Comic 935: Randall's List

I know that by putting this review up so soon after Jon's bingo post might hide it from people, so, if you're into xkcd fora bingo, take a look here. It's good stuff.

And now, onto today's comic.


Title: Missed Connections; alt-text: The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.

Hmm...this looks kind of familiar. Where have I seen this before...

Oh. Right. Comic 886.

You know, that one was bad, but it still was better than this one. Comic 886 came from a time when Randall was too lazy to use a ruler to draw lines, but at least attempted to recreate the search fields on Craigslist. Guess that's too much work these days.

Anyway, this comic has -

No, hold on, I can't let this go yet. This is a LIST COMIC. "Drawing" it involved ONLY writing. How do you not have the time to make the header look tolerable? What is this? How LAZY do you have to be to make a comic like this, look at it, and think, "Yeah, that's probably good"? It's shorter than the apartments one as well, with exactly half the entries. Come on, Randall, if you can't give us quality, as least give us quantity. Make it look like you put SOME effort into your strip.

Anyway.

This comic has some wicked show-don't-tell issues; that is, Randall thinks of an arguably "humorous" interaction, and writes it down. Do we get to see it? Do we get context? Do we get a setup? No, no, and no. Although, to be fair, when Randall does start with a punchline and nothing else, he generally destroys it in trying to cram in a hastily written setup. Because of that, some might say this is an improvement. Unfortunately, a 60 is an improvement from a 50, but they're both still failing grades. An improvement from Randall at this point means jack squat.

Furthermore, the way I understand it (I've never used Craigslist), people use the "Missed Connections" section not just for the literal documenting of a missed connection, but also because they want to meet the person again. Why would a person avoiding a car accident care about hooking up with the driver? Why would a husband need to use this to MEET HIS WIFE? How would the wishing well killer EVER get a response? Everyone who goes there is a silhouette to him! Half of these don't even make sense.

Then of course there are the "lol google knows about you" jokes that aren't really funny. I thought I remembered some recent (but not THAT recent) commentary on Google reading emails, so I did a quick search. The oldest relevant article (on the front page!) is from 2007. Google Street View? Released the same year. It would be one thing if these privacy concerns are fresh, but they're not. All the jokes about Google's ubiquitousness have been done.

The only possible excuse I can think of for these constant dated references is that Randall has a big stack of ideas he's written long ago in case he can't think of something. But, as that's clearly not the case, I guess we can just chalk it up to Randall being a lazy, out of touch sham of a webcartoonist.