1883

Again with the drones! No psychologically healthy person cares this much about drones. And is Randall seriously so ignorant as to believe that a big San Andreas earthquake would actually lead to California drifting off to sea?

1882

i dont get it

1881

After a long career as the gadfly-hero of his own Ayn Rand story, Black Hat Guy finally meets his match in the person of a pet store cashier. The encounter continues through several stages, with White Hat Guy (WHG) offering the intrusive Black Hat Guy (BHG) everything that he requests before finally rejecting him and casting him out, and we realize that what we have witnessed is a recurrence of the ancient confrontation between the Buddha and Mara. WHG's enlightenment is revealed for us by stages, the better to help us appreciate its depth.

Note that WHG at first meets BHG's provocations with gentle correction, even prefacing his declaration about the true nature of the world with the honorific address of "Sir". BHG counters by revealing that the nature of the world-shop is already known to him, before stating that he seeks precisely the sort of good (in the narrow, material sense) on offer. WHG, encouraged by BHG's apparent recognition of the truth of the world, attempts to help him come to small measure of enlightenment in his own right, stating simply that drones cannot be trained. When BHG rejects this invitation, WHG wisely does not attempt to force enlightenment upon him, instead giving him the good he believes himself to seek-- secure in the knowledge that BHG's path to enlightenment will advance itself further in its own good time. It is only when BHG becomes still more importunate and violent in his demands that WHG rebukes him, casting him out from the shop-world entirely.

The deeply layered symbolism of the characters' appearances and poses should not escape us. On the surface, this is a parable about resistance to trolling: WHG is successful in that he does not actively strive against BHG but rather acquiesces in a semi-Taoist fashion as far as possible. But WHG and BHG do not simply have opposite-colored hats; their very stances are perfect mirror images. In this, Randall is clearly struggling to drive home the point that this same struggle between yin-enlightenment and yang-belligerent ignorance runs through every human soul, and suggesting that the tension between these concepts is the very essence of the human experience. I cannot but commend the deep spiritual insight underpinning this comic.

1880

Oh for God's sake.

This is a low-effort comic, even by Randall's standards. There's only 5 points displayed-- good luck getting a statistically significant correlation out of that. Why not add in a bunch more things, like "vernal equinox", "transit of Venus", or "occultation of Jupiter"? It's not like there aren't a lot of different terms for astronomical events. Next, to the extent that there is any visible trend in this niggardly little dataset, it appears that cool-sounding things tend to be cooler to see. Not exactly a revolutionary observation, even if you think "planetary conjunction" doesn't sound cool.

1879

The best thing about the eclipse is that now that it's over Randall will probably stop making comics about it.

1878

Ugh.

1877

"Oops, plebs have started getting excited about the eclipse! Time to switch from patronizing to sneering."

1876

Hey look, it's the chair and laptop from Friday, only reversed!

I keep getting angrier and angrier about this one the more I think about it. We start with an incredibly dumb observation (being careful to cite sources, because Randall is a stalwart fighter in the war against fake news, although the link is provided in the form of a PICTURE OF TEXT SO YOU HAVE TO TYPE IT IN BY HAND): people who live in places where the upcoming eclipse will be visible are likely to look up information about the eclipse. Wow! My mind has never been this blown! You'd think areas in the path of the eclipse* would be regularly exposed to news about it, or something!

Then we have yet another goddamn picture of Google Trends in a half-assed attempt to make some other stupid point. What are we supposed to get from this? That because more people are googling the eclipse than googled the 2016 election, there's going to be massive traffic jams because of everyone going on the road to see the eclipse? Even after all that googling, turnout for the 2016 election was 60%, compared to... 59% in 2012. That's no kind of increase at all. I'd almost think this was some kind of joke about reading too much into Google Trends, except that he's playing it so terribly, terribly straight.

What the hell kind of function is that supposed to be extrapolating, anyway?


*Ackchyually, the eclipse doesn't really have a path; it's the Earth that rotates such that a different portion of its surface is in the shadow cast by the moon throughout the event. How does it feel to be out-pedanted you poseur?

1875

Dinosaur Comics gets away with this on the strength of its writing. Randall is no good at that either.

1874

Man, Randall has always been terrible at this kind of shotgun humor. There's no sense of mounting absurdity or progression to a punchline here: you could put the made-up ones in any order and it wouldn't change the comic at all. Also, a thrust fault is a class of reverse fault. This means that Randall actually struggled for some indeterminate period to come up with more joke faults, but then gave up and opted to put in another real one instead because he could just look it up on Wikipedia without straining his brain.

1872

OK, but... where's the joke? This is another one of those incredibly banal observations people have been making for over a decade-- and also the distinctive mingling of neurosis and techno-fetishism that makes for classic GOOMH-bait.

1873

As above. If this was 2011 and inbox angst was still a relatively recent development, I might have thought this was funny.

1871

This comic is getting pulled in way too many directions. Not so very long ago we were given to understand that referring to rabbits (or hares or bunnies or lagomorphs or whatever, go on, get pedantic) in this disgusting affectedly cutesy way was stupid. Today, it seems that our harmlessly quirky old friend White Hat Guy has latched onto this as his latest whimsical scheme in what appears to be a callback to 1772 that doesn't really go anywhere. Not only that, but the teacher from 1682 is totally over rabbits, while Megan is now tremendously enthusiastic.

I've never heard a reference to this "bun" (*retches violently*) meme outside of XKCD. Is it another one of those really parochial Boston things like complaining about drones?