xkcd griefing thread

[Termina]

Every one of these comics is just a lefty meme with so many words you'd need a bookmark to track how much of it you've read. This Randall guy is a pretentious retard who thinks he's right about everything.

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

This comic and smbc ignited my hatred of modern nerds and nerd "culture".

Whatever you think of that Commie Oppenheimer and the secular yeshiva at Los Alamos, those scientist nerds back then were fucking *cultured*. They read great literature and studied the arts and history to relax from the mind-meltingly hard questions of physics and engineering that were their day jobs. Xkcd is the celebration of being a big-brained man-child who whines whenever someone asks him to apply those brains to anything other than building rockets.

They also had brass balls. Randy Munroe pisses himself at the thought of driving a Kia, but John Von Nuemann regularly drove his Caddie while reading books simultaneously to save time and didn't give a shit about how terrorizing it was to everyone else.

 

[Scout Trooper]

I saw an interview with Randall Munroe when he was publishing a book (possibly his first?) and he was extremely autistic.
His affect was completely flat and the reviewer was trying to give him material to riff on and it was like handball against the drapes, everything just fell limply to the floor.

To his credit he sat there and did some weird calculation of something the interviewer asked about which was kind of cool but he was absolutely NOT funny. At about this same time he was transitioning to more faggy political takes in the comics and it was probably the end of me ever viewing his work positively.

I did enjoy the thing explainer cartoon he did of the Saturn V rocket.



I always thought "if it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today" was funny.

 

[Matt Damon]

They also had brass balls.

Those guys were literally fucking around with a subcritical nuke core and were preventing criticality by holding open gaps in the neutron reflectors with screwdrivers and shims and shit. It killed multiple people when they slipped and the core went critical.

Now our scientists say "cars are 3 spooky 5 me, guys!" and shut down the entire world when they find out there's a new cold virus.

 

[internet friend]

I always considered XKCD to be the kind of shit that people outgrow after finishing high school. It was one of the saddest realisations of growing up that most people didn't.

 

[BlueSpark]

Is the purpose of this "comic" to demonstrate how pointless opinion polls are and how irrelevant their data is? Because that comes across much, much more strongly in this comparison than "I'm right because polls agree with me".

99% of the shitlib college students that we surveyed agree that we're infallible and correct in all regards, goyim.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I'm shocked this thread didn't exist already.

https://xkcd.com/1081/

View attachment 5312859

When preparing this thread, I was half-expecting to find some dormant thread from 2014, but I did not.

View attachment 5312873
I found this one from pretty recently. Is there a joke in here? Is the joke that the comic is really confusing in that it doesn't have a joke anywhere, and somehow that makes a meta-joke of some kind? Or am I reading into it too much and it's actually just what it looks like: Randall vigorously deep-throating the clot shot?

The mouseover text is just about blurry vision when reading data, so yes, simping for the vaccine IS still the point. I can't tell what's more frustrating—the fact that the vaccine had unheard-of propaganda, outright discrimination, and extreme censorship to the likes that hasn't been seen before, all for an undertested vaccine where the story kept changing and Big Pharma got a massive payout, or the belief that suddenly, questioning the current narrative is actually a bad thing now.

"It just feels like a miracle that the best and most effective explanation for the cosmos turns out to be one of the easiest and simplest. The Bible says Sun revolves around the Earth! Why do those pesky 'scientists' complicate things?"

Yeah, it comes off as a bunch of pointless stuff juxtaposed with a lot of extremely serious situations, as though they're not serious at all and can be compared to how many people like kittens and apple pie. Randall and everyone who likes this crap have to be autistic to broken levels in order to not see just how tasteless that comes off.

The stuff on the right is drive-time radio fodder, which is made up with extremely suspect sample sizes and is mostly meaningless as far as any market research goes, it's to fill time. Rather than being a mean-spirited autist, that sort of thing could be flipped on its head to be "polls are meaningless, lol".

I saw an interview with Randall Munroe when he was publishing a book (possibly his first?) and he was extremely autistic.
His affect was completely flat and the reviewer was trying to give him material to riff on and it was like handball against the drapes, everything just fell limply to the floor.

I think the first book was published in 2010, which I got for my brother as a Christmas gift. (Funny story, at the time, he did remark how Monroe was a really fucked-up person when re-reading it). But it was about the time the quality of the comic began to plummet, with more stuff on politics and less stuff on things like Firefly references.

 

[Blatant hypocrite]

View attachment 5312864

Learn to drive dumbass.

Driving is safe and effective. Car companies invested time and money into making good cars, don't you Trust The Science? Look at this cool diagram of a car engine, it's so sciency. I can't believe you don't like something so COOL and MODERN and ENGINEERING.

 

[Harvey Danger]

I'll give a tepid defense of pre-politics XKCD.

Spoiler: the before times

It used to have jokes, and they could have a tiny bit of edge.



The nerd humor could be nerdy, but not pretentious.


And the random ones were at least OK.

But after a while, he disappeared up his own ass.

Spoiler: from quirky to quarrelsome

To start with, xkcd was the I LOVE SCIENCE! meme before the Big Bang Theory ever started.


(2006)

xkcd always had a perspective, usually an oddball take on conventional perspectives. But he lost or lacks the ability to self-introspect, or examine his own worldview. The comics already posted here illustrate some of the problems that leads to when you're trying to make smart jokes about dumb things or people.

There's no better illustration of that lack than these two comics, spaced a year apart.




That was 2011-2012. You would think that someone who recognized the incestuous relationship between wikipedia and the narrative-pushing media, would have some skepticism of the midwit intelligensia structure that fuels the SCIENCE! crowd. Instead Randall just gobbles down the approved expert opinion on everything. His blank faced cutout just can't stand someone who doesn't accept the same authorities as him, so he gives up and does something frivolous instead.

