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 747: Nerds and "Nerds"

I think chart comics generate a weird little subset of controversy in the webcomic world. Some people think they are great, a way to express a funny idea in an amusing, specific way. Others think they are lazy, allowing an artist to get away with drawing nothing but points, bars, or circles. My own opinion is that there is nothing wrong with charts as a comic medium, but that they are too often a crutch for writers who can't think of anything better to make jokes about.

There is, on the internet, a strain of thought that glorifies the Nerd. It is the mindset, if I may generalize horribly, that loves John Hodgman, loves arguing about operating systems, spends most waking hours on Reddit, spends most of their income at ThinkGeek.com, and most importantly, loves announcing their nerdiness to the world. Nerdy is the new cool, to some people. Now, the one thing one might expect from this neo-nerddom that is not actually true is that they are really nerds. They like to think they're smart - and many are - but more important than being smart is pretending to be smart, acting like you love nerdy jokes and nerdy references. It's about the culture, not anything that culture originally stood for.

Of course, a central tenet of this blog is that swirling at the center of this faux-nerdery is the comic xkcd: it's perfect for people who want to say they read a nerdy comic but don't actually want to read jokes that require anything more than a passing knowledge of high school science and the more popular of the 4chan memes. Like many groups, the fake-nerds feel a compulsion to define themselves, in order to make themselves more confident that they are in a special group while Certain Others are not in it (this is why some xkcd apologists feel so strongly that if someone doesn't like xkcd, they must not actually be a nerd, ie, they are "not in the target audience").

The point of all this meandering is that if there is one way to pander to "nerds," it's to reassure them that yes, they are nerds, and tell them exactly where you think the boundaries lie. As comic, it isn't very funny. Let's do a quick experiment: Compare the comic above with the sentence: "The only people who care about the distinction between 'geeks' and 'nerds' are those who are both." I think it says exactly what the comic says, though it's presented entirely verbally and not visually. Is it funny? I don't think so. But you can find out for yourself: Ask a friend who has not read the comic if they think that sentence is funny. Does changing it to a graph make it any better? I'd say no. I'd love to hear reason why I'm wrong, though, but I basically think that this is a statement of a banal fact and nothing more.

It's also odd that the comic itself presents one definition of geeks/nerds, and the alt-text an entirely contradictory one (it says that nerds are a subset of geeks, ie, all nerds are geeks but not all geeks are nerds).

that is all.


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Did anyone else think that Scott Kurtz came off as kind of an asshole in the most recent Penny Arcade TV? I don't read PVP so perhaps I am not in the best place to judge, but he mostly just seemed annoying and somewhat self-important, like pvp is one of the most important webcomics there is.

Guys: probably you heard this already, but Kate Beaton got a cartoon published in the New Yorker! You can see it here. Of course, the New Yorker is a different medium from webcomics, but still, to get published there is quite a big deal and could be a major point in her career, not to mention it could influence some other webcomic artists as well. What do you guys think of it?

Comic 715: Googley Eyed

holy lord YES we get another graph comic! I have been waiting for these! And not just any graph comic, a TURBOCHARGED one! with 10 different graphs!

ughhghhghghhhg

i hate these types of "comics". For one thing, I am sick of them. There was the one where he talked about kissing people. There was that one about death. There was that made up one about where people are searching for what. Just a few weeks ago there was that naked games one.

The worst, though, was when we had a comic that proved that "2 girls 1 cup" was a more popular phrase than putting other numbers the the "x girls y cups" formula. HOLY SHIT! it's only like there was a popular internet meme about "2 girls 1 cup" and there WASN'T ONE for "6 girls 5 cups." Why is anyone surprised by this?

The corresponding graphs in today's comic are "[x bottles of beer on the wall," "there are [x]lights," "drink [x] glasses of water a day" and "I got [x] problems." All of these have a common phrase they are associated with where a single specific number is used for X. Of course "I got 99 problems" will be an outlier. That's cause no one has written a popular song called "I got 39 problems"! What's the point? Maybe for "there are [x] lights" the point is that the nerd reference to star trek has permeated the internet enough that 4 is actually an outlier, but still, when your point is "star trek nerds spend a lot of time online" I can hardly care.

