1037: Well played Randall

Title:  Umwelt ; Alt-Text: "Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds."


So yesterday I went to the xkcd.com site and saw a comic (this was April 1^st) and today I went to xkcd.com while connected to my office VPN and saw a comic with the same title and alt-text... but a different image. I clicked back and forward and refreshed a few times and then decided it was time to check the forums...


Forum Thread Discussing the "Gag"

We now know why xkcd has sucked so blandly in the recent past... never quite bad enough to incite rage or good enough to love. Randall must have been working on all the variations and scripts to generate a unique xkcd experience for every visitor... frankly I can't help but giving kudos to the guy... he really HAS been screwing with us and now we know WHY!

Comic 973: Return of the "Straw Man" Tag

Prolific "sucks less" contributor SinbadEV left this guest post in my inbox. That's good, because I sure as heck didn't want to review 973.


Title: MTV Generation; alt-text: If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.

So I have recently been running this blog where I post edits of XKCD comics in a "xkcd sucks less" kinda way. I like a lot of XKCD comics and, while I often feel they could be improved or feel the need to to draw attention to a flaw, I usually see a silver lining.

But this comic is just painful. The only way I can see to make it not suck, right now, would be to erase all of the text...


... which for me at least, oddly enough, makes the comic hilarious. I'll grant this might be due to my knowledge of the original.

In order to really understand what's wrong with this comic we first need to find the joke. In case you missed it in the midden heap of terribleness I'll do this for you:

"You are so old that the 'kids these days' you resent are now parents."

I may have stretched a little there but I'm sure I can be forgiven given the material I was working with.

What makes me the most mad here is that I don't know of anyone who has referred to anyone as being part of the "MTV Generation" in the last fifteen years. If people from the MTV Generation are now in their 40s then people who talked about the MTV Generation as being a thing are at least in their 50s and people who talked about them derisively are in their 60s or early 70s. Maybe the stick figure wearing the hat is 65, I suppose... maybe we can call him "Old Man Hat Guy" and the joke is that "Old People Don't Keep Up With Pop Psychology". Even assuming that Randall meant this, it would have been a lot better to say "You ARE the MTV Generation, Dad". This all leads to the final conclusion that the execution of the joke hinges on "MTV Generation" being something people still say... and it just isn't.

Even if the joke had been worth telling and he had come up with a way for it not to hinge on a strawman, the execution is still painful. I'm not talking about the stick figures here. I'm talking about the script.

"See, That's the problem with the MTV Generation - No attention span."
"You know, that phrase referred to the 12-19 demographic that formed the core MTV audience in the mid-1980s."
"Uh huh? So?"
"That generation's now in their 40s."
"That can't be right."
"Face it: Your problem with the MTV Generation is their kids."

Who talks like that? Maybe if in panel two she was holding a phone so it was clear she was quoting Wikipedia or something. Here's the script with the joke as bad as it was presented but just the dialog improved.

"See, that's the problem with the MTV Generation. No Attention Span."
"That phrase refers to teens who grew up in the 80's."
"So?"
"They're in their 40s now."
"That can't be..."
"Face it. The problem with the MTV Generation is their kids."

See? The problem with this comic is Everything!

Then the alt-text makes it worse by pointing out that "You are 'the man' you once resented" which is the opposite of what the comic seems to be saying.

Also, who the heck talks in colons and hyphens? What does a colon sound like?

Comic 971: Randall's Rants

Title: Alternative Literature; alt-text: I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

Oh. My. Gosh. I don't know which to criticize first, the comic or the alt-text! This should even be a problem, because normally the two are at least somewhat related. Not this time!

Or, you know what, maybe they are. Maybe the comic is some sort of allegory about homeopathic medicine and how it's like reading blank books. But if that's the case, it needs a LOT of work, because no one's going to naturally assume that from context unless they've just read the alt-text (which makes a completely different point!)

