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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).

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Comics 1265-1267: Does Xkcd Halt?

If you're browsing on a mobile device, please shoot yourself before you try to read the alt texts. Love you guys. By the way, has anyone used iOS 7 yet? It looks like Randall Munroe designed a mobile operating system! Share your flame wars in the comments, please. Oh wait, Blogger's comment box doesn't work on mobile browsers.

Comic 1267: Mess


Ah, the GOOMH-bait. Been a while since we've had something like that. The joke is something that some newspaper cartoon has probably covered in the last ten years, but it's not a bad joke and told well. C for humour, but F for originality.

The artwork, while not stand-out excellent, services the joke. B for artwork, and well done for trying. In a comic like this, I can't help be feel it would be nice to see the expressions on the stick figures' faces. Ah who am I kidding, Randall can't draw faces.

Comic 1266: Halting Problem

No.

Referencing an obscure computer science problem requires the reader to do their own research, thus ruining the pretence of the joke. Just look at all the people who googled it. This is unacceptable. And it also requires the reader to understand programming jargon. It's just the terms define and return, and you can sort of infer those terms from the context, but it ruins the comedic timing if you do so. I'm just gonna go ahead and give this a big fat F- for standalone value. I'd like to say it could be worse, but can it?

Even supposing the reader did know about the Halting Problem, what is the actual joke? It's about answering an unanswerable question with a simple and obviously wrong answer. It's equivalent to saying "The meaning of life is 42."Actually bad example. It's like if Douglas Adams published a book that contained nothing but that sentence. Do you not see how that would be bad. G-- for humour.

Now look at this:

DEFINE DoesItHalt(Program):
{
      RETURN True;
}

"The big picture solution to the halting problem"

This is a plain text adaptation of the above comic. Does it lose anything from the original? No. It also has the advantage of being 101 bytes instead of 7.5 kilobytes. If the comic can be adapted into plain text, then you really have to call into question whether it deserves to be an image or not. Comics are a visual medium, and the PNG image can display over 16 million unique colours. H--- for artwork, or lack thereof.

I would say this is the worst in a while, but we had a pretty bad one a few weeks ago.

Comic 1265: Juicer


I actually had to use explainxkcd.com to see if the joke is really what I think it is. As it turns out, it is. For those of you who needed a clue, the joke is that someone buys a juicer and uses it to extract the juice from sweets (candy if you're a yank). This has some humorous potential in it, but I don't think it was properly realised. B- for humour.

C- for artwork. I feel he could have added just a little shading on those juice bottles.

D for the alt text, which seems to contradict the joke itself.

And F- for using a brand name product. I'm sure there's cash changing hands under the table.

26 comments:

  1. Yeah, 1267 was definitely GOOMHR-bait, though I have to say this is one that worked particularly well with me.

    "Oh wait, Blogger's comment box doesn't work on mobile browsers."

    Do you really think that, or is that an instance of that "Jewish humor" I keep hearing about?

    I haven't used 7 yet; I want to keep my jailbreak for now!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I tried to post a comment in both mobile Chrome and mobile Safari. It was glitched on both occasions. Granted, they both use the same rendering engine, so my study is far from complete.

      Delete
    2. It's probably not the browser, but the site's version. I'm guessing you were on Blogger's mobile site. Superior people who use tablets can choose to display the regular version of sites. But here's a test, posting from their mobile site.

      Delete
    3. Or maybe technology hates you.

      Delete
  2. The joke in 1266 is that everyone dies. And the fruit gushers in 1265 is necessary because he is extracting fruit juice from sweets that contain fruit juice centres.

    These reviews are so bad that I would think Carl was back if it weren't for the fact you were so lenient on the first one. You must do better than this, Jon, if you are to dethrone the Lord of Fat.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. By merely trying, I have already bettered the Fat Rob. I do not fear competition from the likes of him. What is your point exactly? You want me to be more lenient? Less?

