1220-1222: So Bad it's Meta

Hover over the pictures for the alt text.

1220 - Randall is being meta by pointing out how much he hates meta-ness. It would be good if it was actually funny. But no. D

1221 - Ugh, it's not that I don't understand the references here. It's just not even funny when you do. It's not even anything. This comic has no right to exist. It's wasting precious pixels on my screen. F-

1222 - I think I understand what he's getting at (Randall, get out of my head!) But it seems so needlessly negative, and yes, smug. Randall presents a problem, but offers no solution. How the mighty have fallen, since 267. D-

Bingo time!

Oh boy, we haven't done this in a while. It would be a most special thread for this inaugural bingo. So let's have a look at the 2-page obnoxiousness-fest that is the thread for 1221.

B1 (I signed up just to say...) - This square comes courtesy of new user A42, who made this post:

"I made an account here just to say, EEEEEEEEEE, Randall referenced A Wrinkle In Time!"

...which also counts as a B2 and a B3.

I2 (Language/grammar) - We had a long and pointless flame-war about the dot that appears after an abbreviation like Mrs. (yes, really!) It was m_dow who fired the first shot.

N3 (Get out of my head, Randall!): Yes, it is.

G4 (Off-topic argument) - that argument about grammar was indeed off-topic.

O5 (Explaining the joke): Too many examples to link to. But for a comic like this, it was inevitable.

See you next week with more bingo.

xkcdsucks vs xkcd-sucks meta-review

By popular demand* here is the definitive unbiased comparison between xkcd's leading hate-blogs.

xkcdsucks (A.K.A. "No-hypen")

The lead 'reviewer' on this blog can't even be bothered to pump out shitty one-line reviews once a week, leaving the comment threads to wither and die. Once a comment thread turns 2 weeks old, that's it. It can't be posted in anymore. It's clear that people only prefer it out of habit, and failing to update their bookmarks.

F-

xkcd-sucks (A.K.A. "Hypen")

Updated every week with content from yours truly. I may even do other features, like Forum-watch and Bingo if there's demand for it. Best of all, if I stop posting for any reason (although really there's not much chance of that happening), the comment threads will work indefinitely.

A++++

*One guy requested it, and I think he was joking

1208-1219: Picking up where Rob left off

We're evacuating to this site as the new xkcd-sucks blog, because Rob has decided to stop posting.

Tell your cuddlefish friends. We can make this happen.

And without further ado...

1208 - harmless nerd porn. C+

1209 - Makes no sense until you read the caption. D

1210 - This is Randall being cynical, hypocritical and preachy all at the same time. D-

1211 - I agree with what he's saying. It's just that it comes across so preachy. C-

1212 - It annoys me that the distances are not to scale. Alt text saved it. C-

1213 - I think I know what joke Randall's trying to make, but it's difficult to understand. D

1214 - I've played GeoGuessr, and this never happens. F

1215 -  Maybe before we rush to adopt xkcd we should consider the consequences of blithely giving this webcomic such a central position in our lives. D+

1216 - Alt text is better than the actual comic. B-

1217 - This is a good joke for once, and actually told well. A

1218 - I've seen LotR, but the joke fell flat because it took me too long to figure out what was going on. So Randall, your pandering comic even fails at pandering. F

1219 - No Randall, I can not imagine something about something and make it funnier. F 

HYPHEN IS BACK BABY!

Short post goodbye

You may have noticed a distinct lack of updates for the last month. I cannot speak for everybody (though I will in just a few sentences), but I myself feel like there's nothing new to be said about xkcd. I have talked about all the qualities that make it consistently horrible in my past reviews, so this blog, and the comic itself as well, are stagnating. Plus (and here we go), I don't think people even care about xkcd sucking anymore. It's been over five years and 1100+ strips, we're gonna have to live with the fact that it's here to stay.

So here's what I have come here today to say: I am officially retiring from being an xkcd reviewer. I don't know what's going to happen with the blog after this. Maybe Gamer will finally start receiving guest posts, or maybe some of the other reviewers will become more active. Or maybe the blog will wither down and die. Only future will tell.

There is, however, one final thing I want to talk about. It's not about xkcd itself, but it is related. For the last few months, Mr. Munroe has been producing a weekly feature on his site, called "What If?", which focuses on answering questions about various hypothetical scenarios, like "What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?" or "How much Force power can Yoda output?" You know, the standard geek discussion stuff. To this date, there have been 15 segments, including one "Short Answer Roundup".

And believe it or not, I actually like what I see here. The overthinking of various scenarios is what I believe xkcd was supposed to be about all along, and focusing on reader-submitted questions provides the much needed limit to the art. The scenarios outlined in the answers are equal parts interesting and informative. Even elements obviously taken from the comic work much better here. The simple stick-figure art style fits the illustrative diagrams and the stupid jokes actually liven up the presentation and are much more tolerable when they're not "the main focus of the evening". In short, I believe that Randall should stop churning out his tri-weekly xkcd comics and instead focus more on his new creation.

