1878

Ugh.

1877

"Oops, plebs have started getting excited about the eclipse! Time to switch from patronizing to sneering."

1876

Hey look, it's the chair and laptop from Friday, only reversed!

I keep getting angrier and angrier about this one the more I think about it. We start with an incredibly dumb observation (being careful to cite sources, because Randall is a stalwart fighter in the war against fake news, although the link is provided in the form of a PICTURE OF TEXT SO YOU HAVE TO TYPE IT IN BY HAND): people who live in places where the upcoming eclipse will be visible are likely to look up information about the eclipse. Wow! My mind has never been this blown! You'd think areas in the path of the eclipse* would be regularly exposed to news about it, or something!

Then we have yet another goddamn picture of Google Trends in a half-assed attempt to make some other stupid point. What are we supposed to get from this? That because more people are googling the eclipse than googled the 2016 election, there's going to be massive traffic jams because of everyone going on the road to see the eclipse? Even after all that googling, turnout for the 2016 election was 60%, compared to... 59% in 2012. That's no kind of increase at all. I'd almost think this was some kind of joke about reading too much into Google Trends, except that he's playing it so terribly, terribly straight.

What the hell kind of function is that supposed to be extrapolating, anyway?


*Ackchyually, the eclipse doesn't really have a path; it's the Earth that rotates such that a different portion of its surface is in the shadow cast by the moon throughout the event. How does it feel to be out-pedanted you poseur?

1875

Dinosaur Comics gets away with this on the strength of its writing. Randall is no good at that either.

1874

Man, Randall has always been terrible at this kind of shotgun humor. There's no sense of mounting absurdity or progression to a punchline here: you could put the made-up ones in any order and it wouldn't change the comic at all. Also, a thrust fault is a class of reverse fault. This means that Randall actually struggled for some indeterminate period to come up with more joke faults, but then gave up and opted to put in another real one instead because he could just look it up on Wikipedia without straining his brain.

1872

OK, but... where's the joke? This is another one of those incredibly banal observations people have been making for over a decade-- and also the distinctive mingling of neurosis and techno-fetishism that makes for classic GOOMH-bait.

1873

As above. If this was 2011 and inbox angst was still a relatively recent development, I might have thought this was funny.

1871

This comic is getting pulled in way too many directions. Not so very long ago we were given to understand that referring to rabbits (or hares or bunnies or lagomorphs or whatever, go on, get pedantic) in this disgusting affectedly cutesy way was stupid. Today, it seems that our harmlessly quirky old friend White Hat Guy has latched onto this as his latest whimsical scheme in what appears to be a callback to 1772 that doesn't really go anywhere. Not only that, but the teacher from 1682 is totally over rabbits, while Megan is now tremendously enthusiastic.

I've never heard a reference to this "bun" (*retches violently*) meme outside of XKCD. Is it another one of those really parochial Boston things like complaining about drones?