2079

Well, at least it's recognizably a joke. I have, however, had an epiphany about these wacky conference proceedings. They always seem to be conducted from a stage: that must be because, to Randall, "scientific presentation" really means "TED talk".

2078

I too have read the first two paragraphs of Karl Popper's article on Wikipedia

2077

“Oh dear, someone is asking me to let him into a secure room* in exactly the sort of textbook situation I thought was a waste of time when I was doing all that mandatory training! I know I’m not supposed to give him access if he doesn’t have a badge, but I’m so constitutionally passive and conflict-averse that the prospect of not just immediately doing what he says is giving me anxiety!** What to do??”

*lol imagine giving Randall the keys to a room you care about

**lol imagine if it was a woman or a non-white person

2075

OK, so we've gone from "the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale" to "the worst thing about modern technology is that it doesn't monitor you closely enough" in barely a week!


2076

Look everyone, another incredibly realistic conversation such as you might have with your own friends

2074

Why not make this comic three months ago?

2073

I know Carl always used to say this, but man, Black Hat Guy (BHG) has really lost his touch, hasn't he? This isn't even a troll, it's something you might write on Twitter and immediately forget about. Making an actual comic out of it is deeply cringeworthy. What's supposed to be the joke? That BHG actually convinced the committee to do this? That BHG is just saying the committee did it? The responses? If the responses, which response? The two people saying it's a good idea, or Megan, the Voice of Reason? Each possibility is worse than the last.

2072

2071

Note Randall once again getting upset about the idea of other people having opinions he disagrees with. Note too how he reflexively conflates "terrible opinion[s]" with "awful" people.

And what's wrong with hunting unwanted stray animals for sport, anyway? If no one is adopting them from the pound, they're really just taking up space that could be used to collect other stray animals from the streets. The longer an animal resides in a pound, the less chance it has of being eventually adopted. Such animals are doomed to be euthanized in any case. Why not hunt them for sport? You could charge admission to these events and use the proceeds to fund operations and maybe even expansion at the animal pound.

2070

Sorry, can't do it. You guys are on your own for this one.

2069

A reader says:

$70 million in funding and Beto still couldn't get chosen for Smash

But I want to talk about this crap from yesterday:

This may be the epitome of lazy millennial virtue-signaling, at least as it pertains to voting. "Check[ing] in with friends and family [to] make sure they know when and where they're voting" is not even a little bit helpful on Election Day, and it's shockingly idiotic for Randall to suggest that it is. If you don't know when and where you're voting by Election Day, it is because you either failed to register (in which case you in fact cannot vote no matter how much you get hectored by twerps who read XKCD) or failed to make even the most rudimentary effort to learn about the election (in which case we would all appreciate it if you did not vote, thank you very much). What does Randall imagine here? That everyone is just sitting around waiting for his dickhead millennial cousin to call up and remind him to go and vote? If you wanted "to help", you should have done so three to six weeks ago, before the registration deadlines had passed in most states. Or you could have volunteered at a precinct-- you know, those places where people actually go to vote. Oh, sorry, I forgot, that last one might actually require some effort.

2068

Congratulations Randall, XKCD has finally become the worst thing about campaign season.

2067

This is one of the worst political maps I've ever seen. Randall is mapping multiple variables onto the same aesthetic, which goes against the grammar of graphics. The size of each name indicates both the "height" of the office (what does that mean, anyway? is a Senator "higher" than a Governor?) and the challenger's chance of winning, so there's a serious confounding issue there-- in Montana, is Matt Rosendale bigger than Kathleen Williams because the Senate is "higher" than the House, or because he has a better chance of winning? Also, no scale is provided, so it's impossible to tell relatively how likely any of these people are to win in the first place. I guess the intended take-home message is supposed to be that the Democrats are going to clean up on Tuesday, since there are a lot more big blue names than big red ones, but then you have to remember that all those blue names are challenging red ones to begin with. When you consider that every one of those Democratic names is running for a seat currently held by a Republican, the Democratic Party is actually doing worse than I thought.

Consider, too, Randall's condescending disdain for people who actually care about sports. He knows that caring about sports is dumb, because it's just an atavistic urge toward tribal solidarity expressing itself in an incredibly lower-class way. All that endless talk about how teams stack up against each other is such a huge waste of time; the outcome of the game will be decided by the players when they play, and it won't matter after the game anyway. For all these reasons, real intellectuals know that sports are stupid, and that you should care about more important things like who's going to win legislature seats in a state you'll never visit.