2016-12-05

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1738 - Moon Shapes & #1739 - Fixing Problems


I'd like to point out that #4 depends on the viewing angle. Imagine you're laying down in a field, looking up. You see the moon like it's #3, but if you rotate your body around, you can see it like it's #4.

Also, #5 is still possible, right? It's just improbable, it should at least get a half checkmark.

It kinda annoys me that Randy decided to caption this "Interpreting the shape of the moon in art". Art doesn't have to be realistic, man! The fact that The Starry Night isn't astronomically accurate doesn't devalue it, it enhances it. The comic should have been captioned "A guide to drawing the moon realistically" or something like that.

#8 brings up an interesting thought: How much human habitation would it take for the light they generate to become visible from Earth? 'Cause the light we generate in cities is visible from near space, right? So it's like vica versa. Also how bright are nuclear explosions from space, realistically?

Anyway this comic isn't a joke, but it isn't really informational either. Like, doesn't everyone pretty much already know this? 90% of the time someone draws moon #6, it's just stylization. This comic really just comes off like Randy complaining that other people don't have the same standards that he does. NEXT!


This is just like that other comic, except without everything that made it good. With that comic, we saw the development of those problems, we felt his exasperation at the exponential disaster that was his computers, and then we got some decent art stuff at the end. This is just a tweet with art slapped on to call it a comic. The recursive phrase suddenly ending out midway is even a regular twitter joke thing (although I'm unable to find any examples at the moment). 

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