Comic 926: more like time LORD, amirite?

Hello you cretinous crustaceans, this is Time Raven of Time Raven fame and it looks like you're stuck with me all week because Gamer is off in Holland fixing the Dutch version of the internet, or the "Nethernet" as I believe they call it. The week following Raven's Week of Folly is an adventure in questionable decisions as we let Ann take over for the three updates between the 25th and the 29th. Alternately, if any of you feel particularly enraged kindly send a review to Gamer at gamer2k4[at]gmail[dot]com and he'll maybe post it if it's good. If no guest post appears within 36 hours, that's Ann's cue to write up a filler and/or review! I don't really care either way since I won't be interfacing with web-based technology for a good 6 sequential days.

I'll be rejoining my aquatic-based ancestors in the Deep of the oceans, preparing for the eventual re-emergence of the Dark Order to summon the Gods of Old who will bring their wrath to this World and the puny, flesh-covered Residents that call it theirs. And I guess Gamer will still be fixing the Nethernet. It's pretty damn complicated I hear. Anyways, that's our programme for the next two weeks, after which we'll resume our schedule as normal until Randall Munroe quits or my Masters decide to end Time and Life as we know it.

So, let me start by saying this. This concept is entertaining. The idea of a Time Vulture is kinda cute in a non-sensical way.


Title: Time Vulture. Tooltip: In a way, all vultures are Time Vultures; some just have more patience than others.

However, the fowl gem of brilliance is buried beneath foul refuse of verbosity. This comic is a 4.9 on the Ravenzomg scale of Wordiness™. For our British and Commonwealth readers, that's a metric shit-tonne of words for a comic that small. Note that the last three comics in reverse were a 3.5, a 2.25, and a 2.5. For even more reference, here's a series of comics from the late 800s rated by word density.



Anyways, I could spout numbers at you for ages, but the bottom line: There are too many words in this comic.

And some of them are just weird. "They live for millenia and use little energy". That's sounding really unnatural. Also the first panel, "Dude, you've got a time vulture!" "Holy crap! What is it?" ....It's a time vulture, fucknuts, he just told you. I think he means to say "What's that" or more wordily "What's a time vulture?" which would be okay given that, upon hearing about time vultures, I'd want to say "time vulture" as much as I possibly could on account of "time vulture" being a pretty cool concept. Time vulture. Or, just swap the dialogue.

Also, the punchline is pretty awful. I'm just saying, if you're going to mention the ultimate "killer", you're only setting yourself up for a macabre end, or a disappointment. Guess which we have here.

I mean, let's try this.


Open to opinion whether this punchline is better, but I hope you'll admit that the dialogue is at least slightly less painful.

And the heart of the matter: I feel like Randall has just watched a certain TV Series again, one episode in particular.

Ask any Doctor Who geek, and 90% of the time you'll get "Blink" as their favourite episode. This is how it works. The concept of an ancient creature killing you by just letting you age is pretty terrifying. Hell, out of the first three seasons it was rated the second most terrifying only behind the episode which focused on the antics of the living and original Devil.

This concept is pretty cool, and sadly it's been wasted here.

....Business as usual.

Comic 925: Carcinogenic Comic Comments

Good Evening this is Ravenzomg with another exciting review about Randall's research regarding radioactive phones!

Title: Cell Phones. Tooltip: He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.



So anyways, this guy named Randall Munroe made a cute joke about Causality.

Here it is:

That was back around comic 550. I'll admit to liking that one. I'll admit to being that idiot who actually repeats it sometimes. It's simple, cute, and geeky. The old school XKCD. Now, let's look at these two comics and compare. Comic 552 is a 2.7 on the Ravenzomg scale of Wordiness™, while comic 925 is an insipid 3.5, which is a full 29% wordier per pixel.

Let me stop right here and put a milk chocolate centre of praise inside this insipid dish of flavourless grule that I like to call a "Raview". I thought this comic was pretty okay. I smiled. I did not laugh, or snicker, but I smirked.

This is good. It means that there's a cute sort of idea in here, and it's just buried beneath mounds of insipid commentary!

And that's why we're all here: Not to Destroy, but to Recover. We want the XKCD of yore back, that old gem we used to love more than anything before it was tarnished by the filthy plebeian insipid concept of humour that we shall simply call "Mediocrity". ...Well, that's why most of us are here. Some of you have serious issues that I cannot explain.

Without going into detail, yes the XKCD graph is half-accurate in that cancer incidence has been on the rise, but really that misses the point. As this shocking graph below indicates, despite cancer incidence rising, cancer deaths are actually declining. It's a USA-centric graph, but (a) look at other first world graphs and you'll see the same trends and (b)Randall lives in the insipid USA, so only deals with insipid USA issues, obviously. And that's not the point, the point is Cancer INCIDENCE. Also third world countries without access to advanced medical treatment, but please see point B regarding that one. But all the same, these cancer comics are pretty odd.