Anyway, that only takes us through 4 of the 10 graphs. Let's talk about the other 6. Tell me if you see a pattern:

-Number of girl- or boyfriends
-Age and lack of boyfriends (oddly, no corresponding one for girlfriends, here)
-penis length
-What middle or high school grade one is it
-bra size
-intelligence

Do you see what I mean? It's weirder because he doesn't actually draw attention to it in the comic - these are interspersed with the others. But the point is still: High schoolers, sexyparts, needing a boyfriend. Doesn't that make anyone else...a little creeped out?
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What I really hate about these google comics is that they really, truly, have no point. You'll note that with these comics, Randall never actually tells you what you should think about any of this, never interprets the data he gives you. He just presents it. That's because, I think, he respects the scientific method enough to realize that the data he is showing you is woefully unscientific. Google results vary wildly depending on who is doing them (based on what links you've clicked on before, where you are, etc) and anyway, the number of times something is said online is indicative of very little beyond the number of times that this is said online. It tells you nothing about how people actually use that phrase in real life. Sometimes, if you are very careful, you can extrapolate more from the data, but Randall doesn't even try. He just presents the facts as being interesting on their own, which - sorry! - they are not.

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Actually, not only is the data not interesting, it's not even accurate. People were arguing, quite violently, about this in the comments, so I chose one and decided to check.

I decided to look at one of the more illogical ones, the one that searched for "I'm and have never had a boyfriend." The results were: this comic is crazy wrong! The comic says that the results for 17, 18, and 19 (the outlier and the two data points next to it) are ~450,000, ~700,000, and ~400,000, respectively. My results were as follows:



if X = 17 : 8,790




if X = 18 : 9,940




if X = 19 : 5,910

How on earth did he get into the hundreds of thousands range? I have no idea. I know that some of you are thinking "well try it without quotes" but that a) is pointless, because then each age is likely to turn up in searches for other ages, and b) the results without searches make all the numbers jump up to the millions range (perhaps because of problem a). So I don't know what to conclude from this, besides the fact that Randall is just wrong.

I'm not going to bother with the others because I am lazy. I am sure some are right, I am sure that some are wrong. He's got a lot of numbers there. But it makes me think that Randall just made up some of these, which really is just sad. You can't find lame google searches on your own, so you make up boring results? Quite a good job you've got there. Quite a good job.

you have so much to be proud of

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I totally forgot to link to this the other day, but a certain Suit made of Chainsaws seemed to be taking a direct shot at xkcd the other day. Given that it came the day after the "i know two things with the word ring in them" comic, and that it is basically an "I know two things with the word code in them" comic, I think it's pretty clearly about xkcd in particular. Also, xkcd shirts cost $48.

Comic 696: All The Cleverness Stripped Away

Boston, MA. 11:56 pm, Sunday. A young man thinks to himself.

Think, Randall! Just concentrate and think. You can DO this, Randall. You made almost 700 great comics and you are going to give up now? No fucking way! Bring on the Munroe Genius, man, bring it on like you do every monday, wednesday, and friday without fail. Come on.

Make a comic about something you like. What do you love? Lots of things. Aaagh, think. Sex! You like sex. And nudin' it up. Lots of naked folks, that's good. Good! You can work with this. Sexy times.

What do your readers like? Ugh, they are all a bunch of nerds. All they do is play nerd games and have nerdgasms and shit. What can I throw them to make them like this comic? What nerd games are out there?

wait. some of your readers just like math. FUCK. What can I do for them? fuuuuuuck. dammit. Gotta think of something.

And how can I combine these ideas? There must be a way. There must. You didn't become king of the internet by haphazardly smacking together random different ideas.

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Perhaps, one day long ago, you learned that any fortune cookie can be made more hilarious by adding the phrase "in bed" to the end. This is because when you heard this, you were in seventh grade, and nothing was more funny to you than the idea of sex, or as you called it at the time, "doin' it." For some of you, this is still the most hilarious thing there is. So just by taking something boring, a fortune cookie, and sexin' it up, you ended up with a foolproof formula for the world's greatest jokes.

