Comic 798: Fucking as Shit

[Alt: 'Fucking ineffable' sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase.]

This Tuftean bullshit has got to stop. There was that stuff about which numbers turn up most in google searches, that stuff about which games people get naked to, and which memes have apparently existed, and google proving that you need to kiss more people. I don't know who finds google search results interesting or funny, but it's certainly not me.

Apparently more obscure adjectives are combined with obscene intensifiers less regularly than more common adjectives. This is not particularly exciting; the sorts of people who use the word "evanescent" are probably a bit more of a careful, erudite (erudite as shit) lot, and less prone to vulgarity.

I guess part of the point of this comic is that some words turn up with certain foul-languaged descriptions more often than with others. I don't know. The visual display is actually pretty damn crappy (it's pretty fucking pretty darn crappy) so I can't tell just by looking. The horizontal axis is a measure of frequency of "fuck" or "shit" occurrences relative to non-fuck-shit occurrences, but since it's the natural log of the ratio I can't intuitively see whether some of these patters are meaningful or not.

All the other problems with this graph are generally the same as the ones linked to above (and linked to here as well).

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Take a look at comic 5, panel 3 in today's Kate Beaton. Then take a look at today's Kris Straub. What's up with that? I guess it's a coincidence? Or perhaps there is some greater cultural reference that I do not understand.

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 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."