Now, I won't question his judgment regarding the high incidence of cancer-related comics lately, so I'll just assume he's as excited as we all are about this magical time of year, and he's cramming them all in before we're forced to start making Lion comics like morons. And don't even get me started on August. UGH.

Anyways, bottom line: the punchline is "lol, cancer causes cell phones". The alternative is circle-jerking retorts of, "I always knew cell phones were only marginally responsible for cancer deaths, my statistics professor high school teacher told me so after he told me to stop interrupting class with my so-totally relevant anecdotes!

So, there's thing called "Hanging a Lantern", and if I were Jon Levi I'd link to it on TV Tropes (I'm not checking but I'm sure they have an article on it), but rather than do that I'll respect your ability to either understand the term or be able to look it up. Anyways, the tooltip declares quite cheerily, "That awful design in panel 2? Intentionally awful!" to which I reply, "That's awful."

Combined with Comic 919, it's like he's purposely trolling his fan base. What's the deal with that, eh? I.... I just don't get it.

I'd like to say right now that I feel as if Randall's going to go out with a big bang, and this is just the first signs of it coming. These insipid little quirks he's shoving out are just the forerunners of a greater catastrophe (lol), namely him ending XKCD probably at comic 1000 or 1024. That's my bet anyway. We'll just have to wait and see.

Tl;Dr: Comic has a cute idea in it, but it's clunky, wordy, and insults the reader for gods-know-what reason.

I dated a Cancer once -- they're emotionally fucked up and it's impossible to get through to them in any meaningful way beyond the physical. I think this is the frustration we're supposed to take out of this comic, really.

Comic 922: The First Rule of XKCD...

...is that context is never an issue. Most people take issue with this.




Title: Fight Club. Tooltip: I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.

This "comic" is short and so too will be this review. Not "XKCDexplained" short, but simply put the problem here cannot be made more apparent by going of on an angry tangent full of angry ranting about angry problems, but that is not what I am here to do.

Why? Because this "comic" does not fill me with any sort of anger, rage, hatred, fury, scorn, or sense of mortality.

This "comic" is an opinion. Randall doesn't like talking about the Fight Club movie from 1999 starring such drop-dead gorgeous and stunningly talented actor(s) and actress(es) as Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter.

Google Image doesn't seem to be working for me right now, so in lieu of sexy pictures of the aforementioned actor(s) and actress(es) here's an image from my photobucket of the Anger I cannot invoke in response to this comic.
-Ravenzomg

Sexy stuff there! I can barely contain myself.

"But Ravenz", you argue, "The caption is parodying that other line everyone knows! That makes teh funniez"

The caption is a clear parody of the line from the film stating that the first rule about Fight Club (the club) is that you don't talk about Fight Club (the club). That is correct. But we're talking about turning around a phrase nearly 12 years old and doing nothing particularly original or particularly exceptional. This brings me back to my point: This is an opinion. It is an opinion -- and it is a good opinion -- that we should leave Fight Club in the past. It was a good film, but please, let's stop analyzing it. He has then proceeded to wrap the opinion in a comic roll, thus fulfilling his quota and gaining support through "Agreement Chuckles". I agree with him, but I am not chuckling. Not at all.

The generous among us would say that Randall is upset with people for talking about Fight Club (the film), thus violating the very first rule of Fight Club (the club), which is not to talk about Fight Club (the club, but in this case the film) but these people are idiots who don't understand that words and phrases can have more than one connotation and the confusion of reference is not clever, it's just idiocy.

I'm going to critique the tooltip with ungenerous detail, because it's a mix of "GOOMH!" and unexciting reiteration of the comic: phrasing awkward as hell. BLEH!

And to close things up, returning to my very first line: Void Creature 1 keeps saying, "But [such and such] was X, not Y!" which demands that Void Creature 2 (the narrator) brought up some suggestion that it WAS Y. But if he doesn't like being talked to about Fight Club, why bring up Fight Club in the first place???

Alternately, Void Creature 1 doesn't understand social behaviours and cues, so he makes assumptions about what other parties believe in order to rant and finish arguments no one started because to him this seems like a way that regular people regularly interact in a regular setting.

SOUND LIKE SOMEONE YOU KNOW?

Comic 920: YouTube, Bruté?

...

This is Ravenzomg with your review of this thing about this thing called "YouTube Parties" which I'm sure you are all aware of/active participants in.


Title: YouTube Parties. Tooltip: That reminds me of that video where ... no? How have you not seen that? Oh man, let me find it. No, it's okay, we can go back to your video later.

So. It's July 1st and three of us are waiting around at someone's place between "events" in the course of our National Celebration.