Today's xkcd makes comedy history by providing a slight variant on that theme. Instead of "in bed" [havin' sex], he adds "without clothes" [havin' sex]. Different words, yes; different idea, no. Apparently, some people think it is funny to take nerdy games (or in the end, not even real games, like Conway's Game of Life) and make 'em naked. But that's stupid.

Apparently, some people are dumb enough that you can literally just stick a "guaranteed Komedy Gold formula" in from of them and they will take your bait. Because it is literally a formula: Take the game name, and add "strip" in front of it. THE END. This works equally well for any game. Strip Bible Trivia? Strip Plants vs. Zombies? Strip Russian Roulette [which is funnier than anything randall mentioned]? All of these are exactly as funny at the ones in the list. If the point of the comic is to say that some of these are less common than others, that's equally stupid. Because the results are exactly what you would expect. If it turned out to be different - lots of people playing strip prisoner's dilemma, for example - then it might be funny. But as it is, he's just saying, "hey look, fewer people get naked playing chess by mail than playing beer pong" and I go "DUHHHHH, what other brilliant insights have you got, Mr. NASA?" "



This is also another in a long list where Randall gives us notoriously-innacurate google results for something, as a way to try to prove some point he is making. See also: Silly ways to die, kiss more people, the right number of girls for the right number of cups, etc (update: and ninja turtles, if you read the methodology). It's a silly way to present data for a number of reasons, but my favorite is the one Sam pointed out here: you'll get a lot of results for "strip " that are not referring to a version of the game where people strip. When Randall gives us these google search comics, I always get the sense that he doesn't really want to show us the results he found as much as the clever search he came up with.


Why did he choose N to be his ratio variable? N should refer to the total sample size, ie, the denominator. Right?

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In other news, Dinosaur Comics celebrated its 7th birthday yesterday with what I thought was the funniest comic in months (and a rare comic that had its funniest line at the very end), while over in Achewood Heights someone also made me laugh really, really hard. Did anyone make an hourly comic yesterday, on hourly comic day? Let us know and share a link. I made one but I am not going to link to it, it did not turn out that well.

Comic 688: There Is No Title For My Post About Comic 688

OK guys, I've said this before. I love self-reference. I don't know why. I think it's hilarious. I love Stephen Colbert's portrait. I love the question "What question is its own answer?" and other Douglas Hofstadter-type sentences. Yet, I don't like this comic.

I think it's because this comic acts like it is really clever and took a lot of hard work when it clearly didn't. Especially if you read the alt-text ("...The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop..."), he's trying to act like the fact that he made this is somehow impressive. Now he's made impressive comics in the past, but this isn't one of them. for one thing, he has his usual habit of not labeling his axes (where the hell did he learn math, anyway?). "Fraction of this image" in panel 1 is not a fraction at all, but merely a piece of a pie chart (and while we're at it, it's a total copy of the Pac Man thing). He could have at least called it a percentage and included a label with a percent in each segment.

Panel 2 could also be labeled better. I mean, ink can be measured (either by volume if we are still pretending this is real ink on real paper, or area). I mean, there is no "amount" anywhere in there. A line is not an amount.

Panel three is the least clear; I think he just wanted to include images of all the panels, including a tiny little version of panel three itself (even this concept is not new to Randall). Why are there 0s at the beginning? What unit does that represent? I guess it's distance in each direction, in some kind of unit. I think what annoys me is that such a graph is meaningless - a chart is supposed to organize data into a useful (well, ok, sometimes) form - a chart that represents its subject by recreating it is missing the point. It's just a replica; it doesn't tell you anything you can't figure out from the original.

Also, saying "this image" in the first and last panels is unclear; it could refer to the panel or the comic as a whole. In this case it is the latter, still, using the word "comic" would be nice. Or even make it one big panel/image, then you wouldn't have the problem. Thought I guess that would invalidate the bar graph, so never mind.

Lastly, the alt-text. It's another case where I think he had two different ideas and just figured, the hell with it, I'll include both. The first was trying to make this whole thing seem fancier than it is, as I mentioned above, and the second was trying to work in a comment in the alt-text about the alt-text. I was disappointed that he went for counting characters, though, since i think that's a bit too easy (for example, he could replace two hundred and forty-two" with "220" and it would also work). That's especially true given that he has more content in the alt-text than just the description of itself, so if it had added up wrong he could always change it to "two hundred and forty-six" and just add four more characters somewhere. Not terribly complicated.

