xkcd Forums Bingo: week 0

Hey all, Jon Levi posting here for the first time. Now that I've taken over the bingo slot there will be a few changes:

1) These are now going to go in their own post, not tacked on to an older post. Because otherwise no one will look at them.
2) Score cards will be saved in GIF format, not PNG. This is to reduce file size.
3) Their title now includes the word 'fora', subtly mocking the forumites' pluralization of the word 'forum', using their god Randall's own handwriting.
4) Letters and numbers down the sides make it so that instead of having to say 'I signed up just to say...' we can just say 'B2'.
5) To visually distinguish it from the older style, the 'strike' in each box will be reversed to run from top-left to bottom-right.
6) I like bold type for emphasis. Deal with it.

If anyone needs confirmation, this is for the xkcd forums. I'm still content if Kitten(s) want to do their own thing with the Xkcdsucks comment threads. Now without further delay let's see the damn score cards:

#899 - Number Line

Quite a lot of people were confused in this thread about what the actual jokes are. It was painful to sift through all the '0.999... = 1' comments. There was something close to a line, if only someone had posted a quote within a quote within a quote within a quote.

#900 - Religions






















A good effort, but nothing even close to a bingo. Seriously, what else am I supposed to say here?

#901 - Temperature






















Another almost-bingo. Why are all the crossed squares on the left hand side? Why do you like the left hand side, forums?

Coming next week: bingo scores for comics 902-904.

Comic 904: Sports Science

Alt-text: Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.

If the alt-text had also mentioned 'all science and statistical analysis', we would be able to see what a worthless piece of shit this comic is. Randall mocks the un-nerdy pursuit of sports and completely fails to see the parallels to the science he worships. The weights matter, Randall, they matter a lot. Worse is the sheer bald-faced hypocrisy – how many times have you done a pathetic Google-based 'analysis' of social trends, you fuckwit? How many times have you used the number of Google hits to make your point? HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES?

Okay, okay, maybe he is just pointing out that the winning and losing of competitive sports is just a way of producing 'random numbers', and he isn't mocking the statistical analysis that accompanies them. However, if he's willing to refer to all the skill, strategy, athleticism, psychology and quick-thinking involved in so many sports as a 'weighted random number generator', then what area of human endeavour can you not apply the same idea? Science – your experiment produces some weighted random numbers, and you build a narrative for why they occur. Engineering – you combine individual components based on weighted random numbers, and build a narrative for why they work together. History – people do things based on weighted random numbers, and you build narrative for why they do that. But of course Randall the Nerd-King picks on sports.

I would like to know whether Randall really is a nerd that dismisses sport as pointless because he is rubbish at it (while arguing about the minutiae of Star Wars), or if he is just cynically working his fanbase.

Probably both.

Comic 903: Extended Prosthetic Penis

(A very special guest review from Aquarians Love to Fuck. Welcome back, ALTF.)

Alt-text: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

Critiques are for cunts, but...

Well fuck me from behind with a Primal Scream made physically manifest, but does this comic perpetuates a vicious fallacy or what? Knowledge and intellect (as measured by an I.Q. Test) are fundamentally different constructs. A subjective argument may be proffered to support the contrary, but no truly objective argument is credible.

As this is a critique, I am now, officially, a cunt.

Comic 902: XKCD:TNG

Alt Text: I wonder how often Patrick Stewart has Darmok flashbacks when talking to Star Trek fans.

So we have a reference to an old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. In case you didn't waste your life watching such programmes, the episode revolves around an encounter with an alien species that uses a language based entirely on cultural references, and (probably unintentionally) makes the whole 'universal translator that helps everyone understand one another' thing look a bit silly. The crew and the aliens have problems understanding one another, and the breakthrough in communication is made when the alien captain kidnaps Picard and transports both of them down to a planet to fight an invisible monster. Through the power of teamwork and friendship, they overcome their ludicrous, self-imposed trial and Picard learns a few phrases. The alien captain, however, dies of stupidity.

This comic may well have worked, if Randall wasn't forcing into a stick-figure format. His original reasoning for using the blank faces – that the reader can better identify with the protagonist – is completely irrelevant here. These are all well-known characters. As such, the attempt to draw the alien is pretty horrific, and the wink has to be identified with a hugely ridiculous... well, sound effect, I guess. If drawn and coloured decently, the comic might have worked.

Randall also seems to be drawing some nerd rage because he 'incorrectly' quoted the episode (it should be 'Tanagra', not 'Kalenda', apparently). This of course ignores the possibility that Randall is just making up a new phrase, one that means something different from the phrase in the episode.

Finally, the alt-text here actually made me laugh. A bit of self-denigration about nerds talking in shitty pop-culture references, wrapped up in a neat little sentence that contains a pop-culture reference? That is probably the best thing he has done in quite some time.

Introducing... Jon Levi's Bingo Time!

Delving into the xkcd forums is a dangerous task, best left to professionals and/or hobos. No-one should subject themselves to such unremitting horror without proper training and/or a basic inability to grasp reality. Thus, to allow you to see at a safe glance what is going on in there, Jon Levi has devised the 'xkcd comment thread bingo'!

And here is a sample, from comic 603 (Idiocracy):

He even writes bingo in big letters when it happens! What more could you ask for! The reviews for comics 891-898 have been updated with bingo cards, and all of them can be found in this comment.

Comic 901: Nude Supper

Alt-text: And the baby has a fever.

