Comic 952: The Trouble With Punchlines

[Comic title: Stud Finder; alt text: According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.]

Randy has this problem with punchlines. Usually he writes what we have started calling post-punchline dialog, wherein his characters comment on the punchline after it's happened, really stealing the thunder from the moment by letting it drag on too long. Perhaps in response to this, we get this comic.

So, rather than ending the comic one sentence before the punchline, Randy actually prevents Black Hat Guy from actually delivering the punchline--we are left to assume he was about to offer a Stud Finder Finder (I have been unable to find any cuddlefish who disagree on this premise, unfortunately). But he cuts himself off before he actually delivers the joke.

And then--AND THEN!--he still adds the post-punchline dialog. "Your joke is bad and I want you to shut up," he says to himself, which, I mean. That's what we've been saying to you for years, Randy. It's okay to stop.

Comics 950 and 951: Around The World Of Terrible Comics

950. Alt text: The Roanoke Lost Colonists founded Roanoke, the Franklin Expedition reached the Pacific in 2009 when the Northwest Passage opened, and Jimmy Hoffa currently heads the Teamsters Union--he just started going by 'James'.

Every now and then Randy thinks that he is capable of producing humor of the absurd variety: wouldn't it just be WACKY if Amelia Erhart didn't get lost but was actually just flying around the world REALLY SLOWLY? Imagine how funny that would be! And then she'd come back and she'd be all "sup guys I made it" and people would be like "BUT YOU DISAPPEARED" and then because she's a woman she'd be like "lol you are male and therefore too dumb to even appear in the same panel as me! Maybe you should fetch a woman because women are way smarter than guys, whose primary purpose should be protecting ladies on the internet, AMIRITE?"

...I think that one got away from me a bit. The point is: lolrandumb humor is not funny, and it is even less so when Randy does it, because you can tell he's really trying to make it smart, even though it's still nothing more than lolrandumb. I hope this isn't a new trend, because these are extra annoying.

Also, special shout out to "what's that airplane?" as one of the dumbest things any human has ever written, ever.


951. Alt text: And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.

Yet another comic in which Randy uses maths to prove that you're really dumb! How dumb are you? You're so dumb you think that saving money is worthwhile! Don't you know that spending less money is only worthwhile if it pays better than minimum wage? What, you mean you don't have a limitless supply of income from doing no work three times a week? What kind of chump are you?

Apparently in Randy's world, spending NINE WHOLE MINUTES going out of your way to save money is the dumbest thing you can do, because apparently every goddamned second of this life is precious and to spend it doing something like pumping gas is utterly demeaning! You could be out there writing about breast milk on Google + and making shitty chart comics about cancer for your webcomic! Life is too short to waste any time on saving money when you don't have to worry about saving money!

Listen, Randy, you worthless little condescending shit. Some people don't have the luxury of sitting on their ass all day to make a tidy income selling awful t-shirts and posters to awful people who want to identify themselves as fans of your awful comic so they can have awful conversations about your awful comic with your other awful fanboys. Some people "work for less than minimum wage" to save money because otherwise they would not be able to afford what they are buying in the first place--or buying it would make them unable to afford something else they want or need. Some people have to make tough financial decisions. (This to say nothing of the fact that a lot of individual savings--a dollar here, a dollar there--can really add up over time.)

And what kind of a stupid measure of worth-your-timeness is that, anyway? When you spend ten minutes to buy twenty dollars of groceries, you are paying sixty 120 [ha ha ha my bad -Ed.] dollars an hour for the privilege of eating!!! When you tip a dollar for the drink it took you a minute to get you are paying the bartender sixty dollars an hour!!! This is a fundamentally dishonest way of thinking about money, spending, and saving.

And just look at that fucking alt text. "No matter how worthless your time is to you"--as if that's the only reason for someone to spend a little extra time in order to save money. Because your time is worthless to you.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Randy is using dubious math and dishonest statistics to prove that some useless aspect of his personality is actually desirable, but there you are.

Comics 948 and 949: Burning Randy

948. Alt text: And they both react poorly to showers.
Randy is jealous of his loser tech friends who have the money and free time to go down to Burning Man, a festival (?) which is populated mostly by sad tech people desperately trying to prove to themselves and others that they are wacky and fun.


949. Alt text: Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear.
This one has all of Randy's favorite vices in it. Dialog that in no way resembles how a human talks--let's imagine the conversation if we could actually hear what the other person was saying.

