addendum: I also dislike ones like the recent one about sighing. There are already enough memetastic things people parrot back to me in real life. I don’t need LMFAO lyrics to be added to that.
How prophetic.
I still laugh at the very clever strip that compared the fantasy of crypto geeks using technology to outwit brutal dictators, and the reality which is they beat you with a pipe until you give them your encryption key.
Thats the kind of humor cutting down some of the fantasies of the tech crowd that I can’t get anywhere else.
See, I’m a geneticist-in-training, and I read that particular comic as a meta-joke about how genetic tests rarely give definite conclusions – just a bunch of possible risk factors that probably don’t add up to anything. Parentage is the one of the few possible conclusions that can come from a genetic test.
I agree that it’s hit and miss in terms of humour. Some of them are pretty clever, though.
can’t explain. just one of those things. i don’t like pupusas. ::shrug::
There’s a lot of heart in XKCD - from “Angular Momentum” through to “Lanes”
Baron is correct.
It’s not the geekiness. It’s the heart.
Some of them completely peg the concept and nothing further need be said.
I’m a scientist, and most of my best buds are scientists. I shelled out the simoleons and got a signed copy of ‘The Difference’ for one of them.
I’ve used the example from Connoisseur a number of times, and it has certainly made me think about the nature of expertise.
I can see how it might seem like that’s what he’s doing if you don’t get the references. I hate that sort of shit.
However, I that’s not what Munroe is doing. He makes jokes about the things that interest him. He just has really odd, geeky interests.
Yeah, seems pretty safe to say he pretty much does.
Is the artist by chance atheist?
I may be alone on this one, but if xkcd confuses me on a given day, or I just flat out don’t get the joke, I use that as a good excuse to go read up on the topic until I DO get it. It’s not just funny, it’s educational! If you’re like me, anyway.
Which would be scary.
I still read xkcd, but at this point I think Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal basically fills the same niche but is consistently better.
The science and/or math ones aren’t my bag, but they’re not the ONLY ones:
OK, I have to ask. What the heck does this have to do with anything?
I also want to say that XKCD has had a pretty big influence on other webcomic authors(abstruse goose, phdcomics), which is in part a result of how successful it has been, but in my view also a measure of how good and novel its humour has been.
I love the ones with stick figure sex because it often takes me a minute to figure out what’s going on because the sticks overlap so much.
But is that really enough?
I feel I am the target market. I have a degree in Pure Mathematics. I have a postgraduate degree in Software Engineering. I read comics. I could geek if not for my country but for at least county-level competition. I far, far more often than not understand XKCD.
But I just don’t find it funny. I recognise it, shrug my shoulders and move on. Just recognising what is being referred to isn’t enough to be funny.