Comic 870: Randall learns about advertising

I remember the exact moment in my childhood when I realized, while reading a flyer, that nobody would ever spend money solely to tell me they wanted to give me something for nothing. It's a much more vivid memory than the (related) parental Santa talk.

I almost liked this one. I almost fell for it. I mean, who doesn’t like to bitch about advertising? It is a natural, almost instinctive, reaction, like despising humanity. It is good and right to hate those who will bullshit us.

Which is, of course, why we must hate Randall Munroe.

Look at the phrase in the first panel, “Up to fifteen percent or more”. When have you ever seen that phrase in an advert before? Try googling it. Notice how there aren’t any fucking adverts in there. Hell, a lot of them are people trying to be helpful. Compare it to googling “up to * percent off”, if you want. So why do we find nothing? Because no worthwhile advertiser would make that fucking mistake. If you want to laugh at the innumerate, go ahead. Don’t try getting us to tag along by conflating them with a rightly hated demographic.

Oh fucking hell, that second panel. Question to all of you: how many times did you have to read the sentence in that panel before it made sense? The wording is horrific. Sometimes I wish Randall would take a liberal-arts course, so he could learn to write like a human fucking being. Unfortunately he thinks learning about something completely relevant to what he does for a living is less important than pretending he is still a scientist.

And finally, why precisely did he write ‘negative slope’? I am honestly baffled by it. Does he think that needs explaining, or that it wasn’t clear from the picture? Or did he do it just so we could say he fucked up every single panel? Although, from reading the forums I discovered some people got ‘confused’ because the dependent variable should be on the y-axis. Strange, seeing as fixing this would not change the shape of the graph, and Randall has described the relationship in case you couldn’t work it out. Oh wait, I forgot they are all desperate to prove what intellectual giants they are over there. Cunts.

On the plus side, ad-blockers are apparently hiding the comic because it is named ‘Advertising.png’. Irony will never be the same.

In summary, I am an intellectual giant and I hate each and every one of you.

BINGO TIME!

Well fuck. Bingo is completely ruined by Rob actually writing a review.

Also, it appears that the phrase 'up to X% or more' is used in adverts. I've never seen it, but enough people have done so to make the point. That's the closest to a retraction I'm willing to make.