And I can't get this song/animation out of my head, so I suggest we look it up.


My friend then suggests, "oh, there's this 5-second film you have to see..."

Long story short, everyone thinks their interests are the shit. Everyone. And this comic communicates this idea.

This comic is like a thing that happened.

Like.

Okay, I don't want to stray into ad hominem attacks. But my complaint about this comic is the concept of "YouTube Parties". In my anecdote, we ended up watching four videos for a grand total of maybe 8 minutes before deciding to watch the pilot of a children's show from the early 2000s, and from there we ended up going downtown for various Festivities.

But he's created this idea of the "YouTube Party", where a group of people (here there are five of these Void Creatures) gather and watch videos as the Title Event. They plan it enough to turn off the lights to watch (Randall has put in the effort of shading to show us that this is, indeed, in the dark).

So this opens up two venues:
1) This "YouTube Party" is a real thing that exists, and people ARE in fact this awful and lame.
2) "YouTube Party" is a made-up thing and Randall had to create this bizarrely anti-social situation to illustrate a point that is pretty unambiguous.


I can't touch 1 without calling boring people boring, and I can't touch 2 without saying something you've all heard in 918, namely, "Why don't you understand human context".

Sooo, let's change tact.



Notice that he says "YouTube Parties" as the title, and then "titles" the comic in the image "The Problem With YouTube Parties". Now, I understand some people only get the image and not the title.

But does Randall actually need to spell it out? It's as if he's afraid we won't "get it", and it's honestly the sort of redundant condescension that borders on "irritating".



Is there any ambiguity about the setting here? There's a group of people around a laptop; a bottle and glass are on the table; the first figure mentions that they're watching [or will watch] a "video", and the punchline takes off from there. The fact that it may or may not be a "YouTube Party" is just needless name-dropping baggage, especially given that YouTube is the third most popular website on the internet and when people below the age of 30 say "video" in connection with a computer, you probably think "YouTube" [minus the Party] all on your own.

Randall used to get the idea.

Don't let the presence of a human-ish figure fool you, this was comic#46. He didn't put on a caption "The problem with being Emo" or whatever, he let it stand on its own and make its statement!

The tooltip just elaborates on the joke in a slightly different way, but a) that's par for the course and b) the tooltip, if unoffensive, is basically a "freebie" anyways.

So all in all, he has nice potential in this comic, but he's SMOTHERING IT. There is a talented man in there somewhere, and he I still believe deep down that he just needs an editor to help him escape.

Comic 918: GoogleD=

Good evening, this is Ravenzomg of Ravenzomg fame here to review another mediocre comic! Mediocrity draws us together in a greater pact of apathetic dissent.


Title: Google+ . Tooltip: On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!

So there's this new site that's a social-networking thing, and it's not Facebook! But it's still in a beta mode, and you can only get in if you got a special invite, or if you know someone who got that invite. Randall, trying to champion the bizarre geek quality of liking non-mainstream, difficult, and obscure methods to do their shit, told us about it very subtly in his comic. The comic is called "Infrastructures", the number is the 743rd, and the site is called "Diaspora", and it is May of 2010.

Please read a few lines of that article. In fact, nevermind, you're not going to so let me copy/paste like some sort of first-year university student the night before an essay worth 25% of his final mark is due.

One of my favorite sites is XKCD, which features brilliant tech-related comics drawn by Randall Munroe.
[...]
By the way, if you haven’t visited XKCD before. You should. It’s good eaten’ for your mind.

I'm just going to let those comments sit on their own without commentary.

Let me begin by restating that XKCD #918 is mediocre. It inspires neither mirth nor rage in yours truly, and honestly the flaw is again the medium. I don't know who these two Void Creatures are, and I don't care. But if this were, say, Saphalia and Grim what the fuck did I just say there why didn't i just make up real names then I'd be more intrigued by this discussion and perhaps touched by panel 3's admission. Instead, all I get is two awkward stick figures puppeting Randall's thoughts. Characterization is essential in separating yourself from your creations. Hell, even WhiteHat has a distinct voice and I don't revert to saying, "It's Randall", but instead say, "It's goddamn bakery man" or whatever. The point here is that by virtue of their not possessing any recognizable traits except for the implicit ones in this comic, we don't really care at all and this may as well be a text update in the form of a chatlogue.

SP: you should join Google+! =D
GR: What is it?
SP: not facebook!
GR: What is it like?
SP: facebook!
GR: ...
GR: Oh, what the hell.
GR: I guess that's all I really wanted.

Please tell me what we lost in this transition. Well, besides crappy art.

