comic was a long time ago, and Randall doesn't have a search bar on his site anymore, so maybe he just forgot. But both are three-panels of a guy and girl (look who is taller! it is still the guy!) starting off by saying that one loves the other, and then revealing that actually, eh, not so much. Of course, broaden your topic to any comic where characters are in a failing relationship and you've got a whole pillar of the xkcd universe. Does this comic add anything meaningful to that corpus? Not a bit.

Is it funny? No, not really. There's a little bit of subverted expectations, but they are lost in the fact that basically you are seeing a man tell a woman that he doesn't like her very much, or at least, not as much as one might expect in the situation. Why would he say that? There doesn't seem to be a non-convoluted reason for it. It's more about just figuring out a way to start a sentence in a way that sounds nice, and end it so that it is mean. It's of a level of complexity with "you're pretty funny...PRETTY FUNNY LOOKING!" which I did once think was quite clever but then I graduated from 7th grade. More intriguing and complex are garden path sentences, but coming up with something like is no doubt too much work for a busy cartoonist.

And then of course, the alt-text just repeats the exact same joke: I love you! But not as much as I love some other people. HA HA.

not sure why i am not feeling more rage tonight, i think it's just that I've seen this so many times, there's little new to say. but just so there is no confusion: This is truly an atrocious strip, on its own, and in the context of other similar horrible xkcd "boo hoo not everyone loves me as much as I want them to" comics.

Comic 769: All Is Fair...

[alt: They offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.]

This comic brings to mind many interesting, important questions. The first one is "what the fuck?"

For one thing, when is this comic taking place? I don't know much about wars and stuff but the guys helmet looks like how World War Two soldiers look, his rifle looks like something from the American Revolution, and his love/enemy's name "Cordelia" plus vocabulary like "i hope this missive finds you well" suggests something from the Civil War. The "maintenance shed" suggests a first person shooter. The stone wall I can't quite figure out, but it doesn't seem right with any of those (except the fps).

Second, what's he writing on? I know it may seem like a trivial question, but it matters. Is he writing a letter with ink on paper? In that case, why is he writing whatever comes out of his mind? In other words, if he were actually writing a letter to the woman he is trying to shoot, he wouldn't say "I fear you may have found a superior vantage poi--A splendid effort, my love..." because that doesn't make sense. The first half of the letter is negated by the second. So a normal sane human would just start over and not act like this was a conversation. How is the reader supposed to know what effort the writer is talking about? She's not reading it in real time. So that makes no fucking sense.

What if he's IMing her or something? It's hard to tell what he's writing on, though it looks like he's holding a pen. Nonetheless, it may be a stylus of some kind so let's think about this. When you write an IM to your friend Cordelia, do you start it with, "My Dearest Cordelia" ? No. you start it with "yo cord whuts up." THAT IS HOW YOU DO IT. Also, if the message is being sent digitally and instantly, it takes away the point of the last line - the mild amusement that the line induces comes from the image of him throwing a love letter tied to a grenade, ie, the two are actually thrown together and found at the same time. So that makes no fucking sense either.

Lastly, who the hell are these people? The alt-text tells us that the man on screen is our beloved Mr. Beret, a "character" who despite numerous appearances has only three consistent traits: 1, he is totally unpredictable based on previous actions, 2, he wears a beret (but not always, like here), 3, he makes xkcd forumites squeal with glee about something they call "existentialism" but which bears little to resemblance to actual existentialism. It's quite a mystery. I'd go so far as to say that it makes no fucking sense.

So who is he? Does he love someone named Cordelia and just so happens to be at war with her? Does he hate her, so he is mocking her? Does he not know her at all? Or is he just insane? Who knows! If these characters had any sort of consistency, if we were given any context for their actions, it might be funny. But we're not. We will no doubt never hear of this again (i would love to be wrong on this). So we can't help but be confused.

Oh context. Done properly, this could have been a pointed commentary on the tragedy of war, the innocence of soldiers, the current debate over Don't Ask Don't Tell (and the broader role of love in the military), a metaphor for a troubled relationship...so many possibilities, none of them even attempted.

I'll end on a nice note: the use of color is done well here. Adds to the visual effect (makes it easier to imagine this scene as a real soldier) without being distracting or annoying. I'd love to see this happen more.

Wait, no, I'll end on an unhappy note: lots of people pointed this out but I still should say, this joke was much better the first time.

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update: Some people have been yellin' at me in the comments on a few topics that I think are worth clarifying.

The first is, why does it matter when this is supposed to take place? I think it matters because the confused signals (19th century name, 20th century dress, etc) show that Randall hasn't really thought through what is going on in this comic. He hasn't pinned down the context. I think the other problems flow from that one: he didn't build this idea on a solid foundation, and the confusion about time is a part of that.

The second is about how he is writing to her. When I wrote that he was either IMing or sending a letter, I was, of course, being too limited. What I meant was that he is either writing to her in a format where he writes the entire message, sends it, and then she gets it all at once and reads it (e-mail, regular mail) or he is writing to her in a more conversational style, where he writes to her, she "communicates" back (not with words, but with bullets) and he then talks about the new thing she's "said" ("shot"). In any case, neither really makes sense.

Lastly, some people pointed out a much better joke that this could have been, and maybe it's even the joke he was trying to make. Basically, the better comic would have the image of a soldier writing a letter, and it would talk about how much he misses his darling Cordelia etc, etc, he just wants to see her again, etc, the usual stuff you'd expect. Then, as the comic progresses, you realize (perhaps the bullets give it away, perhaps this version would do something else) that he is writing about his enemy. That would be a reversal from what you are expecting in the first half. It might even be funny, maybe. As it is though, the comic starts with him saying that he's writing to his enemy ("through my telescopic sights") before the shooting starts, so it really makes no sense at all.

OK, i really should get started on the rage for comic 770 now...