2092

https://xkcd.com/285/

2091

Is this really a problem for people besides Randall? I get the whole "charge $19.99 because it feels like so much less than $20" but I'm not aware of lots of people feeling like 100 million is more than 1 billion. In that light, the superciliousness of the alt text becomes entertaining.

2089

Raise your hand if you didn't think of this on your own by age 9.


2090

Think about how much money Randall makes from XKCD.

2088

This kind of mawkish sentimentality about animals is the logical counterpart to memes about being dead inside. I suspect that what's going on is that people sense the absence of the transcendence in their lives and, recognizing that it is killing them, try to force themselves to feel sentimental instead. They don't actually care about smol puppers, they just really wish that they were the sorts of people who can.

2087

Does Family Circus even do these anymore?

2086

I might hate this less if I was more confident this wasn't how Randall actually thinks history works.

2085

This is exceptionally lazy art, even by Randall's standards-- how long do you think this comic took to put together, from start to finish? And what is the joke? arXiv hosts preprints: versions of manuscripts that have not yet been peer-reviewed, and usually go on to be published in those horrible scientific journals. Is it that the existence of preprints is essentially in conflict with the existence of the journals and conference proceedings they end up in? That Cornell University, whose endowment was valued at 5.8 billion dollars in 2016, is really making huge sacrifices to host arXiv? The alt text ("scientists are better people than non-scientists") makes it even worse: why is Randall so smug about something to which he has never contributed and with which he has not even meaningfully interacted since the Bush administration?

2084

GOOMH Randall I too sometimes write the wrong day on checks

2083

It's a big problem if you have to explain your joke before you even start setting it up. This whole comic sort of goes all over the place. The individual complaints don't really escalate; they all just sort of come off like some sort of autistic Rodney Dangerfield ("my computer is the worst, I tell ya, the other day I tried to turn it on and my mouse bit me"). And what is it with Randall drowning people who ask questions he doesn't immediately know the answer to? Is he that threatened by the prospect of having his limits exposed?


Unrelatedly, looks like we might have outlasted Neil deGrasse Tyson!

2082

...who? What people? Who is meaningfully misled by the Mercator projection in a way that has any consequences? This might be the most autistic XKCD ever: both in the idea that some people are this pathologically obsessed with maps, and in the fact that Randall chooses to illustrate this by... having someone convince someone else that Canada is an island? What?

2081

Legitimately stumped by this one. Is that all there is to it? "Near the equator, winter is warm, and far from the equator, it's cold, but in between, it's not as cold"?

2080

only 90s kids will get this