See, until I read the alt-text (ironic, isn't it, that Randall adds novel-length alt-text in a comic about wordless books), I assumed he was just doing what he always does: setting up a strawman that doesn't exist and laughing at him. Look at it. Even the structure of the comic emphasizes just how clueless Randall is about what he's doing wrong. "Not true; there's some ink" and "a smudge" are completely useless to the point the character is making. Guy 1 says something. Guy 2 argues a different point. It's a perfect metaphor for today's update, if Guy 1 is the alt-text and Guy 2 is the the strip itself.

Is this making any sense? Well, at least it can't make any less sense than Comic 971. I mean, I've spent three paragraphs (coming up on four) ranting about this strip and I haven't even addressed its subject matter yet! That's bad, folks.

Look, the joke here is friggin' simple. "All your books are blank!" "My mind makes the books, and I refuse be a part of a system that says otherwise. I'm no sucker." "And you paid how much for these?" I can't stand xkcd, and even I smiled at the "Who sold you all these blank books?" line. You know why? Because that's the punch line! That's the joke! We don't need all these other panels of pointless dialogue!


Image by SinbadEV

But Randall's not content to ruin his comic with an awful setup and a too-delayed punchline. Oh no. Nope, he has to get on one of his, "Boy, people are stupid, and companies just take advantage of them. It's too bad they're not as smart as me" high horses. Carl from xkcdsucks (the original blog; remember when it wasn't awful?) said all there is to say about this sort of thing, so I'll just link to his rant here. In short, it says that people aren't stupid, they know that just because you put two different things together they aren't the same thing, and Randall's a complete douchebag for assuming otherwise.

I dunno, maybe I'm tired and hopped up on pain pills. If I'm missing some deeper point here, someone please tell me. Until then, I'm going to believe that this is just an awful, awful strip, and one of the worst Randall's done in recent memory.


P.S. I was in such disbelief when I read the alt-text, I actually screenshotted it in case Randy changes it. It's just...what was he thinking??

Comic 959: Point, Counterpoint

First of all, let me apologize for not posting a "Sucks Less" for this week. It's just kind of turning into "XKCD SUCKS, SinbadEV Edition," and while I don't have a problem with that (I'm glad that he still puts in the effort, and I like his submissions), I don't feel as motivated to update when there's only one submitter to choose from. I imagine you're also feeling let down from the lack of bingo, in which case talk to Jon Levi. I don't know what's happened with that.

However! Today is kind of special, because we have not one, but TWO guest reviews! One is in favor of today's strip and one is against it, so you get both sides of the story. We're nothing if not objective here, folks. I'll start with the positive review, move onto the negative one, then post my own thoughts afterwards. Enjoy!


Title: Caroling; alt-text: For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.

Comic 959: Does Randall Read This Blog?

I like this comic. I mean, it's by no means perfect, but hell, I'll take it.

The setup is simple: Some kids are singing Christams carols (presumably on Mr. Hat's doorstep; I'll get to this later), and Mr. Hat stops them with a cruel remark. And it works. This is exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned the "show, don't tell" rule in my last review: Don't have Mr. Hat talk about how he's being a dick, SHOW him being a dick.

The strip avoids the usual pitfalls: It's short, to the point, has no post-punchline-dialogue and even makes effective use of a beat panel. I could argue a case of bad history (King Wenceslas didn't actually massacre anybody), but since this is Mr. Hat ruining a carol for a bunch of kids, it can be written off as a creative lie.

The art is also passable. The kids apparently exist in a featureless void (seriously, some background would be nice), but as Randall has proven multiple times now, he's good at shading. I, for one, would like to see that in more strips.

The alt-text... Well, I'm not really sure what to say about it. It doesn't really do much more than broaden the strip's punchline, but to be honest, it DID get a chuckle out of me. Maybe you people will have more to say about it.