I was hoping he would go for the more challenging variant of listing how often each letter occurs, like so:

This sentence contains three a's, one b, three c's, two d's, thirty e's, two f's, two g's, nine h's, nine i's, one j, one k, one l, one m, twenty two n's, thirteen o's, one p, seven r's, twenty one s's, twenty three t's, three v's, eight w's, and five y's.

(this sentence comes from here, see way too much of this nonsense over here). That would actually take effort, unless a website exists just to create such a thing. Does it?

Of course, the best irony is that the whole thing is utterly wrong; there is also lots of gray ink all over the place that is not accounted for anywhere. here, look:

Just look at all that gray surrounding the black! it's not in the pi chart at all. Next time, try aliasing, randall.

Also, this. Also, this.

PS - reading that Randall Munroe guest strip on dinosaur comics makes me feel so very weird, with my least favorite writer putting words into the mouths of my most favorite comic's characters. It is perhaps the closest I will ever get to the Capgras Delusion.

PPS - what?
PPPS - ok, this makes up for it.

Comic 657: Wayward Journeys

I know i usually forget to do this, but I'm making this post now in case you want to talk about the highly unusual comic 657. Yes, I know that if you read this by RSS feed, it makes it more difficult. To you people I say, just check back wednesday night. Also, if you are reading this by RSS you are most likely Rob, in which case i hate you and you should get the hell off my blog.

A few quick thoughts

-Regardless of what anyone says, this comic is very, very impressive, and clearly took a lot of thought and care to produce. I don't want to think about how hard it is. This doesn't excuse any of Randall's earlier lazy comics, but it does show that when he wants to, he can do something intense like this.

-to the always classy sje on the forums: You are a moron, there is only one critic on this site who matters, and that is me, and I read it right, and have seen the movie like a billion times. That clever little "let the voice of one person stand in for the whole website" is lame, and if I were to use it, I might assume that all of the xkcd forums were filled with giant assholes that reveled in the mistakes of others.

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PS i thought of an xkcd comic today and I want to say it now, so xkcd fans can tell me is sucks and then will have to backtrack when xkcd inevitably makes the same joke - it would basically a twitter post version of Fermat's last theorem, saying that 140 characters was not enough to explain it fully. Math reference + Internet Twist = XKCD Gold.

also, how long before we get a logical journey of the zoombinis comic? Maybe Mr. Hat is playing the game and uses all sorts of practical, assholeish tactics to avoid the usual logical rules.

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OK. Now it's time to get down and write about this comic.

This is an impressive comic. A lot of the usual anti-xkcd folks are impressed with it, and I fall into that category as well. Let's break it into two distinct parts, the charts themselves and the joke or jokes.

The charts are cool. Now granted, this sort of thing is not original; the most famous chart in the world (according to some sources), the Napoleon's Forces one, is of this style. It's actually a chart which xkcd has referenced before (incidentally, I could have sworn he referred to it twice. lots of cookies to whoever can find another example). Even the idea of doing it for a story dates at least to Slaughterhouse-Five, as many people have pointed out. But that's really not the point - I don't want to criticize him for that; unlike many other examples it's really completely fine that he's done this. I just want to make sure that all the fans who are like "oh wow he is so brilliant to think of using graphics to see where people move as time goes on!" know that they are dumb.

The Lord of the Rings chart, covering 1000 pages of novel as it does, is of course the most impressive. Particularly if it was done entirely freehand, as I suspect, it would have taken many tries and many drafts, and many consultations of the book. His blog post sheds a tiny amount of light on this (but I warn you - do not click on that animation link at the end....). The Star Wars graph, while clearly simpler, is also impressive on its own. And I guess Jurassic Park as well.

The presentation of the graphs leaves a bit to be desired - on the front page, they are just far too small to make anything of, and the "joke panels," discussed below, are shunted off in the bottom where the eye is not really able read them, let alone concentrate on them. But is there anyone out there who seriously doubts that this will not be turned into a poster, probably before christmas, and that Randall had this in mind when he made it? Any copyright lawyers out there who know if this would constitute fair use or not?

