XKCD Still Sucks

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Yeah but we found a video of that guy laughing at an off-color Dane Cook joke in 2008 so we banned him from GitHub

Contemporary meme culture has done to webcomics what YouTube did to America's Funniest Home Videos*. In order to stand apart, you need something special. This is a mediocre trolley problem meme, made worse by its presentation as an original comic (and of course Randall's brevity allergy).

*Not that either of these is a bad thing

1 comment:

TBHAugust 20, 2020 at 7:15 AM
Virgin web service: Needs a team of full time developers, constantly on guard against compatibility breakage among its own components, basically a bunch of libraries glued together

Chad 80s Unix until: Written by a physics professor emeritus, can compile 20 years later without changes, a single 10000 line ANSI C file with no includes
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Why This Matters

As the years drag on, the early, golden years of XKCD constitute an ever-smaller fraction of its lifespan. The jokes have passed from whimsical, through insufferable, to positively Garfieldian. Today they are mostly just dated, written by and for the kind of people who still think Neil deGrasse Tyson is cool. I have not Greg's bonhommie or Carl's sheer malice, but this torch must be kept burning, however feebly; and so it is with the greatest humility and respect for hateblogs past that I join the succession of pyramid-kickers.