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??

Comics 969 and 970: Randall is Stupid

Still laid up from my injury, which means xkcd remains one of the last things on my mind. Again, I don't have much to say about either Wednesday's or today's strips, but they do both suck.

Comic 969

Title: Delta-P; alt-text: If you fire a Portal gun through the door of the wardrobe, space and time knot together, which leads to a frustrated Aslan trying to impart Christian morality to the Space sphere.

Oh geez I hate this one. Absolute best case for this strip: Randall's equations work, Narnia gets flooded, and the White Witch dies. OH WAIT, AND SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE. That's like saying we could have prevented the Holocaust by killing everyone in the world. Hitler would be gone, so no Holocaust, right?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

My next objections might be considered nitpicks, but dang it, Randy put all his equations right on the comic, so he apparently cares about that kind of detailed analysis.

1. It's not raining so there's no portal.


2. The pressure might just close the doors of the wardrobe, meaning that no water ever gets in.


3. Even if the doors remain open, shouldn't the air and everything else in Narnia simply stop the water from filling it? To see what I mean, invert a cup and push it into some water. Notice how there's still air inside the cup?


4. But okay, let's assume water does make it in, Still, time is completely different in Narnia, so the water would just trickle in, rather than the torrent Randall expects.


5. What the heck do you mean, "space and time knot together if you fire a portal gun through the door"? The door IS a portal! You can't fire a portal gun through an existing portal!

Seriously, Randall. THINK a little before you post garbage like this.

Comic 970

Title: The Important Field; alt-text: I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It's interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

This is a straw man attack if I've ever seen one. Yes, most registration forms require you to enter your email address twice. You know why? BECAUSE IT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT FIELD. If your email is wrong, you don't get registered. Now, compare that to something like the comments box for this blog. You're asked to enter your email once. You know why? Because it's NOT important! Who cares if your email is wrong there?

The situation in this strip is a total fabrication. It's so contrived it hurts. THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. It's like saying, "I really think the US government should take down freenuclearsecrets.gov. How stupid are they to just offer that up to anyone?" He'd be making a good point if that was how things worked, but IT'S NOT.


I think there's a lesson we can all learn from this: Don't be a retard, Randall.

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

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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.

Comic 955: Someone is Wrong on the Internet

Title: Neutrinos; alt-text: I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).

What do you mean, you can't speak to the paper's scientific merits? Surely someone well-versed in something as pure as math should have no trouble with the "softer" studies, right?

Oh. Wrong. Because Randall's not actually well-versed in math.

Anyway! In concept (that is, in a perfect world), this idea makes some degree of sense. It's win-win: a good gamble. But of course, we don't live in a perfect world, so like most of Randall's strips, the comic fails because of its flawed premise.

First of all, if we're to believe the second panel, these arguments are all with people on the internet. How is either going to make good on the bet? Paypal?

Second, even if this was in real life, I would expect that the kind of people who follow articles like this are generally going to be skeptical. It's not like your mom is just going to say, "Hey, did you see this morning's CNN? Apparently neutrinos can travel faster than light!" No, that's the sort of article that you only find if you're looking for it.

Finally, and probably most importantly, why does the guy need cash? I don't see any kids in the strip, so shouldn't he be rolling in the Benjamins?

In short, it's the kind of idea that would be good if it worked, but it doesn't. Surprise, surprise.


P.S. "Have you seen our budget? We couldn't begin to afford our own thought police," is a really stupid thing to say. Have you seen our budget? Congress doesn't care about spending trillions of dollars they don't have! We could "afford" all kinds of thought police. Not that that's the sort of thing that would show up on a national budget, anyway...

Comic 947: Compounding Issues

Title: Investing; alt-text: But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

Oh look, another strip where Randall invents a false target and then attacks it for the sake of humor. Humor that - it's worth noting - would not exist if he was being honest in his subject matter.

Let's start with the obvious. 2% interest may not seem like a lot because it's NOT a lot. 2% is what you get if you put your money in a savings account. It's what a bank guarantees you for letting them hang on to your money. 2% is NOT investing. Furthermore, decent investments are going to be maturing for a lot longer than 10 years. If you have a low principle, a low interest rate, and a low time frame, of COURSE you're going to get a low return!

If we're being realistic, an investment is something that you're going to let grow for several decades, and you're going to get an average rate of return much higher than 2%. I'm no financial expert, but I understand that decent investments return around 8%, and great ones return 12%. Those numbers may be off (feel free to correct me in the comments), but it doesn't matter; my example is going to be much lower.