In view of my last review, it seems to me that Randall does indeed read the blog and is willing to learn from our criticism. Maybe I'm wrong and this is just a coincidence, but if not, well... More power to you, Randall. Cheers.
by T-Jack

Comic 959: Winter in Coming

When I woke up this morning I brewed myself a cup of coffee and headed down to the computer in the basement that is good for little else then to browse web comics and blogs and loaded up xkcd-sucks because I hoped Gamer2K4 would have posted a "Sucks Less" for last week. Because there was none, I skipped over to xkcd itself to see how much it sucked.

The short answer was "a lot" and so I left for the bus doubly disappointed.

On that trip I briefly entertained resentment to Gamer2k4 for not having posted a "Sucks Less" despite me having submitted numerous options for him to choose from. Then I thought to myself, "Perhaps he is busy. I could be proactive and send in a guest review and then he would have time to post my amazing 'Sucks Less' entries." I tend to be long winded so, to this point, I have typically refrained from doing so but... this comic was particularly ripe for criticism.

To begin: Randall is making a joke about a Christmas carol on the first weekday of October which makes me think that he has had this joke in his mind for quite some time and thought that it was now close enough to Christmas to post it. Sadly, this indicates that, in his mind, this joke was so astonishingly funny that he could not wait a minute longer to share it.

Next: It is not even funny to begin with. This "joke" is very similar to how, when people make jokes about person's parents and then the person says, "My father is dead." to ruin the joke. This is not humour, this is buzz-kill.

Also: While I feel like Mr. Hat (who I like to call Black Hat Guy [or BHG for short]) is being a dick who doesn't care about social mores for personal gain... he is again doing so in a way that feels (as mentioned in the 958 blog) to fall short of his character.

Finally: The alt-text IS the joke... it took me a coffee and a half to wake up enough to get it but, given that it is likely the only enjoyment you will garner from the comic I will leave puzzling out the terrible pun as an exercise for the class (which is elitist intellectual for "let you figure it out for yourself").

While the pacing is well done, the comic shows instead of tells and the expressive use of the traditionally minimalist style is put to good use... the lack of "funny", post punchline pun and "not quite right" use of BHG causes the whole experience to fall flat.

In short, xkcd 959 sucks because it is disappointing.
by SinbadEV

--

And now for my own thoughts. First of all, thanks to both T-Jack and SinbadEV for their efforts. As I say in the blog header, this comic wasn't supposed to be a one-man effort, and if we can get the community involved (the REAL community, not the 4chan wannabe cesspool in the xkcdsucks comments that Rob and Raven call the community), so much the better.

Secondly, I have my own opinion on this strip. It sucks. A lot.

The two aspects of the comic - the context and the joke - are both out of place. We JUST hit October; it's not even close to the right time of year to be posting Christmas comics. But the joke somehow manages to be worse than that! T-Jack is right (to some degree) that this is technically showing, not telling, but it's "showing" a conversation in progress. As in, it's doing the same thing the "stud finder finder" strip was. And THAT'S where Mr. Hat always falls flat.

The strip itself is ridiculously forced. I imagine Randall read something about the "Feast of Stephen," thought, "ha ha wouldn't it be funny if it was actually about eating a guy named stephen," and extrapolated that to "oh man what if that made wenceslas a mass murderer." KOMEDY GOLD, right? I know! But how would he get that across to his adoring fans? How could he make yet another of his "what if instead of this, that" strips? That's right: by putting those words in the mouth of Mr. Hat and making the strip about caroling.

That's why this feels so out of place, and that's why today's strip is so terrible. Randall's no stranger to writing jokes that require stupid, contrived setups, but here he goes so far as take someone who is canonically a saint and by all accounts was a great person, and portrays him as a mass murderer for the sake of a joke. Yes, I know. Mr. Hat is LYING. That's what he does. But still, without the alt-text to make the joke (as SinbadEV alluded to), this just comes off as lying for the sake of lying. Imagine this comic as follows: In the first panel, people are waving "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS" signs. In the second, Mr. Hat says, "Marines eat babies." In the third panel, the sign holders are kind of standing there, stunned.

IT'S THE EXACT SAME COMIC. And it's just not funny.