But of course, xkcd is a comic, and so it can't just show you something cool, no matter how cool it is. It has to make a joke. And this comic, I think, tries to make two. First, 12 Angry Men, a great movie but one where nearly the whole thing takes place in one jury room, so the chart version is comically simple. Ha ha, I guess. You wonder why he didn't go even more sparse and do a well known two-person movie, like My Dinner With Andre. Or a single line with The Cube. Whatever.

Then the real joke is the last graph, Primer, a movie so complicated that I've seen it 4 times and still have some key questions about just what is happening. It's not the crazy jumble that Randall makes it out to be (for one thing, like most time travel stories, the time travelers create duplicates of themselves when they go back in time) and it is, in fact, comprehensible. Nonetheless, that is how the movie feels, the first time you watch it. Unfortunately, I couldn't enjoy the joke. So few people know this movie that to me it just felt like Randall the insecure nerd trying to prove that he's heard of this cool nerd movie. Most people who have just discovered it, like me, did so either directly or indirectly because The Onion AV Club brought it a lot of attention this summer. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Randall just watched it recently, and wants to tell people - like he did with House of Leaves - that he is just as well versed in nerdery as they.

In comparison to the nearly overwhelming impact of the "serious" panels, these last two jokes ("12 angry men is simple" and "primer is complicated") seem pretty pathetic. Why not just skip them entirely and leave us with only the high quality stuff?

Of course, had he done that, there's a good chance I would have said "this is cool and all, but it's not funny. It's not trying to be funny. Isn't xkcd supposed to be a webcomic?" and I would have been right.

That's why Randall Munroe should stop trying to be funny, as I have said a thousand times. By trying and failing, he's just bringing down the quality of the good stuff, like the serious panels in this comic. That's why he needs to scrap the webcomic format entirely and move all his fans over to Randall Munroe's World-Famous Death Defying Amazing Picto-Blog and he should do it as soon as he possibly can.

This was a very cool installment of xkcd. But it only reinforced to me that Randall does have good ideas, and xkcd is not the best channel for them.

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PS here is something interesting - looks like xkcd is now overtly objectifying women for profit. I wasn't expecting that.

Comic 592: Drama Is The Opposite of Comedy

I told myself I was going to try to find something I like about every comic, just to do something new and maybe slightly more constructive. It would be a good way to think about things. But then I read this comic and I was like, "Well let's wait a comic before getting started...." because 592 is just awful.

Now it has some of the usual problems with xkcd that we see all the time - "boo hoo, I struggle with relationhips constantly" with a healthy dose of charts as well - but there's crappiness of a nature exclusive to this strip as well.

Probably the worst thing is that this is an old fucking idea (as well as, ahem, an old 'fucking idea' ZING) with an old established outcome that is somehow presented as being clever and insightful. Probably the best, best-known, and most similar to the xkcd example I can think of is the Seinfeld episode that wikipedia tells me is called "The Deal" Seriously, read their synopsis of it - it's the same fucking thing (as well as the same, ahem - ha ha, nope).

But it's an older idea than that. Hell, the idea of having a friend with whom one has sexual relations yet with whom one is not romantically involved should even have a name! Something like "Compatriots with advantages," say, or "chums with perks" or maybe "mates you mate with" or "comrades with values" or "partners minus costs" or "friends with benefits" or something to describe this situation Randall has created. I don't know, you guys pick something.

Now I know some people have said this comic reminds them of a Dinosaur Comic but honestly I don't really see it - maybe in that qwantz has a way of saying "woah, here's a problem with the world, why hasn't anyone fixed it?" and then in the next panel the problem has been fixed. But honestly I didn't really see a connection.

In conclusion: This idea is old, don't throw your fucked up relationships on us, you sucks, stop graphing things it's why no one likes you, i hate you, the end.

And I swear I am going to be more positive in the future! SWEAR

Comic 523: Randall Speaks To Us

Hello chaps and chapettes, this is Thomas and I'll be providing a week of snarkiness in Carl's absence. I was nervous about what Randall would hit to me for the start of the week, but now I can rest easy and let his fly ball(s) land directly in my mitt.