Well, that's just about it from me. Xkcd sucks, What If? rocks, the end. See you in another fandom, guys. It's been fun.

1102: Black hats on sale

Alt-text: I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.

I love how today's comic came out just three strips after 1099, since this is basically Mr. Hat's response to that one. So what exactly is Mr. Hat's character? Is he a murderous sociopath, or just kind of a dick? Neither, actually, since as I wrote in the last review, there is no single Mr. Hat. The black hat itself is just a prop that signifies a character trait, in this case that the person wearing it is "not a very nice people". So yeah. There are no recurruing characters in xkcd, no matter what anybody says.

The comic itself deals with a common criticism of one of the claims made by, ahem, a certain lawsuit-happy "religion" based in the Wang of America. And that is also its biggest flaw. The comic just reiterates an argument against something without adding anything to the discussion. It is absolutely unnecessary and not at all funny. Plus I think the argument has been floating around the Internet for a long time. Yeah, I'm adding the "dated reference" tag.

The alt-text is kinda amusing, if divorced from the comic and presented as an out-of-context joke line. Like a bash.org entry, I'd say.

Well, this was short, but hey, it's not like I haven't already said all of this in previous reviews. We really need a glossary of xkcd's recurring flaws instead of the review blog format...

1099: You do realize that anybody can buy a beret, right?

Alt-text: Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

Today's joke is a play on the term "endless wings". For those of you who don't know and are unable to use Google, "endless wings" is a promotion by the Hooters restaurant (and probably other places as well) where you pay some amount of money and then may eat as many chicken wings as you can stomach. Now, someboy could make the observation that "endless" means the same thing as "infinitely long" and draw a comic about that, but who would go with such an obvious and thought-less joke? Oh, right...

Besides, why would Beret Guy even have infinitely long wings? Is it because he's a mutant? Or the last member of a long lost race? No, it's because Randall thought up a joke that nobody else would find funny. And because the idea was kind of wacky and non-sensical, he just slapped Beret Guy in it without any sense of reason.

We have been led to believe that even though all other characters are basically one-shots with similar hair styles, Beret Guy is the same man in every strip. Now that I think back to it, though, I don't think there has ever been any indication of this in the comic itself. And that makes sense. Why is Beret Guy's (and Mr. Hat's, for that matter) character so inconsistent? Because it's not the same character. Beret Guy is every Cloudcuckoolander in xkcd-land. The beret is not an indication of the character, it's an indication of the chracteristic. Mr. Hat is not one guy who is a kind of a dick. Mr. Hat is every guy who is kind of a dick. It is laziness of the highest caliber, equal to declaring "everybody who wears glasses is a brainiac" and just expecting the audience to run with it.

It is laziness that is Randall Munroe's biggest sin. He is capable of drawing beautiful landscapes, detailed vehicles and even recognizable human beings, but he creates a stick comic because otherwise he'd have to put work into drawing it. He often goes with half-assed, unfunny jokes, because otherwise he'd have to put work into writing them. He never grows as an artist, because that means challenging himself, i.e. work. Randall Munroe's laziness is the reason why xkcd sucks.

----

P.S.: There haven't been any reviews for a long time, because even if I do usually find something to say about a comic, I can't muster up any energy to write a review, especially since all I really need to do is point at some past reviews and say "these things that were wrong with the past comics are wrong with this comic, too". I have come to the conclusion that xkcd isn't really conductive to the "strip by strip review" blog format and that it would be more effective to just create a wiki that would mainly focus on the many, many flaws of the comic (see the tag list on this blog) - something like Rob's Rants on the non-hyphenated cousin.

1086: It's not a comic until you draw something worth looking at.

Alt-text: Ooh, another one. Uh ... the ability to alter any coefficients of friction at will during sporting events.

Oh come on! This isn't even a comic. How far up your ass does your head have to be to think that to be labelled a comic, all your creation needs to be is made by hand in a drawing program?

Yep, it's another one of those and I guess it's my duty to demonstrate how this execution is the single worst one that Randall could've chosen. First, it is essentially a dumb joke about meta-wishes (who hasn't made one of those?) interspersed with shotgun humor, and as we all know by now, neither is funny, especially when done by xkcd. The shotgun wishes especially could be used as setups for a series of comics, depicting the effects of said wishes, but no, all we get is a list of ideas.

What really ruins the comic for me is the format. Presuming the existence of a magical wish-granting bureau is a) something so typically xkcd, and b) a dead horse already. You could've drawn this as a log of a clinically insane man and you wouldn't even have to change anything except for the header.

Also, including a picture of Mr. Hat in the log does not count as featuring a recurring character.