To be positive, I'll admit that the joke is structured correctly. Panel 1 introduces the setting, panel 2 is a beat panel, and panel 3 contains the "joke". Panel 1's dialogue is awkward and stitled, but that is pretty well the point -- to illustrate how ridiculous the idea of switching to any other social-networking site is becoming and mocking the incentives geeks are willing to take to be more hipster. Going back to my awful transcription, the girl's dialogue really sounds more like a chat log to me. But maybe I'm just biased. But the stiltedness completely fits the concept of online chat.

And perhaps that's an issue here -- these are based on real conversations, but by "real" I mean "in a chat client", and Randall hasn't rewritten it to be a natural conversation, instead copying it nearly word-for-word.

But this is just supposition and cannot reaaally be confirmed one way or the other except hyperbolicly through repeated confirmation that this sounds valid.

Let me say upfront that I have a Facebook account that I check daily and do use. I managed to get rid of my old account bogged down with a hundred+ people I didn't give a shit about in favour of about 14 "friends". Let me also say that if I get an invite to Google+, I will bail like a rat on a sinking ship. Why? I don't even know anymore.

I AM THIS GEEK. That's me. In panel 3. I made a Diaspora account just because it wasn't Facebook, and it was awkward and clunky and I spent maybe 2 days using it before letting it fall into decay. I still have a Myspace profile full of angsty poetry dating back to like 2005 (although I only use myspace now for music purposes).

I distinctly remember, when Facebook was new and weird and not popular, telling people, "let's get in on this Facebook thing." Why? Because it was new and different from Myspace.

This is the geek sickness, the desire for the new, the shiny, the different.

And in these barely creative scrawls Randall has captured this idea.

However, this does not make this a good comic. This is not funny, this is not entertaining, and this is not new. Everyone knows about this geek attitude, and he's just using a recent example to illustrate a point that everyone knows. We're talking syndicated newspaper comic level of humour.

"It's entertaining!" No, not really. "It's deep!" No, it's pretty shallow and uninventive. ....So where does that leave us? A mediocre sketch that is intended to illicit what we used to call "Agreement Chuckles".

This is exactly pandering to someone like me, someone who thinks Facebook is devilish but cannot switch until a viable alternative occurs. And yet here I am, saying that it's mediocre. It's not awful, it's just not INTERESTING in any way.

In other words, it's another XKCD update.

Sigh.

Comic 917: Failing Us; Cute Kinda?

Good evening to one and all, this is Ravenzomg reviewing today because Gamer has not been hulkified by this particularly uninteresting piece of.... work.


Title: Hofstadter; Tooltip: "This is the reference implementation of the self-reference joke."

I was going to write the review in one huge acrostic, but that'd just be stupid since this comic is not about acrostics, it is about abbreviations. (Do not look for a huge abbreviation either, you will not enjoy it.)

So the joke is about Hofstadter, and if you know who this guy is, then you already know we're going to get some stupid joke about analogies. If you don't know this guy, go to that article and read, like, 10 words in.

Hofstadter is a man who has published many quite official books and articles on language, logic, philosophy, as well as quite interestingly rewriting a classic Russian piece to retain its poetic charm. In short, he's taken his passion and he has run with it.

(I just set myself up for personal attacks, but that's not really where I am going with this).

Now, this comic is sort of okay. But the biggest problem is that it is entirely GOOMH bait for anyone who knows about Hofstadter. That is the point of this comic.

The joke, which is the cute little acronym (goddamn it, yes it is an acronym not that other thing) "I'm so meta even this acronym (IS META)". This is the joke. It's a cute little throwaway thing you write down in a particularly boring lecture.

But then it occurs in panel 2 of 3.

Panel 3 is useless Post-Punchline Dialogue, unless you think the acrostical "WIN" is intentional, which I do not. So we have a joke that is kinda okay if it weren't 33% of his workload for the week, sandwiched between two useless panels. Panel one? Oh, yes, I will get to that.

Now, in fact.

Panel one sets us up with an author we've already mentioned has proven himself to be quite capable of language games. Randall has created a little lark, and he legitimizes it by saying someone else created it.

You understand how fundamentally weird this is? It's like goddamn fan fiction. He's inserted his own words into Hofstadter's mouth, and in his created universe it is factual. No, you know what? This isn't like fan fiction. It is fan fiction.

The more I think about it, the creepier this gets. And this coming from the writer who wrote a fan fiction that was almost (but not actually) slash-fic between Rob and Randall.

GAH.

I mean, let me try this out.



Awkward as shit, and not just because this was inked with a regular blue pen and took less time than perhaps an xkcd comic (hahah, who are we kidding).

The lesson here is that name-dropping is absolutely awful, and creating something and crediting it to someone else, regardless of how good you "think" it "is", is just abhorrent and weird. Why did I mention Randall? Couldn't I have just talked about the Llamas without pretending someone else famouser than I talked about llamas?

Yes. Yes I could.

Fuckin' weird.