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Died in a Blogging Accident has lived up to its name and died... in a blogging accident. That is to say it has concluded. You can still re-live the magic by clicking here to start at chapter 1. For genuine criticism of XKCD, please click the top link to the right (XKCD Isn't Funny).

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Comic 989: The Door into Humour

Cryogenics
title: Cryogenics; alt-text: "'Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.' was the slogan of my astonishingly short-lived tech startup."

On the bus this morning (or technically while I was walking from the bus stop to the office) I was thinking "Since no-one has reviewed comic 989 I suppose I should at least put it up so people don't start commenting on it in the thread for 988." but alas, I was too late.

Leahcim said...
The new comic is an interesting halfway breed between a subversion and a shoehorn. After reading the first panel, I thought, "Yet another comic about how technology is changing fast. This is stupid. Life is stupid." Then, Randall Munroe took me in a completely different direction by making the comic about cryogenics. It felt kind of weird but an interesting twist at the time, and that feeling actually won't go away for me. Every time I read it over, I seem to be able to process it as both a cool twist and some stupid right turn in a disjointed comic. I think this is because it is actually the exact halfway point between the two, and it mediates the spectrum. So, not ideal in the "I-wanna-read-a-good-comic" sense, but very interesting to analyze from the literary point of view. A sort of metaproperty. Something for those searching for the next level of meaning. Something for those too bored out of their minds to do anything but criticize a lame but somehow popular webcomic all day long.



7 comments:

  1. http://xkcdprime.blogspot.com/2011/12/xkcd-989-cryogenics-web-you0-edition.html

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  2. Thanks for including my comment, but I was only drawing on one aspect of the comic. My next comment review will be much more fleshed-out, trust me. :D

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  3. Panel 5 alone could have worked.

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  4. Chainsawsuit is so great!

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  5. Your last paragraph is why I hate this comic. People don't become engineers so that they can wait to see what other people do. They become engineers so that they can do it themselves.

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  6. but... but chainsawsuit actually sucks... there aren't any jokes at all.

    I shouldn't even be commenting, since I definitely wasn't looking for an "XKCD sucks" page when I found this, but I've gotta say it's hilarious to find someone who can't spell 'sais' and uses 'then/than' improperly to critique the minutiae of a webcomic. XKCD is made up of stick people, yes, everyone knows that. The jokes are likely made as they flow out of someone's head, yep, that's pretty obvious too. They're still funny to the people who bother to check their site three days a week, so why does so much effort go into ripping each one apart...?

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  7. Oh yeah, and what I think this comic was getting at (besides the obvious) is that engineers are tech junkies. Yes they want to develop and change the future, but in their own time they're total nuts for the kind of stuff that doesn't make sense to other people, and they wish they had more to play with. I can't relate, but I know some are like that, which made this funny for me!

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