This is a combination of "we broke up" + "math in unlikely places," which makes me as repulsed as the out-of-frame lady must be. And the relationship dipped because of the sort of graphing he's doing at this moment! This is like a roommate resolving his gluttony by telling you, "I know you hate it when I clean out the pantry" as he finishes the last slice of pizza and flattens the last beer can against his forehead. And, like a bad roommate, Randall's not very good at recycling, either. There is no charty joke like Randall used to do, just a jokeless chart with one visible character defending its crappiness. He's taken an empty can, pissed in it, and pretended he just found it in the fridge for us.

Nobody's buying you beer anymore, Randall, even if it makes your physics, math, and word games more fun for you. Sober up, climb the 12 Steps (no need to draw memes on them or stretch them out to a weird scale), and when you see the trash you've let accumulate beneath you, hang yourself from the 12th step as a warning to other webcomic authors.

Comic 519: ARGHHHHHHHHHH

I know it's Rob's week but good god we have got some problems here. Make sure you read his post, but christ I just couldn't avoid a horrible rant of my own.

Ok I guess I will make a list or something.

1. This is yet another goddamn chart comic, making two comics in a row where the most complicated shape drawn is a parallelogram.

2. It doesn't make sense at all. Who's career is he talking about? His own? I think his drawing and "comedy" are probably helping him more with this particular career he has chosen, and I do believe he began this comic with drawings done...in class! For example, when he was in 11th grade! In fact, there is nothing about his career as a cartoonist that would be affected how much perl he knows except that he wouldn't be able to make jokes about perl, which isn't that often and they usually are lame anyway.

2a. Perhaps I am being to harsh on him. Perhaps he meant in general. Or wait, no, that's even stupider than the original idea. Very few jobs need to know perl. Sure, some do, and for those people "messing around" with it might be more helpful than class (unless you went to some kind of KRAZY PERSON SCHOOL where they taught entire classes about computer science!). Some jobs - chemist, biologist, mathematician, physisict, writer, historian, to name but a tiny fraction - are very much served by what the learn in high school. SORRY THEY CAN'T BE MORE LIKE YOU, RANDALL.

3. This comic goes against everything I think as a nerd. School was where learning happened! It makes people smarter! Now you've got a whole bunch of shitty forumites saying things like "glad to be unschooling with my kids" (I don't totally know what that means but I don't like it) or "Screw History, I'm not going to be a History teacher or a Historian!" which just makes me -and I'm not a historian, except of xkcd- feel terrible just a person who values knowledge and intelligence.

4. Randall, you are 24 years old. You graduated from college two years ago. Are you really at the right age to decide what skills are best needed for a career? Your career is currently selling t-shirts with pictures and words to people who find them amusing.

5. Leaving aside what actually helps you in life, for you to say that you know better than all your teachers - even if, miraculously, you are right about all this and the graph is 100% accurate - is still ungodly arrogant and I want to punch you in the face.

6. Oh, alt-text. You loveable little motherfucker you. "And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined." AWWWW, YOU SHOULD TALK TO STRANGE KIDS. IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT THERE IS FOR YOU TO DO! This is another of Randall's condescending "oh please, don't worry your little self, I know what is best for you to do" comments, like when he said "you should kiss people more!" or "the other time he told you to talk to strangers, as well as a lot more stuff" You know, I remember reading a comic once where a nerdy guy does this, he goes to talk to a girl because she seems quirky in an appealing way, and then it turns out she sucks. OH RIGHT THAT WAS XKCD, BACK WHEN IT DIDN'T SUCK WITH THE FERCIOUS POWER OF 2000 VACCUUM CLEANERS AND 8 BLACK HOLES. it was right here. It was a good comic! It made fun of the whole idea that it is a good idea to talk to strangers. It made you think it was going to do that preachy shit but then it didn't. Ahhh, the good old days...

7. I'm sorry, I just keep coming down to the outright lie of this. Really randall? You never used physics in your career? The one you had at NASA? You don't think math is important? And don't give me that "uhhhhh well the important stuff I learned in college" bullcrap because you sure as hell have to learn the basic stuff first, and you have to learn it somewhere.

