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title: Mnemonics; alt-text: "'Sailor Moon's head exploded once' and 'Some men have explosive orgasms' both work for the Great Lakes from west to east (Paddle-to-the-Sea order)."
What's funny here is that in panel five Randall has carefully avoided a phrase that would have required someone as "sensitive" as Randall to issue a trigger warning at the beginning of the comic between making lite of a potentially tragic condition affecting 5-10% of the female population and proceeding to purposefully attempting to offend Christians in panel six. LOL offensiveness juxtaposition.
As far as reviewing the comic itself... it kinda comes off as a "meh" for me... Making up pseudo intellectual mnemonics was kinda fun in college (and making up dirty ones in High School... or when drunk and in college*)... actually that really explains it... this is the kind of comic you would come up with if you were getting drunk with other "intellectuals" and drawing accompanying doodles on napkins. If anyone reads this comic while drunk could you let us know if its suddenly hilarious? You know... for science?
(note: I never got drunk in college so I am basing my expectations for what people do when drunk, not from personal drinking experience, but on observations of people getting drunk and their depiction in popular media.)
I have never really understood why Americans need mnemonics for such simple information. Ah well, I'm getting off-topic...
ReplyDeleteAbout the comic: Emailing sharks is just stupid for the sake of stupid. And I'm sure that if anyone else thought of that before, Randall would've made fun of him for not knowing how computers work.
The other order of operations line is just lazy. Couldn't Randy think of another P-word? Like "Pubescents Expect More Drugs And Sex"? That certainly sounds better and makes more sense... though it requires the knowledge of the word "pubescent", so I guess we know why Randy didn't use it.
"Wikipedians". Ugh. Otherwise, I don't have anything to say about the other lines, though I like the "upstairs neighbor" joke in the planets mnemonic. I hope it was intentional. Also, who the fuck needs a mnemonic to remember the planets of the solar system?! Come the fuck on!
Notice that all of these mnemonics are WACKY and RANDOM and therefor not very easy to remember.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous... are you implying that Randall is trying to be ironic? That these mnemonics are meant to be more obscure then the things you are using them to remember? How insightful!
ReplyDeleteMy big problem here is that Randall admits up front that he couldn't be bothered to find out the 'traditional' mnemonics for half of these before offering these 'wacky' alternatives! Where's the joke if we don't know what they're supposed to be alternatives TO? There's no ironic context! Seriously Randy, you couldn't spend five minutes on google to find these out? (If there is none, then take the time to verify that and then just say so!) You actually had to encode into the text that you're that much of a lazy ass? Argh!
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, people who use the planets mnemonic somehow manage to get Mars and Mercury mixed up. Just because Mars is too cold to sustain life, you'd think it would be further from the sun.
ReplyDeleteAargh! I'm so angry at this comic!! What the hell! Why am I still reading it! Goddammit! Perhaps if I poke at it, I can find something pointless and present it as a big problem!
ReplyDelete^you guys ;)
Aargh! I'm so angry at this review!! What the hell! Why am I still reading it! Goddammit! Perhaps if I poke at it, I can find something pointless and present it as a big problem!
ReplyDelete^Anonymous 2011-12-20 4:39 AM Guy >:D
"Never got drunk in college."
ReplyDeletelolwut?
"Never got drunk in college." is a subset of "Never got drunk" which is a subset of "Never drank anything alcoholic beyond what may have been incidentally contained in fruit-cake, cheese-cake, beef-beer-stew or similar recipes".
ReplyDelete993: Nice one, but it's been already done in reality.
ReplyDeleteI'm drunk right now, and it's less funny than when I read it sober.
ReplyDeleteFuck Randall.
I wanna call bullshit on the "traditional" planet mnemonic. Pluto's not a planet, and that's fine, but it's pretty damn recent. Everybody who's old enough to read xkcd learned a planet mnemonic that included Pluto.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there are a bunch of versions of the traditional mnemonic. If Randall wants a Pluto-less one, he should've picked a traditional one where Pluto could be easily dropped; the one I learned ends in "nine pickles" which doesn't lend itself to truncation, but "nachos" doesn't exactly lend itself to adding a p-word. There's no way in hell that Randall's "traditional" mnemonic existed more than 5 years ago.
This blog is so funny! To think someone would dedicate nearly 1000 blog posts just to try to poo-poo another's accomplishments. And quite poorly I might add.
ReplyDelete