XKCD

[BRPXQZME]

Over the past 11 years of Internet postings? Maybe like 10 times, tops. Because in a forum format, people avoid naming names a lot of the time (almost like a faux pas, especially if you’re contradicting them). It feels really weird to me to call someone by their handle name at times, I know that much. I try to keep a sense of humor about it, at any rate, since on the flip side I am kind of a hardass when it comes to my real name (not hard, just unusual—also, unique). I have gone by BRP before, but sometimes that one’s taken.

And yes, I am afraid that that is not the language recognized by M. Five points from Gryffindor.

[Wesley Foxx]

That is part of why I have always avoided internet handles that weren't names of some kind.

Actually I don't remember having an internet handle that WASN'T some form of Wes(ley)( /_)Fox(x) aside from WoW stuff, where I was Foxpaw. I've been using it for about a decade now, so for many intents and purposes it is actually my name.

[Drillgorg]

Except for in the water world on Minecraft when you were Wesley Otter.

I've only been to a precious few IRL meetups, but we generally called each other by our screen names. I didn't even give out my first name, people just called me Drillgorg. I heard Zuki's first name at some point, but I promptly forgot it because I only called her Zuki, and it never came up again.

ANYWAY speaking of XKCD, the new what if physics section is pretty good.

[Miff]

Miff is my furname, so by all accounts, it's pretty much as real to me as my IRL name. About half the people I know IRL call me Miff and the other half use my given name.

[eerr]

* The reason none of Randall's comics seem to have any coherence, is that he forces people in computer labs to write them, as some sort of slave labour.

[Jetroid]

You cannot get rid of C or K without ruining the title of this comic!

XK-seedy?

[Kíeros]

So, there's now the What-If portion in addition. Since I like the geeky physics parts of xkcd, these are great. Especially the baseball one.

[unbridledExüberance]

This latest comic reminds me of an idea I had about a potential security vulnerability in Linux. It's not really a security flaw since it requires the user to intentionally run software (which would never be accepted into a trusted repository), but still. The idea is this: make your program (which only needs to be run by an account which has permission to use sudo, it doesn't need to be run by root itself) modify the .bashrc profile of an administrator account to add the following line

alias sudo="sudo <insert malicious program here>; sudo"

Next time the user opens up a terminal and tries to run a command as root using sudo, the malicious code is also run with root privilages.

Of course, you could easily avoid this by simply changing the ownership of your .bashrc file to root, and giving yourself read privillages.

[SeFoNo]

And Hussie ain't an ass? As in my own words: "Between half-assing it and actually working, Hussie made Homestuck." And I read XKCD, and it is quite humerous if y'get the context. Just 'cause someone can't draw don't mean it ain't good!

[Nimz]

I don't think anyone is saying that Randall can't draw, unless you are making that assertion, SeFoNo. If that is the case, I would like to draw your attention to some of the background details (chairs for stick figures aren't as easy as they look), landscapes, and ferrets, among other things that demonstrate that he is at least competent as an artist. Also, the converse of your last statement is just as true as what you stated. Put one way, just 'cause someone can draw don't mean it ain't no good. However, that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, regarding the comic itself, I think I would be more disturbed at Google's data collection with the advent of ContextBot rather than less disturbed. And I already regularly delete my cookies from Google.

[nostalgebraist]

And Hussie ain't an ass? As in my own words: "Between half-assing it and actually working, Hussie made Homestuck." And I read XKCD, and it is quite humerous if y'get the context.

I'm a math grad student, I have a degree in physics, I've done my fair share of programming, and I spend more time than I should on the internet. I usually get what Monroe's referring to. I just don't think his comic is all that funny or, well . . . good.

And I really don't think the Hussie/Munroe comparison makes Monroe look good at all. Hussie can definitely draw; his pages for MSPA just look shoddy because he produces them extremely fast. In three years of working 12 hours a day, he's produced a 5000-page comic with a very complex story, numerous visual motifs, enough dialogue to fill a 1000-page novel (or many seasons of a TV show) and a large cast of characters with subtle personalities and their own distinctive styles and registers of speech.

Meanwhile, in seven years, Munroe has produced barely more than 1000 pages of stick figures reciting the sort of lame jokes that scientists and programmers make to each other while in the lab or the office to distract themselves from their real work. His comic has no distinctive or interesting visual features (except, uh, a few guys with different types of hats), no plot, and no well-defined characters (except, again, a few guys who wear hats).

