2025

Amazing, a flowchart and a boomerpost at the same time!

2025

Oh look, another comic we've seen before. Randall is just so tickled to pretend he's "hacking" things.

2024

It's funny because she knows these things aren't life hacks, she's just saying it to annoy her interlocutor. The delivery is like that bit in The Office where they just run around shouting "parkour!" played excruciatingly straight.

2023

In case you had forgotten, Randall is a datavis expert from whom we can all learn much.

2022

Extrapolating a trend from two data points that are only tenuously connected to begin with? And here I thought Randall didn't like the social sciences!

2021

2020

I wish Randall would stop pretending to know what being a scientist is like.

2019

Randall thinks one dollar is a good price for a single apple.

2018

XKCD finally catches up to the current year!

This comic demonstrates something about the decadence of modernity that I had not previously grasped. It should be obvious that comic books and associated nerd crap started going wrong in the 1980s, when people stopped growing out of it. This gave rise to the well-known Comic Book Guy manchild demographic, made up of disaffected adults who had never learned to think in a mature way. Over the following couple decades, the millennials developed, steeped in a culture which appears to have actually lost the capacity to grow up. I had wondered for a while what was going to happen to the millennials as they themselves grew older. XKCD No. 2018 demonstrates that they will respond by clinging in panic to the trappings of nostalgia with an ever-more-tenacious grip. Only those blessed few whose cultural memory includes more than the imaginations of Stan Lee and George Lucas, it appears, will be able to grow into fully-formed adults as Paul writes in 1 Cor 13:11.

2016

It is 2018, and Randall Munroe just learned about the OEIS.

2017

A reader had this to say:

Randall seems to have mixed himself up. On the one hand, he wants to show that women can do anything by making a woman identical to the beret guy, but on the other hand he's now sexist because the beret guy is unfunny and dumb

2015

This sure goes on for a long time.

2014

The point of this is not to convey useful information or tell a joke; it's to signal other Science Enthusiasts that Randall knows what the James Webb Space Telescope is and is sad that it keeps getting delayed. This is nerd-tue signaling.

And curiously, it seems that the error of each point increases as time goes on, but Randall doesn't know how to use anything more powerful than the trend function in Excel, so we're stuck.