Randy: He can email it to--
Fred: It's 25 MB.
Randy: Oh, it's 25 MB? Do either of you have an FTP server?
Fred: No.
Randy: No, right. Well, we could use dropbox--
Fred: Actually he just drove over to my house with a USB drive.
Randy: Oh, he just drove over to your house with a USB drive?

Brilliant! We've also got a wall of text accompanying a completely useless illustration. Thanks for drawing a dude on a phone, Randy! There's NO WAY we could have figured out what was going for otherwise, you paragon of sophistication, you.

Next, Randy seems to think that a 25MB attachment should be a problem for most email services--gmail, at least, has a 25MB limit. Maybe it's slightly above that limit in size, but it would be a lot more compelling if the file size was something that was somehow difficult to deal with. Similarly, his reason for avoiding MegaUpload-style sites is that they're full of porn popups. Randy has consistently demonstrated that he doesn't seem to know that adblock exists--making multiple comics whose original filenames get blocked by adblock, and now acting like porn popups are insurmountable. This is especially odd since Randy brought us this comic. Perhaps he's stopped using it since then? But speaking as someone who has sent and received a lot of files using such services: they work fine, especially if you're only sending one file. AIM file transfers are sometimes flaky but are hardly worth dismissing out of hand.

And of course we have the captioning-something-that-doesn't-need-a-caption, Randy's old trademark. "In case you didn't get it, this was an incredibly nuanced depiction of the problems with sending large files over the internet. I know you were wondering what it was about."

Oh, and I almost forgot the meaningless name-dropping in the alt text! The inventor of the World Wide Web definitely cries when you . . . use web-based email to store a file for easy access on other computers, I guess? Because it wasn't an explicitly intended purpose of the web, even though "storing something for easy access on other computers" seems like it's more or less the entire point of the web? And using something in a way which wasn't explicitly intended is a bad thing which makes its creators weep instead of a clever way to get around some of the problems technology presents?

You're supposed to like these workarounds, Randy.

Comic 947: Randy's School of Investment

[Comic title: Investing; alt text: But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.]

Before we go into this comic, I'd like to point out that this is not the original comic that Randall posted. The number in the original comic was $1279, a number which is apparently in error (I obviously am far too lazy to check this sort of shit). I guess $1219 is the correct number, though. Good thing Randy takes the time to proofread and then inform everyone of his mysterious edits!

Now, the comic itself. It looks like Randy's really upping the sneering disdain for concepts he doesn't understand lately--this is two of the past three comics where he sets up a smugness strawman! This time it's investing. "Investing is dumb," he says. "If instead of investing $1000 you got a job writing a shitty stick figure comic thrice-weekly, you'd have way more money in ten years. I mean, I get a thousand dollars every time I sneeze, and I don't even have to try!"

Those of you who aren't some form of shelf fungus might have noticed that this is a false dichotomy. In Randy Land you can either invest, or you can try to make more money. It's impossible to do both! And since the return on a relatively tiny amount of money over time is also pretty tiny, it's better to just make more money, instead of relying on that whole investing stuff.

I'm not here to advise you on your investing future, of course, but the premise here (investment is dumb) seems rather flawed. Indeed, there is an entire segment of the population which makes its living entirely on investment. It's kind of a thing. Now, far be it from me to question the financial wisdom of Randall Munroe, who was totally a NASA PHYSICIST before he was a t-shirt salesmen, but I think it is worth observing that the ultra-rich, who are ultra-rich and have lots of money, invest.

This comic has, predictably, started plenty of nerd arguments about economics and maths, but none of it is interesting, except for the nerds who seem to think that you can get a guaranteed eight percent return on investments somewhere, which, where do I sign?

Comic 946: Bump My Sticker

[Comic title: Family Decals; alt text: My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.]

This comic is so incredibly boring I'm not even going to comment on it, except to make this observation about the art:

It looks as if Randy has spent a great deal of time to make these cars, no doubt working from a photo he himself took. And yet there is something fundamentally off about them. They look acceptable, sure, but it is immediately apparent even at a glance that this is not the work of a talented artist; this is the work of a man who, given ample time, is capable of making something which looks acceptable.

Normally I'd say his gifts lie elsewhere, but unfortunately he hasn't yet demonstrated that he has any gifts to speak of, and like Marlow before me, I hate lies. They smell funny.

[Update: hahaha I linked the comic URL instead of the comic image, MY BAD]
[Further update: IT'S ALL FIXED NOW HAPPY?]