8. All the stupid forum posts are about "duhhh this is true duhh school wuz boring ah ahm glad ah didn't pay atenshun" but the point of this comic isn't "school is useless" it's "the only really worthwile thing to do is fuck around with perl." And what the hell happened to Randall's "ha ha, perl SUXXX i'm using python now, bitches!" mindset? what made him change his mind??

9. This comic is terrible. Truly terrible, on basically every level. Sometimes I wonder how I would react if I met Randall Munroe, and I used to think I would be angry but at least polite. Now I am thinking I would just punch him in the face and leave. TOO BAD YOU DIDN'T LEARN HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF FROM PUNCHES IN YOUR PRECIOUS SCHOOL

Comic 519: The Worst Comic Ever Made

I am making an official declaration: this individual comic is, with no exceptions, the worst comic I have EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE. This includes print comics such as Garfield and the really bad political cartoons that crop up during election season. This is an abysmal piece of work and Randall ought to be ashamed of himself. ASHAMED. It is entirely indefensible. It is not funny, and it is far from insightful.

All right, stop me if you heard this one before. So an intelligent kid goes to high school and finds himself bored by all of his classes, assumes they are a waste of time because he is unchallenged, and in his free time adopts some other hobby that he finds to be challenging and rewarding, and he puts a lot more value on that activity and associates more positive memories with it, so he assumes it is a lot more important to the rest of his life. Then his parents take him to visit a college campus and when he meets with the admissions counselor he says "That's no admissions counselor, THAT'S MY WIFE."

Anyone?

So, it's a chart comic. Minus points for that. And it's not funny. I'm not even sure if it's trying to be funny, but if it's not it is even worse because it is also not insightful. Maybe he is going for (as the alt text implies) "It's amazing how much small decisions can totally change your life." And yes, true. I could tell you about countless tiny things that happened to me that have completely changed the course of my life. But this is (a) not a very insightful way of saying it, and (b) implying that these are the only decisions that actually matter.

Or perhaps he's making a comment about the education system. "Man, you don't learn anything important in school it's not like I'll be using any of this in my job, you don't know nothing this sucks" etc. This is not clever or insightful or useful; this is something high school students say when they don't want to do their work. Especially the intelligent ones who are doing other hobbies that they have decided they want to get paid for, like playing with Perl.

And now we move on to the feature known as "Rob Reads The Forums, So You Don't Have To." Not only is everyone agreeing with it "oh man that is so true," we have what counts as a Get Out Of My Head, Randall, and then an Obvious Troll who is my new personal hero (if you are this person PLEASE COMMENT I LOVE YOU). Mostly everyone seems to think that this comic is their new personal Jesus.

god why did i look at the forums i think it may have broken me YOU ALL BETTER APPRECIATE IT

Love,
Rob

UPDATE: I have replaced the link to the actual comic with a link to Carl's parody on his post. Which I am glad happened, because THERE IS NOT ENOUGH BAD STUFF TO WRITE ABOUT THIS COMIC. TONGUE NOR HEART CANNOT CONCEIVE NOR NAME THEE.

Comic 518: Diagram My Feelings

I should probably start by saying I was this close to liking this one. This is not a bad concept. I mean, it is not going to win any prizes for comedy, but it's a flowchart to explain flowcharts. That's amusing, right? Ha ha? So it has a decent structure. It starts as a flowchart, for one! While this might make it one of his many diagram comics at least it's not, like, "My hobby: making flowcharts to explain flowcharts." Bonus points for actually telling a joke!

Then he gets to the part at the end of a joke, it is the part which is supposed to be funny, what is it called, oh right THE PUNCHLINE. Right, he gets to the punchline and, uh. It is a random joke about... getting drunk and installing FreeBSD. FreeBSD is not a flowchart. It is an operating system.

So the flowchart joke never really happens. This is something you scribble on your napkin at the diner at 3 am, a half-formed idea in your head, its humor derived mostly from the context of the conversation, ultimately lost and discarded as the relic of a moment.

Am I alone in this one? I feel like jokes should have punchlines which are related to the premise of the joke. Unless it is a shaggy dog story, or The Aristocrats! etc, which is subverting the standard format of a joke. I mean, you could probably make a funny comic about recursive flowcharts. You might even be able to make one about 'woo I am drunk let's install FreeBSD' but I doubt it.