      Delete
    2. Kitten seems to confuse the comic and the alt-text. No, 1266 isn't about everyone dying.

      Delete
    3. Yes it is. It's about everything dying. It's pretty obvious, even without the alt-text.

      Delete
  3. I consider 1267 a badly told joke. I despise comedians who go "have you ever noticed X?" and then rely on the fact that most people have experienced X. You gotta do something with that observation, man. I don't find raw data all that amusing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I actually laughed at the halting problem comic. It's fine that you don't know what the halting problem is; obviously, that comic was intended for an audience that didn't include you. Find someone who didn't have to Google the problem to write the review. If such a person does not exist, don't write the review. Unless, of course, your point is just to needlessly bash him as opposed to giving a step-back review of the comic.

    As for it being a PNG, yes, they're all PNG. It was for consistency of content, including his custom font. If he just threw on text, someone else (or probably you) would have bitched about how tacky it looked.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I actually already knew about the ha;ting problem, so there.

      And Randall has a perfectly good Twitter account that he's not using for one-liners like these.

      Delete
  5. B- for a Juicer joke that requires understanding of a culturally specific reference? That's really quite generous.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I actually chuckled at 1266. As a computer science Ph.D. I obviously know what the halting problem was, and the joke appears to be "everything ends eventually", i.e. even if the program keeps running until the end of the universe, it will still halt at that point. Which is a sort-of clever philosophical interpretation of a pure logic problem.

    And hey, this comic apparently caused you to google and learn about an important part of information science. Is learning such a bad thing?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are plenty of educational Youtube channels that make learning fun - Minutephysics, Sci Show, Periodic Table of Videos, and many more. I watch those on a regular basis. I like learning things.

      But learning with the specific intent of understanding a punchline short changes both myself and the schmuck who told the joke.

      Delete
    2. sudo cater to the lowest common denominator

      Delete
    3. I just don't agree with the premise that you are only allowed to make jokes with references that everyone is likely to understand. Even more so in a comic like XKCD which comes with the warning that it's about math and science. Given the target audience that XKCD is supposed to have, a joke about something like the Halting Problem seems perfectly acceptable to me. Not only does everyone who has studied CS for more than semester know about it, many other geeks are likely to already know it too by cultural osmosis.

      I would also hardly classify it as "obscure" considering it's one of the most fundamental principles of computer science, and probably the best known example of proof by contradiction.

      I also seem to recall lots of complaints back on non-dash when Randall did math comics that were about high-school math, because apparently that wasn't complicated enough. So damned if you do, damned if you don't, it seems.

      Delete
    4. I think the main problem here is that anyone who hasn't studied computability doesn't care, while almost everyone who has will have already considered the difference between theoretical and practical Turing machines.

      This comic caters to the remaining dullards who have been introduced carefully to freshman science topics yet haven't spent any time thinking about them. So, typical xkcd readers.

      tl;dr GOOMH I can't think for myself and find Randall insightful too.

      Delete
    5. "As a computer science PhD..."

      I take computer science as seriously as I'd have taken medicine in the first fifty years of its existence.

      Delete
  7. 1269 is disgustingly smug.

    ReplyDelete
  8. 1271 is 100% GOOMHR bait.
    But it resonated with me pretty well. I don't have the symmetrical thing, so I didn't understand why the first item was an "X", but the "Clicking to highlight text is disabled" and the alt text made me laugh.
    This is why I don't like going to snopes.com, because I can't select the text as I read.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Jon Levi where's the review

    ReplyDelete
  10. Jon Levi is worse than Rob. At least Rob had no standards.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Replies
    1. I think so. Rob got so tired of people asking why he still bothered that he murdered Jon.

      Delete
  12. I know I am several years late to this party but are you sure the fruit gushers one doesn't have something to do with "gushing" about fruit?

    ReplyDelete
  13. I know I am several years late to this party but are you sure the fruit gushers one doesn't have something to do with "gushing" about fruit?

    ReplyDelete