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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).

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

1056: LOL, Cats.

Felidae
title: "Felidae"; alt-text: "'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals."

File:The Childrens Museum of Indianapolis - Dracorex skeletal reconstruction.jpg
Totally a Real Thing
I'm posting this review because I couldn't find anything funny or clever in this comic. I'll be honest; I read it once and didn't get it and then came back later and tried again and noticed where it says "THE OS X PROBLEM" down at the bottom there for the first time.

Randall has arbitrarily arranged some feline names and then pointed out that OSX doesn't use the same arbitrary arrangement that he would have and that they will soon run out of awesome sounding names of powerful cats. OK... maybe the joke is in the alt-text... nope, unrelated comment and a attempt to get me to got to Wikipedia to find out if 'Dracorex hogwartsia' is a real thing.

So, were're back to Randall trying to be clever and failing. I get that Apple is running out of awesome cat names... but why is that funny? Also... why is this a comic at all? Do you really need an illustration to say "What happens when Apple runs out of cat names?"... I supposed he was going for humour density here... if you break it down there are a lot of sub-joke attempts in there... but really... a stick figure looking at a box labelled "OS 10.13 Housecat" would have probably gotten more laughs.
Posted by Unknown at 7:22 AM

7 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 16, 2012 at 12:07 PM

    Your housecat box has a fatal flaw: It's not a chart. As Randall clearly demonstrates: charts are inherently funny.

    ReplyDelete
  2. T-JackMay 16, 2012 at 12:17 PM

    I think it's a testament to Randall's ability to continually raise the bar on how awful xkcd can be when his comic completely fails not only as a comic, but even as a graph comic. This is literally scraping the bottom of the barrel from below.

    You're right, there are so many jokes that could be made about this subject - for instance, when you notice that the pre-release version was named Kodiak, you could make a "What if Apple stuck to bear names?" joke. Or something about how lesser companies adopted Apple's version naming convention - they're using the names of office supplies or cutlery or something. It really takes commitment to awful comics to go with the non-obvious stupid graph joke.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMay 17, 2012 at 1:31 PM

    Besides, the name coolness order is wrong. Who thinks "Lion" is a cooler name than "Jaguar"?

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMay 19, 2012 at 5:33 AM

    He missed an opportunity to make a stupid Schroedinger's Cat reference. He's slipping, man, he's slipping.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMay 20, 2012 at 1:07 AM

    gamer2k4 your sporadic posts are not only dull but you are a quitter and a winging pissant.

    "botruit gadjec"

    ReplyDelete
  6. UnknownMay 20, 2012 at 2:26 PM

    Gamer_2K4 hasn't been writing reviews since late last year... the dull is entirely on me.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousOctober 31, 2012 at 1:31 AM

    Why you hating?

    ReplyDelete

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