But you can't just say "uh, man, FreeBSD is a six drink minimum and, uh. Flowcharts? Yeah, man."


CARL SAYS: "Also, you have to assume it's going to lose some points for saying 'presented in flow chart form' at the top there when it's pretty danged obvious from the, you know, flow chart sitting below it that there will, in fact, be flow charts involved. This comic to me felt like he started with a good idea and then gave up trying to make it really great. My mind keeps going back to 'Screw it' --> 'let's go drink' and imagining Randall saying that while drawing the last few panels. Also, Rob, hope you don't mind me invading your post like this. I didn't change anything, just added stuff. PS you are doing a heckuva job so far."

Comic 483: Number of Boring Chart Comics:Shittiness of Webcomic

This comic is pretty pathetic. Obviously there's no art of any kind, and it joins such illustrious chart-comics as 290, 231, 418, 252, and probably a bunch of others.

Also it's patently false. The forums are full of counterexamples, some of which I read and some of which I didn't, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't. The king of word-making-up is Shakespeare I understand, who in addition to the word "eyeball" made up tons of other words and also, in a Lord of the Rings coincidence, "the crack of doom" at least according to my high school copy of...I want to say...macbeth?

Anyway, this was lazy, phoned in, and a disappointing attempt to mock the fantasy / sci fi genre in a pretty standard way.

Comic 467: 1comic0jokes

[If you didn't see my post requesting general feedback about this blog, as well as an unsatisfying explanation for why posts are sporadic for the next 10 or so days, check it out here]

While I will almost surely regret this tomorrow, I am staying up Past My Bedtime to post some quick and fairly belated thoughts on this comic, because they are simple and short.

1 - Hey hey, just when I foolishly thought he'd already mocked every meme out there, he comes out with another one.

2 - Hey hey, just when I foolishly thought he'd gotten sick of goddamn google search . Dude: It's just a search engine. Relax, ok? We don't all want unscientific studies in place of our comics.

3 - "Cups" should be "cup/cups." With the plural in there, "2 girls 1 cups" is both ungrammatical and inaccurate, as a google search for it brought up, as of this writing, only 2,750 hits. You'd think that maybe he'd make mistakes elsewhere in the chart, not in the key block.

4 - What's the point? There's a popular well-known video online, and it has many google hits. But variations of its name do not! EUREKA. I must report these findings to the world!

Update: It's tomorrow, and I regret it!

Comic 458: Randall Tells You That You Are Not Kissing People Enough

I think we can all agree that this is not in any way a funny comic. Basically it's saying more mopey internet people wish they had kissed someone than wish they didn't, assuming they used the exact same phrasing as Randall used here.

ASTOUNDING!

The fact is that people don't do things more than they do things - for example, I currently regret not eating a burrito for lunch. I also regret not eating a delicious sandwich for lunch, I regret not eating several pounds of chocolate for lunch, and most of all, I regret not starting a multimillion dollar computer company during lunch, because I really would have liked that. It's not that people don't kiss each other enough, Randall, it's that people regret things more than they are glad about things they did do. That's why google gives 3 times as many hits for "I should have" as "I shouldn't have."

And anyway what is your point? That people often regret not kissing other people more than they regret kissing them, so you should kiss people more? Thanks for the tip, randall! Any other helpful advice? Because I have some advice for you: Stop writing a shitty romance advice comic, because we don't really care what you have to say.

And anyway, the "kiss people more" idea was already done way better by qwantz, and you can even buy that one on a shirt:

And as to the alt text - "And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie' " I can only say that currently, there are also no results for "I'm glad I read xkcd."

Comic 418: Stove Ownership

This is pretty funny. I like it. Reminds me a little of the "Times when I'm Happy / Times when I'm wearing pants" non-overlapping Venn diagram, though I'm not 100% sure why.

Oh and something wacky is happening with the links on xkcd - going to the homepage took me to the last comic, typing in the URL directly took me to this one, going to the homepage and clicking forward did nothing, and going to xkcd/417 and clicking forward took me to 418. Mysteries!