2016-06-19

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1689 - My Friend Catherine & #1690 - Time-Tracking Software


Mark Prindle fans may or may not remember that one of his chief problems with Guided By Voices was that they'd release every single thing they ever recorded, even if it sucked and no one wanted to hear it and it sucked. I heard six GBV songs about fifty years ago, so I can't verify this assertion, but I am inclined to trust a man who tells me that Ween is good. 

I think a similar point can be made about XKCD. When this comic idea popped into Randall's head, rather thank immediately thinking "Wait, haven't I done this seven times before?" he thought something else that made him think another keyboard substitution joke was a good idea. 

The world does not need an update every time Randall Munroe comes up with a new keyboard substitution. Or, at the very least, the world does not need it in comic form. 

Here's an idea: Randall is a tech type guy, right? So he could probably hook us all up with an official "XKCD Keyboard Substitutions" Chrome extension thing. And every time he's about to make one of these comics, he just updates the extension. Unless making Chrome extensions is actually super hard, in which case I apologize for my unreasonable expectation.


This one actually does not get a full thumbs down from me. It's not a thumbs up, either, though. The Star War, Wikipedia, and Jack And Dane captions all come off as "Hey I'm self consciously quirky!"

Brief bit of navel gazing: Maybe the reason that I personally dislike Randall's self-conscious quirkiness is because I've always been self-conscious of my own behavioral abnormalities, and my self loathing manifests as projection. Then again, people who try to seem unique and special are mostly grating by default, so maybe not.

What makes this comic work (or at least, not totally suck) is the "installing and configuring time-tracking software". I feel like it really does say something deep about this human equation with which we are all afflicted. For lack of a better comparison, it's like how Oedipus tried so hard not to fuck his mom that he ended up fucking his mom - this guy tried to keep himself on task through time-tracking software that he ended up going through his work time.

The thing that ruins my quick stint at being an English major is the aforementioned three 'quirky' slices of the pie chart. Irony is so delicious, don't add sides of broccoli. [Broccoli, in this metaphor, represents the bad parts of this comic]

Also it would have probably have been better to show a guy installing the time software on his computer before showing us the graph, but I basically took that criticism as read.

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