This eventually led to his profoundly dumb takes on things like the Coronavirus.


Alt text: " This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it."

And the jabs.


And even worse takes on the intersection of politics, power, and technology.



And of course he's an unquestioning lefty.


Alt text: "We can do this."

I haven't bothered skimming xkcd in a very long time, so I missed the worst parts. I used to see some of them posted in forums to make a simple, succinct point during arguments; my personal favorite was a jab at the squishy academic fields.



But that hasn't really happened in at least a decade. You would think the "witty wry observer of human folly" schtick would be having a field day in the middle of Clown World. But it really says something about Randall's limitations that he's lost all relevance as the world becomes dumber and more bizarre.

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

I haven't bothered skimming xkcd in a very long time, so I missed the worst parts. I used to see some of them posted in forums to make a simple, succinct point during arguments; my personal favorite was a jab at the squishy academic fields.

I always hated that shit, granted, I was studying to be part of a field that is the butt of that joke, but at the same time, what are the alternatives?

It's either you don't study it at all, or you accept that studying models of human social functioning will never be able to happen in a perfectly controlled experimental set-up and you're just left with modeling from data-sets drawn from the messiness of real life, complete with messy results, including results that were verboten to discuss even back in the 90s and 00s when I was kicking it through college and grad school (the book "The Bell Curve" put me into a two year funk because, well, it explained too well stuff that I had seen first hand, and mind you I'm from a low-performing minority group).

Either way, there's irony in "I FUCKIN' LOVE SCIENCE" Randy Monroe now mouthing political lines about the science of race, sex and gender that only the most batshit insane sociologists and cultural anthropologists bought into back in the 90s. Shit, I'm so old I remember when the student GLBT group (the "G" was first back then) protested commie professors who made students buy class books from the nearby RCP bookstore because Bob Avakian and the old-school commies thought faggotry was bourgeois.

 

[McMitch]

I always thought "if it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today" was funny.

Fuck, is xkcd where the infantile, intentionally-reductionist, reddit speak came from?

 

[Scout Trooper]

Fuck, is xkcd where the infantile, intentionally-reductionist, reddit speak came from?

It didn't not come from xkcd, I'll tell you that.

 

[Tekken Enjoyer]

Apparently I value my time so little that I browsed xkcd more and found some more especially bad comics. If you don't want to check what xkcd is like now, you can rest assured that basically every comic I saw was bad, these are just the ones without even a normal, hackneyed, lame joke.

The joke is that... What if down was another direction? A great example of the following clip:

If you couldn't tell he was a liberal by the political comics, you can certainly tell by the amount of WORDSWORDSWORDS he puts into comics that aren't even funny to being with.

Another one of his favorite "jokes" is just describing normal things but using Science™ words to make it funny.

Randall really seems to like Wirecutter. What the fuck is Wirecutter, you may ask? The New York Times' product recommendation website. Who the fuck would read the NYT's product recommendation website regularly? Randall Munroe.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

If you couldn't tell he was a liberal by the political comics, you can certainly tell by the amount of WORDSWORDSWORDS he puts into comics that aren't even funny to being with.

I actually like this one. But it isn't funny, and I don't like it for any sort of humour reasons but because it is a interesting commentary on how different life can be and the nature of it.

His main problem seems to be a lack of self awareness. As Harvey perfectly pointed out here:

xkcd always had a perspective, usually an oddball take on conventional perspectives. But he lost or lacks the ability to self-introspect, or examine his own worldview. The comics already posted here illustrate some of the problems that leads to when you're trying to make smart jokes about dumb things or people.

There's no better illustration of that lack than these two comics, spaced a year apart.

Someone who made the first post should have been able to realize why the second one doesn't work as well. But Randall didn't because he isn't paying attention anymore.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I haven't bothered skimming xkcd in a very long time, so I missed the worst parts. I used to see some of them posted in forums to make a simple, succinct point during arguments; my personal favorite was a jab at the squishy academic fields.

That is a good one.

The insufferable waterslide one? I found it by clicking random about 15 times.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

I never found these comics funny. They often had a fucking wall of text.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I actually like this one. But it isn't funny, and I don't like it for any sort of humour reasons but because it is a interesting commentary on how different life can be and the nature of it.

His main problem seems to be a lack of self awareness. As Harvey perfectly pointed out here:

Someone who made the first post should have been able to realize why the second one doesn't work as well. But Randall didn't because he isn't paying attention anymore.

In some ways it works perfectly. "My colleagues have figured a way to create 'truth' from their own ass and that has become truth. You may NOT question it."

 

[Retink Retunk]

This is one of those webcomics I'm happy I forgot existed a decade ago. I remember liking it when I was younger, but that's not saying much and I'm sure if I went back today I'd find it very cringe.

 

[Tekken Enjoyer]

I actually like this one. But it isn't funny, and I don't like it for any sort of humour reasons but because it is a interesting commentary on how different life can be and the nature of it.

After reading a bunch of these I think he should just have a blog or something where he can talk about his random ideas, or latest thing he found on Wikipedia, because so many of these comics come off to me as him finding a random thing he finds interesting and then throwing together a comic to show that off with little regard for if there's a functional joke in there.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

After reading a bunch of these I think he should just have a blog or something where he can talk about his random ideas, or latest thing he found on Wikipedia, because so many of these comics come off to me as him finding a random thing he finds interesting and then throwing together a comic to show that off with little regard for if there's a functional joke in there.

He has a sister site, What If, where he replied to random questions about absurd scenarios an such. It was highly amusing but seems to be dead as it hasn't been updated in a while. He put 2 books out from stuff he did for it.