xkcd vs. MATT

i'm sorry you think this terrible, toxic comic is funny : (

I am sorry that due to personal reasons your sense of humour is off, but how is it "toxic" from any viewpoint other than "nerds are bad, and should feel bad"?

you end up on the other side of the line almost every time. get thee away from me!

xp it presents condescension as a positive bromide, among other things.

read all the comments in this thread not written by you for further deets (we are all nerds).

I genuinely thought he was doing all those things.

haha way to miss the point of the criticism, which is that this dude is dumb and bad at jokes

He's not condescending, he's getting away from there to something he'd rather be doing (A lesson for ILX, etc).

But yeah I don't think that looking at this as a delivery platform for joeks (rather than quietly ironic ideas) is going to get you much joy.

"i only have time in my life for positive people" is the sort of sophomoric sentiment i would expect from a webcomic artist tho

sorry "artist"

lol @ being furious at a webcomic about not talking about ppl behind their back, dont worry guys, he's not going to actually take away your god-given right to say mean things about ppl when they're not around

wtf it's the internet, getting furious at people who will never have any significant impact on our lives is the whole point.

i'm so furious about it right now

i said something about it, ergo i'm a mad carefucker, i'm so negative

also can we move this to 77 so we're actually bitching about him behind his back.

i think someone made a cartoon about this once, hold on...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

does anyone know how old this guy is?

He's not condescending, he's getting away from there to something he'd rather be doing (A lesson for ILX, etc).

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, February 22, 2013 2:03 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's the condescension (e.g. the latest) or there's humour of recognition (e.g. lol python exists), which is just as toxic. both boil down to encouraging self-congratulatory narcissism/elitism in the target audience (i say this with some certainty via my job).

the humour of mentioning a computer program is toxic

ha, try working where i do

elmo v andrew farrell i really don't know it's like pats v giants

[SMART GUY PWNS OTHER GUY]

But it's never literally pavlovian "lol python exists", even weak stuff like http://xkcd.com/1168/ is "lol tar is a widely used but massively arcane tool, see how you literally couldn't figure it out without looking at the manual even if your life depended on it". If that's toxic, then they need to bring in people in rad suits for most of Family Guy.

xp ..where do you actually work?

xkcd dude comes off like mickey mouse fucking a marshmellow peep, with an added touch of outraged pastor's wife. i think i get some sick pleasure out of being annoyed by these comics.

i think people are projecting just a little onto these comics

yah these comics sure are making people ... animated

i think its because we all know that somewhere inside of us, there's a 15-year old that would probably find xkcd funny and relevant

obviously family guy is awful, but at least not every single family guy 2% joke is tailored for the same audience. it's the accumulation of self-congratulation for one small group that's my problem. (and it is _only_ self congratulation. a reference to a thing that exists is not a joke.)

i think people are projecting just a little onto these comics

this is quite literally the whole point, tho. it's not very different at all than facebook macros getting all shrill about grammar and punctuation, or the explanatory infographics from the oatmeal, or any other highly-shared content. people like sharing things that flatter their intelligence and make them feel smart. it's the entire reason we're even talking about this dumb webcomic at all, because people project themselves all over it.

well, maybe not ANY highly-shared content, but it accounts for maybe like 50% of reddit frontpage posts

this is a legitimate criticism of family guy/simpson/30 rock...

http://zigzigger.blogspot.de/2006/12/30-rock-my-boys-and-new-sit-com.html

"This is Simpsons-style humor, what writers sometimes call a 2% joke: one that they expect most people to miss. (Actually, 2% jokes are jokes that people are supposed to think that most people will miss so that it can make them feel superior, but which are actually not so hard to get.)"

but as a criticism it only goes so far because with those shows because their 2% jokes are usu. not _just_ references. they actually have some of the other properties of humour. when xkcd does this (which is all the time when it's not stuff like "talking about people when they're not in the room is mean" or self-infantilisation about ball pits or "sex-positive" stalker shit), it's always marketed to the same skill-set. they're not generic pop culture refs, but a demand the knowledge that a particular group of people sincerely if sub-consciously confuse with intelligence.

p.s. yes i am definitely projecting. i am a scientist in an academic institution.

Much as ledge blessed me upthread, I now bless caek for never having met any enthusiastic python converts.

A lot of that comparison is audience and distribution though - Family Guy is on national TV, xkcd is pretty clearly a subculture thing. If you are, say, the only non-geek in an office where people bellow xkcd catchphrases in place of humour then that it horrible and you have my full sympathy. As far as I know "someone on the internet is wrong" is the only xkcd to really hit escape velocity and be a proper meme, though my experiences may not match all of yours, of course.

I am a little upset that this thread has more posts than the PBF one. I think what Russell was trying to say with that comic is that instead of bitching about how much we dislike XKCD, we should instead be talking about how good PBF is.

p.p.s. i think the tar joke is not about it's arcaneness. it's that everyone makes an incredibly simple, frustrating mistake about the simplest aspect of tar, every time they use tar without checking, i.e. "tar cvf directory/ tarball.tar" when they mean "tar cvf tarball.tar directory/".

i greatly enjoy the 2 new PBF comix he writes a year xp

every time they use tar without checking, i.e. "tar cvf directory/ tarball.tar" when they mean "tar cvf tarball.tar directory/".

stop, my sides

tbf if that's the joke, i do think that's the funniest xkcd cartoon ever

btw that "2%" thing is really bs - there are some jokes I can think of where I do feel I'm one of the few that gets it (the Todd Rundgren joke on 30 Rock) but I think I do get like 99% of the jokes on the Simpsons or Family Guy and there's no way I'm always in the "2%"...I'm really quite ignorant

pbf guy is working on short films mostly now http://vimeo.com/user4387261/videos

i greatly enjoy the 2 new PBF comix he writes a year xp

i think it's a good testament to the strength of two really good ideas per year vs. two hundred shitty ones (yes I'm talking about xkcd here) in the internet age

There is room in the world for two really good ideas and two hundred tossed-off bits of "this is moderately amusing to the intended audience" per year.

you go to that room I'll be in this room

lol

But yeah I don't think that looking at this as a delivery platform for joeks (rather than quietly ironic ideas) is going to get you much joy.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 22 February 2013 14:03 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that "2%" thing is really bs

is the point. a proper 2 percenter should be accessible to 80 percent plus of the audience but make most of them feel special for getting it. the cartoons already listed do regular meta-gags about 2 percent gags too, so that the 2 percent of the 2 percent can feel good about themselves, and so on, until every viewer is on the inside nice and warm and gently explaining the humour to their partner/room-mate/sibling who is trapped on the outside about to punch them in the balls

^^^ good idea for an XKCD strip, will pitch

also it helps if the joke isn't the weakest shit ever

u guys have weird opinions about what makes ppl feel good

bingo - what kind of upset me in retrospect about the Rundgren joke was the realization that if Todd was as big as the Beatles and the joke was actually quite easy to get, it wouldn't be funny because it doesn't really make sense. I'm sure the Simpsons had a few but I think Arrested Development was probably the king of making jokes that very few people got that were actually really funny.

like when a simpsons writer comes up with a joke that's a bit obscure, i am pretty sure that they put it in because it's funny to them, not as like a secret high-five to their ~special viewers~

is a joke a joke if no one gets it? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

s1ocki if those kind of gags with that kind of motive don't exist then why do the meta-commentary gags in the same shows exist to show us that the writers are aware of what they're doing?