(All results are done here with a starting principle of 1000, no annual addition, and annual compounding.)

So, we start with our 1,000 dollars. I'm 23 years old; let's say I want to retire at 63. This money will be compounding interest for 40 years. At just a 4% return, that 1,000 dollars turns into 4,800 dollars. At 5% it becomes 7,040 dollars. At 6% it's at 10,285 dollars. See that? Even at below average interest rates, a principle as low as 1,000 dollars will increase tenfold if given the time.

Compounding interest isn't magical. No one said it was. But, under the right conditions, and given the right amount of time, it will offer a dramatic return on the original principle.

So why am I making such a big deal about this? Why am I running numbers that you guys probably already know about? Well, quite simply, it pains me that a webcomic about "math" can so callously disregard such an important application of it. It feels like Randall is saying, "Compound interest? Eh, it's basically meaningless." It's not! Compound interest is a big deal, and it should be treated as such!

What's happening to you, Randall? Why don't you like math anymore?


P.S. The xkcd forums are filled with people pointing out the flaws in the comic (low interest rate, etc.) Interestingly, the number that's in the strip right now for the result ($1,279) is wrong. No one can reach that answer no matter how they come at it. I've saved the image for now, as I expect that Randall will sneakily update it once he sees the flaw.

Comic 936: Short and Bitter

This is going to be a short post, partly because I'm tired and partly because there's not much to say about the comic. Really, it's times like this that I was Raven didn't quit the blog in her rather...ignoble manner, so someone else could take strips like this. Oh well.


Title: Password Strength; alt-text: To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.

This isn't good comic material, but it might just be good picto-blag material. It's kind of interesting information (whether it's accurate or not, I can't say), and it's clear that this is something that Randall likes and that he's willing to put some effort into. It's not funny, but he's not going for funny, so we'll let that go this time.

The caption is misleading, simply because for most of those twenty years, passwords that were hard to remember were also hard to crack. However, aside from that, the only real gripe I have with this strip is the know-it-all attitude Randall has about all this. The second parenthetical sentence in the second panel feels (to me) like his "Yes, centrifugal." remark in strip 852. It's just another way of saying, "I know what you're thinking, stupid plebeian reader, and I'm way ahead of you." And in the alt-text, when he says "To anyone who understands information theory and security," I can just hear the unspoken "like ME" after it. Yes, we know, Randall. Not everyone has the same domain of knowledge as you. Get over it.

Comic 934: Browser? I Hardly Knew 'Er!

So, you've all probably met our newest writer, Jon Levi. I had initially asked him to move his bingo posts over here to sort of consolidate the anti-xkcd content, but I see he's decided to go ahead and post a guest review. Don't worry; joke reviews like that will never replace actual ones (even if they ARE funnier than the ones I put out). Although, for what it's worth, it's rather telling that my first thought was, "No way, THAT'S what today's xkcd is?" instead of, "Haha, oh that wacky Jon Levi."

Anyway, on to 934.


Title: Mac/PC; alt-text: It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.

There's not much to this comic; it's just a flawed premise. "Everyone does everything in browsers now." As he usually does, Randall is projecting himself onto his audience. He assumes that just because HE never goes outside a browser, none of the rest of us do (and if he DOES use other programs, then this comic is just one big pile of hypocrisy). It's the sort of joke that only works if you make certain (false) assumptions, which means it doesn't work at all.

Yes, you can use a browser for email, flash games, and rudimentary document handling (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) However, these things are all done much BETTER as native applications. The reason people aren't dependent on browser apps is the exact same reason that Linux still hasn't caught on. Sure, you can DO all of those tasks (in Linux, or in a browser), but the experience is just so inferior that it's not worth it.

Furthermore, Mac/PC ads focused on things that WEREN'T browser-dependent! Here's an abridged list (taken from Wikipedia).

• Detachable power cord to prevent tripping


• Issues in Vista


• Movie editing


• Malware and viruses


• Non-standard hardware


• Cryptic error messages


• Customer support

I'm only about a third of the way through the list, but I think that's enough for now. Notice how those issues are still relevant, despite that so much can be done in browsers? In other words, Macs and PCs AREN'T indistinguishable.

