1896

Of all the things to feel smug about, knowing that medicines are made predominantly out of non-toxic filler to prevent them from killing you has to be among the dumbest.

I notice as well that the Lecture Series for Smart People Randall is giving in Britain credits XKCD with receiving over a billion hits per year (or 2.7 million per day). What's the provenance of that number? Surely they wouldn't be so unscientific and naive as to trust Randall's own estimates?

1895

So, when all those people were getting pointlessly interviewed about the Eclipse a few weeks ago (as Randall recently sneered), we should actually have been super worried! NOW he tells us! Never mind that he doesn't know how to spell "archaeologist"...

... or that archaeologists, economists, nutritionists, and criminologists apparently count as "scientists" now.

The whole setup doesn't work here. What he means is that disasters having to do with pandemic viruses, supervolcanoes, or the sun are more serious than those having to do with archaeology, but if you see a researcher in any of these fields getting interviewed on the news these days it's more likely than not to be related to the shrieking-college-Maoist tantrum du jour.

The rankings are also stupid as such. Remember the 2008 stock market crash? I'll bet that ended up having a much bigger impact on your life than the 2009 flu pandemic and Comet Hale-Bopp combined (unless you were close to one of these people).

1894

Adulting is hard! lol XD

1893

The first Pern novel was published in 1968. Twitter was founded in 2006. At no point during either of those intervals would this joke have been funny. But then, played-out jokes about played-out novels and social media are pretty much par for the XKCD course these days.

1891

Never mind that Randall has a history of exactly this kind of sneering disdain towards old things. The important thing is that he's smarter than you.

1892

This wouldn't be a problem if you weren't a techno-fetishist slave to anything with a battery and a screen.

1890

There is what looks like the germ of a joke here, but it is not brought to any sort of fruition. There's no sense of progression or escalation, and no one talks about a lot of these things. As it is, he sort of gives up on the conceit of playing around with cliched sayings halfway through, and then just rambles.

1889

This comic was not occasioned by a witty thought that brought a smile to the lips of its author. It is an absolutely soulless creation, devoid of any reason to exist save that it is Wednesday. This execrable XKCD-phone series is a self-justifying sequence, like the hole-digger of Blood Meridian, and it's possible to wonder whether they would continue to appear even if Randall himself died. They are completely interchangeable, with nothing to distinguish one from another for better or worse. There is no love in their creation.

Death can take many forms, but what they all have in common is the complete cessation of change. One of the most terrible is the willing retreat into stagnation. It can be difficult, even in retrospect, for anyone to say when precisely he ceased to live-- when the mantle of success, once the object of passionate toil, became a smothering blanket, and then a shroud. To witness it in another is horrifying.

1888

You know how sometimes, when you try to empty the recycle bin on your computer, it tells you you can't empty the recycle bin because some file in it is in use by some program, even though all your programs are closed? The joke is that the real trash can is like that.

1887

Is there even supposed to be a joke here? Meteor storms aren't rare at all: the annual Perseid shower was only about a week before the eclipse. Are we now to be treated to Randall's diary of exciting things he is both lolz-nerdy-XD enough to know about and urbane enough to travel to see?

1886

...OK, but what's your most favorite aspect of typing notifications? In this particular instance, it might have been better to make the setup a little stranger. This is too mundane of a situation.

1885

Well, it seems work on the Bad XKCD Shotgun Joke Generator AI continues apace.

1884

Randall will no doubt be gratified to learn that Android versions since 2016 have included a dropdown menu on the volume slider so the Media and Ring Tone can be controlled independently at any time.