Comics 1262-1264: The Future of Xkcd

I hope you have noticed by now that I am incorrectly capitalising Xkcd on purpose. Randall prefers it to either be all lowercase, or all caps. Anything else is an insult, and I would encourage you to do the same.

Hover over the images to see the alt text. And if you are browsing on a mobile device, you can view the alt text by downloading the Xkcd-sucks app, available on the App Store and Google Play... never!

Comic 1264: Slideshow

Of all the annoying things he could have picked that annoyed him about today's HTML5-dominated, social-media-oriented, search-engine-optimised, internet-that-has-become-a-parody-of-itself. He picked slideshows.

Web design has committed far greater sins, including share buttons that follow you as you scroll down a page, contextual ads disguised as hyperlinks, fake download buttons, pages that get longer as you scroll so you can never reach the bottom, and (perhaps worst of all) blogs that don't have an RSS feed. But slideshows, really?

I've only really seen them on the front pages of estate agents and companies that want to show off their product portfolio - i.e. not the sort of website you come to to enjoy yourself (unless you're an Apple Inc fan, in which case you can fuck off). So it's not a problem for your daily internet usage, not even a first world problem.

I had a look around Flickr, and I couldn't find any examples of this happening. So the alt text is lying.

F for relevance, or lack thereof. F- for crappy alt text. F-- for humour, because there is no joke. Oh, and before I forget, F----- for smugness, and using Xkcd as his personal soapbox.

Comic 1263: Reassuring

This is a comic that is trying to be depressing by telling us that computers will become more powerful than our own brains. He did this before in 894 (Progeny) with a better joke, and fewer words. That older comic made a better joke, and in fewer words.

I get the impression some fans are using Xkcd as a news site. When something happens to Curiosity or Voyager I or whatever, many people, including self-confessed nerds, would not hear about it unless there had been a topical Xkcd on the subject. Following that logic, this comic's function is alert people that computers had beaten Go. So I checked if that was the case. As a matter of fact, it was topical... in 2009.

Here is an article on the subject, which was posted four years ago. As a matter of fact, it makes an interesting point.

“It’s a silly human conceit that such a domain would exist, that there’s something only we can figure out with our wetware brains,”

You see Randall? It really doesn't matter that computers will become more intelligent than us. So stop clinging to your false ideas of 'Humans are better than computers, because... some reason.' Of course they're not better. It's only a matter of time until a computer comes along that writes better Xkcds than Randall.

F-- for topicality. D for humour. D- for wall of text. B for the alt text, which was funny and original. It was better than the actual comic, and should have been the actual comic. Randall needs an editor to see the potential in ideas like these. D for the artwork, because I am so bloody bored of stick figures sitting at computers and talking.

Comic 1262: Unquote

I tried to come up with something to say about this comic. It's not offensively bad. The Star Wars reference doesn't kill it. But it doesn't say anything remotely original. Yes, people will eventually forget about Star Wars and stop quoting it. So what?

My apathy towards this comic is such that I'm going to give it a rare E for humour, artwork, alt text, everything. After all, it's not as if anyone could be emotionally affected by this comic in any way.

"I got tears in my eyes, thinking about that."

*sigh*