And this is why I think xkcd sucks. If it was just not funny, okay, whatever. If it was only that it was occasionally creepy, well, that's tolerable. If it was the bad art, we could just call it "minimalistic" or some BS. If it was that he sometimes uses it to talk about his personal life, I can probably get past that. But xkcd is ALL of those things, and to top it off, when Randall tries to make "jokes," he doesn't even get the setup right! If you have to resort to blatant lies to make your joke almost work, it's time to scrap it and find a new one. If you can't do that, it's time to scrap your webcomic (but please, don't make a new one).


P.S. Helpful xkcd forumite 'folkhero' points out that the Mac/PC ads haven't been running for a while, meaning that Randall is as timely as ever (that is to say, not at all). Surprise, surprise.

P.P.S. Several forumites commented on the brilliance of Randall depicting both the Mac and PC with essentially the same character model. Never mind that this is Randall's default drawing style (dating back to Comic 6!) Nope, his lack of variety is clearly evidence of his genius.

Comic 927: Raven Pulls a Redux

Well, isn't this interesting. I leave for a COUPLE of days and everything freaking falls to pieces. I really can't spare the time for this post, but someone's got to do it, and that someone apparently isn't Raven. Besides, xkcdsucks is beating us (eh, me) now, and that's unacceptable.

ANYWAY, the reason that I'm taking the time to write this is because either living in Holland does crazy things to the internet, or Raven's blog is gone, Raven's profile is gone, and Raven's AdSense account that was pulling in money from this blog for sweet prizes once we announced some contests is inaccessible (it always was to me, but now I can't even ask her about it or do anything with the money). Oh, and she's also not in the "Team Members" part of the blog. (Ann Apolis still is, but I don't think she was ever going to do anything anyway).

So! Looks like I've inherited this thing. Woo. Let's take a look at xkcd, shall we?



Title: Standards; alt-text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

It's Micro-USB. Idiot.

Anyway, Randall has graciously shared one of his "observations" with us lowly plebeians on the internet. As usual, it's 1) not funny and 2) wrong. One big red flag that this comic is going to suck is the subtitle: "See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc." That's right, give us specific examples so that we don't say, "That's not how Blu-ray became a standard! That's not how HTML became a standard! That's not how electrical plugs became a standard! That's not how literally ANYTHING became a standard!" Oh, and air conditioners don't have chargers. Idiot.

You know how standards form? Committees and organizations come together and say, "Hey, what's a good standard for this? Oh, that is? Okay, agreed!" Or, two standards exist and some catalyst forces one into the forefront (Sony including cheap Blu-ray players in PS3s), leaving the other in the dust. Nowhere, ever, has a company come out and said "Hey, there are so many standards, so just use ours instead!" (or if they have, they failed hard and we'll never hear about them).

Let's take a look at Randall's "examples." Maybe they're the exception to the rule. AC chargers? Nope, that's just everyone saying, "There's no standard so we're just picking one we like and bundling it with the device." What's the use case for that, anyway? "Must be able to supply power to device"? Well would you friggin' look at that, EVERY POWER SUPPLY COVERS THAT USE CASE. Holy balls but Randall's stupid sometimes.

Well, surely this applies to character encoding, right? I mean, there are enough character sets out there...oh. Nope, wrong again. ASCII was the standard for 45 years, and now UTF-8 is. Was that really so hard? The reason we have so many encodings is because we have so many languages! ISO/IEC_8859-6 and ISO/IEC_8859-8 are different standards because Arabic and Hebrew are different languages with different characters sets! Of course neither culture is going to agree to use the other!

Okay, last ditch effort. Maybe instant messaging falls prey to this so-called problem? No! As with the chargers, it's just a bunch of companies with a bunch of formats. All of the standards cover all of the use cases; that's why they're still in competition. If a new standard truly did something the others didn't, it would go the way of Facebook and take over. IM clients don't do that.

All in all, this comic is just another "haha what if" strip without the awareness that that's what it is. Sure, it's a funny situation: Everyone tries to standardize things, so we have a ridiculous amount of "standards." Problem is, that's not how things work in the real world. The things that cover all the use cases ARE the standards, and everything else is just competing products.

Randall's wrong again.

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And for crying out loud, Google, being in the Netherlands for three days does NOT make me Dutch! I'm logged into my Google account at all times, and you KNOW I'm an American! Stop making the first link to my searches nl.wikipedia.org, stop putting Blogger in Dutch, and stop trying to "help"! I can't read anything else here; at least let me look at webpages!

...Was this "feature" Randall's idea?