I don't think the level of "half-assing" here is barely comparable.

man what's gotten into me tonight

[dragonpaul99]

The problem with XKCD is that it updates way too often and Randall doesn't have enough good ideas to fill up all the space. It could have the potential to be a good webcomic if he just cut it down to 1 or 2 strips a week and threw out all the weaker ones, or if he focused on making more of those what-if essays, or even spent more than 5 minutes drawing each strip.

But of course it wouldn't be as marketable then if it only updated once a week, so that's clearly not going to happen.

[Sleaw]

If he doesn't have enough good ideas to fill three stickman comics a week, maybe he should stop making xkcd and just have a cool blog or something for his ideas without cramming them into non-funny comics.

[Kraft]

^That's exactly what dragonpaul99 said, but with a vast increase of negativity.

Mondays was hilarious and Wednesday's was cute; I wonder what tomorrow's update will be like.

[User 18]

Oh hey, this thread exists.

I like XKCD. I think the early comics were better, but it still gets a chuckle out of me more often than not.

It was the first comic I was introduced to, and it's the comic that started me into the webcomics community in general. While it's not my favourite, and doesn't even make my top five, it's not a comic I gave up on, and it wouldn't be next to go, either.

I have given up on comics in the past, but when I reinstalled my OS at the start of the year, I did keep this one. Speaks for something, doesn't it?

[Sleaw]

^That's exactly what dragonpaul99 said, but with a vast increase of negativity.

Mondays was hilarious and Wednesday's was cute; I wonder what tomorrow's update will be like.

Well, not exactly. Just nearly identical. Dragonpaul suggested cutting down to fewer strips, I suggest cutting all the strips and just presenting the ideas.

The Contextbot comic is an expression of frustration about vague facebook posts that I've seen so often on sites like 9gag that I couldn't find it funny or interesting. It doesn't help that 9gag is already a place filled with lame humor and overdone memes, either.

The last two comics referenced stuff I didn't really know, so I can't judge them at all. They went pretty much completely over my head.

[Wesley Foxx]

Well, I don't think I get PART of the reference, but I do at least get the Charlotte's Web part of it. Is it supposed to be Bilbo with Sting or something?

[User 18]

Well, I don't think I get PART of the reference, but I do at least get the Charlotte's Web part of it. Is it supposed to be Bilbo with Sting or something?

It's Sam, when Frodo was captured on the border of Mordor. Hence the Cirith Ugnol in the title.

He had a light which was a gift from the elves (who in particular escapes me at the moment), and the tower was full of spiders.

Of course, this is one of the 'not-funny-if-you-don't-know-there's-alt-text' comics, which I don't like as much.

90% of what I remember from the LOTR plots is from BFME right now (which is fuzzy on Sam/Frodo), so I don't remember more details.

[BRPXQZME]

Despite that I read the books, it was when I was 10, so, 90% of what I remember of LotR is from watching the theatrical versions of the movies when they were in theaters and half-rewatching the back half of Return of the King (with commercial breaks and probably some cuts) because it was on TV and homework was getting too boring on its own.

Watching the extended edition of the whole trilogy has gone from being something I was sure was going to happen during high school to being something on my bucket list.

[Wesley Foxx]

See, while I enjoyed The Hobbit, I found the actual LotR books so incredibly fucking tedious that I never got past the first chapter of the first book, so never gave a shit about the movies.

[MathGirl277]

See, while I enjoyed The Hobbit, I found the actual LotR books so incredibly fucking tedious that I never got past the first chapter of the first book, so never gave a shit about the movies.

You are quite like myself. The Hobbit was definitely worth reading, but the density and repetitiveness of the Fellowship of the Ring was extremely off-putting.

[ThereWillBePayne]

I remember reading them when I was a kid, the second book was a pain in the ass. Like half of it was him describing their travels across big empty plains, in-depth. My god, I promised myself if I saw another "and then they rode another 2 clicks", I would dig out his grave and strange his remains.

[XP105]

To anyone interested:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/

[Dronegorg]

Personally, I think XKCD would be much better if Randall quit making the actual comic and just focused all his attention on what-if. It accentuates the things that XKCD is good at (applying math and science to mundane things) while removing the reliance on things it's bad at (humor, character design, artwork, etc.)

Not that XKCD isn't ever funny (I thought Five Years was pretty amusing), but I don't read it for the laffs.

[Dekker3D]

The what ifs are fun. I love the mole of moles.. the idea of a frozen mole-spewing moon is just too brilliant to forget.