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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, May 29, 2012

1061: Bad timing

xkcd presents
Earth Standard Time
(EST)
A universal calendar for a universal planet
EST is…
simple • clearly defined • unambiguous
free of historical baggage • compatible with old units
precisely synced with the solar cycle • free of leap years
intermittently amendable to date math

Units
Second:1 S.I. second
Minute:60 seconds
Hour:60 minutes
Day:1444 minutes

(24 hours 4 minutes)


Month:30 days
Year:12 months

Rules
For 4 hours after every full
moon, run clocks backward.

The non-prime-numbered minutes of
the first full non-reversed hour after
a solstice or equinox happen twice.

EpochTime zones

00:00:00 EST,
January 1, 1970
= 00:00:00 GMT,
January 1, 1970
(Julian calendar)
The two EST time zones are
EST and EST (United Kingdom)
These are the same except that the
UK second is 0.944 standard seconds

Daylight saving:
Countries may enter DST,
but no time may pass there.
Narnian Time:
Synchronized ✔
Year zero
EST does have a year 0.
(However, there is no 1958.)


Title: EST; alt-text: The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.

Greetings, hyphenators (all 6 of you). Jon Levi posing as Capn here, and reminding you now that I still have the power to post reviews.

1061 was, in my opinion, so uniquely bad among xkcd, I think a cartoon vagina might have actually improved it. It's so bland that the pretense of setup and punchline have lost all meaning.

Instead of a setup, we get this very dry description of a universal time system that is (upon closer inspection) obviously absurd. I didn't notice how stupid it was supposed to be at first, because I didn't realize it was meant to be funny.

The closest thing we get to a punchline is a joke about there being no 1958, which is kinda funny, but not punchline material. It's a throwaway joke, like the little landmarks in the Online Communities maps. Now it has become the main joke. Oh how Randall has fallen since then.

1061 has no semblance of a framing device. It's not set up as the argument between two stick people about timekeeping. It's not a wacky new system that some country's government forced people to use. But instead the timekeeping system is presented as is.

The reason I typed it out in HTML is because it loses nothing of it's original meaning. In fact it's better that way, because you don't have to look at Randall's stupid, stupid handwriting. And the small text is actually legible with the naked eye.

Webcomics are a visual medium, which this comic just wasted. If a joke can be told with only text, then why bother making it an image? It's like watching radio on the TV, or one of those stupid Youtube videos that's just a slideshow of images. It's a webcomic that contains only frigging text. That's so bloody lame!

This isn't picto-blog material. This is barely blog material.

6 comments:

  1. This comic review will be syndicated to no-Hyphen in two days. Enjoy it now while it's EXCLUSIVE to Hyphen.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whenever someone points out that an XKCD comic is not funny or that it's hard to understand, or that it's not funny BECAUSE it's hard to understand, there's inevitably at least one Randystan who shows up to proclaim "You're just bitter because you're NOT SMART ENOUGH to understand it!"

    Hey, Randystans? Remember http://xkcd.com/169/ ? In Randy's own words, "Communicating badly and acting smug when you're not understood is not cleverness."

    And neither is this comic. It's neither clever nor funny. It's not anything, except confusing and bad.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's not communicating badly. You just can't understand it. Make your own web comic that ends up with published books and over 1,000 comics, THEN you can rag on other comics.

    Stop being an Internet tough guy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I can rag on whatever I want... I've tried to make web comics so I know it's hard... so is making music and movies and writing books... I don't have written a book that sells a million copies in order to say Twilight is a terrible book and I don't have to make a successful webcomic to say that a webcomic is dumb.

    ReplyDelete
  5. SinbadEV grunted,

    ".....I don't have written a book that sells a million copies....."

    And we are the poorer for it.

    "......Communicating badly and acting smug when you're not understood is not cleverness...."

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is what I get for trying to satiate my curiosity at 2AM on a weekday.

    2 month old doppelganging.

    I hate you all.

    ReplyDelete