1935

Hey, maybe they're not walking perfectly in step. What if they've actually been doing tai chi all along?

1934

Randall was at a Christmas party the other day, and someone mentioned that it would be funny if you could remotely detonate your phone your phone if it was stolen. The other guests laughed, eggnog flowed, and conversation quickly passed to other topics. Randall spent the rest of the evening trying to get people to talk about funny phone security options, but no one listened.

1933

Yet another low-effort shotgun-humor diagram married to a feeble attempt at salience by referring to current events. There are a couple errors as well. The plural should be "Santae", and the IUCN classification for a species with only two living members (assuming Mrs. Claus counts) is "extinction warning", not "critically endangered". Although if we are to take Randall's word for Santa Claus being a vampire, it is improper to refer to Santa Claus as a living being at all, making IUCN classifications inapplicable. This also invalidates Santa's stated position in the presidential line of succession (I guess we're referring to the US line of succession). The 25th Amendment states that the President is to be succeeded by the Vice President in the event of his death, which would seem to necessitate that any person succeeding to the presidency must himself be alive. In any case, the 9th person in the line of presidential succession is Sonny Perdue, the Secretary of Agriculture.

And just as an aside, it was stupid to go for the whole vampire angle in the first place. The only quality of Santa that has anything even related to vampires is the entering houses thing, which of course he contradicts. This is like saying Usain Bolt is a zombie because he runs fast.

1932

This is Randall at his most insufferably Millennial. Notice something? Try being meta about it! Then, try being meta about how meta you're being!

And then it all turns out to have been a terrible setup for something he learned on Wikipedia all along. Even more meta!

1931

Gosh, that Randall sure is wacky! Who else would have the idea of trying to make people think there was a little person inside their spy-bots?

1930

Looks like the AI is bugged-- I think it's supposed to select one of these and make a joke out of it, rather than print the whole Markov chain. But even leaving aside the technical glitch, this is a clear example of the problems with training it exclusively on old XKCD comics. It looks like this was intended to create some kind of humorous connection between Shark Week and Easter, but the AI gets stuck because it has only a library of banal astronomy facts from which to choose.

1929

I never really appreciated before how hard it is for people with absolutely no self-discipline to survive in a highly-networked society.

1928

What a relief! I was starting to wonder if Randall still had a girlfriend.

1927

Come on, Randall! You used this exact joke just a few months ago! Reach back a little farther, at least.

1926

Does this look like a rejected Big Bang Theory script to anyone else?

INT: Open-plan office. RANDALL is sitting at his desk. BLONDE MEGAN approaches.

BLONDE MEGAN: That's the ugliest mess of code I've ever seen. What on Earth are you working on?

[LAUGH TRACK]

RANDALL: It's nothing weird this time, I swear.

[LAUGH TRACK]

RANDALL: It just looks bad because it's a spreadsheet formula.

RANDALL: Which assembles a Haskell function. 

[LAUGH TRACK GETS LOUDER]

BLONDE MEGAN: Uhhh.

[LAUGH TRACK CONTINUES TO MOUNT]

RANDALL: For parsing HTML.

BLONDE MEGAN: Oh my God.

[LAUGH TRACK EXPLODES. I MEAN JUST UPROARIOUS GUFFAWING FOR AT LEAST TWENTY SECONDS]

RANDALL: It's OK! Nothing depends on this.

[LAUGH TRACK]

BLONDE MEGAN: That wall isn't load-bearing. Does that mean we can just throw hammers at it?

RANDALL: I mean...

[LAUGH TRACK]

BLONDE MEGAN: Wait. Crap.

[LAUGH TRACK, CROSSFADE INTO APPLAUSE]

1925

I'm betting we eventually find out that somewhere around 2015, Randall decided to start experimenting with an AI to generate webcomics for him. As the first clumsy, poorly-tuned outputs of a nascent artificial intelligence, these are remarkably human (if not funny) jokes-- I've made several of them myself. It will be interesting to see how the network develops, though this example shows some overfitting problems. Randall should train it on other webcomics too, so it doesn't have to lean so heavily on shotgun humor about things he saw in Wired.

1924

I've been thinking for a while that the inflection point where it takes more effort to write an XKCD hateblog post than it does to actually write XKCD has long since passed, but this is probably the starkest demonstration since my own short career began*. Isn't it great to have a professional NASA engineer around to tell us things that any eight-year-old child would figure out in less than five minutes?

*Not that it wasn't already true well before I started.

This whole week has been remarkably phoned-in, even by XKCD standards.

1922

First, we've got Randall's cringeworthy take on that godawful pupper meme. Sure did me a h*ckin bamboozle! It also doesn't make sense as written, since you still can't ride a single giant dog. Better to show the dogs becoming invisible through polarized sunglasses, or something.

1923

This one, though, is just depressingly crappy. What's the point of being a pedant if you can't even muster up any excitement about it? Why not use the geometric mean, or any other of the library full of esoteric functions you learn as a NASA engineer? I can feel my will to live being sapped just by thinking about this comic. This is the dementor's kiss of comics.