I wake up trapped in cheap cotton sheets, sticky with secretions, belt still wrapped around my abscessed arm. Sick yellow light seeps in through the translucent curtains and fills the veins that splay across the walls and ceiling, a stomach of a room that pulsates and melts me down into cheap cotton and hard springs. She comes in through that sphincter of a door and I can see she's already half-digested, skin crinkled and sweat-sodden, hair hard and already curling.

She sees me and a black smile breaks her face in half and she's on me before I can move. But the mind isn't willing and the flesh is barely aware, flops like rotten meat dropped on the concrete, but she finds a way to get what she wants.

Eat this tuna sammich boy, mommy made it 'special.

I do what I was taught to do in that dark little room, what I draw and attempt to sanitise with black, clean lines on crisp white but it's never clean. This time is different though, I can see through her cotton-skin into her, inside her and I can see a little clump, a little glowing ball sitting in there and as she's jerking and jostling I can see it work loose. When she wails like a banshee it gets washed down, her twitching firing it into my mouth and I can feel it embed into the back of my tongue and I can't scrape it off with my teeth and I can't get my fingers to it. I wonder what the fuck it is and then the truth smashes through my forehead like a bullet, leaves a hole where my thoughts leak out. I start trying to work out when we last fucked, turn to see her flopped over in the bed beside me and I can't, I don't know.

I scramble some clothes on and they latch onto my melting skin like mould, run out of that stomach-room into bright, burning sunlight. I just run, my legs taking over as my mind dribbles out and I find myself at the drug store. I hunt around like a coyote that lost the scent trail and I see something that makes sense and I grab it, rip open the box and pull off the blue lid and jam the thing in my mouth. It says twenty seconds so I count them like fucking ice ages and the world around me spins and changes in a hot, musty blur.

Hands are pulling at me and I can hear voices in the distance but I wait my twenty seconds and pull it out, look at that clean little digital display tell me what I already know, what I already feel doubling and doubling and doubling in size at the back of my tongue and all I can think is...

...I should probably make a comic out of this.

Comic 900: Randall and religion

Alt-text: But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.

Again Randall decides to throw as many jokes as possible at his readers. We have a raptor/rapture in-joke, a subversion of the 'holiday Christian' stereotype, and some sort of science/religion mashup to finish off. None of them are particularly funny, but they're not offensively bad. The 'artwork' is virtually irrelevant.

What is most interesting about the comic is how carefully he avoids outright insults – nothing here can be construed as an attack on the religious, unless you are very easily offended. Randall is quick to shout against anti-science ideas (example), but that doesn't mean he is willing to label himself an anti-theist, probably because he is too thin-skinned to take the abuse.

Comic 899: Numberwang

Alt-text: The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."

I like this one.

Randall has clearly thrown a bunch of nonsense gibberish together, in the full knowledge that his fans will desperately try to find any reason or reference in it. He is trolling them, and I fully approve. I refuse to acknowledge any other interpretation of this comic.

Vaguely related - here's Numberwang.

Comic 898: On your knees, dog, for the engineer

Alt-text: Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

Randy's quest to deify scientists and engineers continues, or maybe he is just fellating his fans. It's difficult to tell. Whichever it is, this comic is exceedingly lazy and dull. It is also interesting to note that Randall is willing to massively simplify a situation to make his point. There is no 'red button'. There is no single engineer who installed the entire machinery for the authorisation and deployment of nuclear attacks.  The military also employ engineers, and things like 'testing' and 'background checks' exist.

I know Randall and his fans desperately want to believe that engineers are capable of doing anything due to their MacGyver-like innovation, but they have to face the facts. Engineers are people too, subject to the same stupidities and limitations as the rest of us.

Anyway, that alt-text again hints at the idea that Randall has children, although Dora the Explorer is a ubiquitous enough for him to have referenced it without being forced to endure it.

JON LEVI'S BINGO TIME!

Is it bingo? Is it? Is it?

No.

Comic 897: Randall learns lift safety

Alt-text: Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.

Guys, guys! Bureaucracy is boring! It is so boring that I get bored reading comics about it! Also, don't you hate it when you have to kneel down in the lift to press the ground floor button? That really sucks!

Anyway, I learned two things about lifts today, at least the ones I use.

One, if you press and hold the button for a particular floor for the whole ride, the lift doesn't stop at any intervening floors. Apparently, this is used by the emergency services.

Two, lifts make you fat.

Good to know.

JON LEVI'S BINGO TIME!

How much can be said about lift safety?

Quite a lot, although nothing related to feminism, unfortunately.

Comic 896: Puppet Zombies

Alt-text: But not permanently.

Wall-o-text alert!

This time it's all about Randall Zombie Marie Curie giving advice to budding female scientists. As far as I can see, these are the salient points:

1) You shouldn't listen to people using Marie Curie as some sort of figurehead for female scientists. She was a scientist and should be respected for the science she did, not used as a mouthpiece for someone's own agenda.

2) If you are a female scientist you should expect to be completely overlooked and reviled by everyone, because female scientists are so very, very rare. For the same reason, you should only use other female scientists as role-models.

3) If you are a female scientist, Randall is always there for you. Always.

Also, no love for Jocelyn Bell? She got the results that made her famous when she was a grad student, and she did so by completely ignoring her supervisor. That is the kind of person I can idolise. Randall probably doesn't like her because she is a Quaker.

JON LEVI'S BINGO TIME!

Is it foolhardiness, bravery or madness that allows Jon to do this?

I say all three.

Comic 895: Feynmann and Rubber

 Alt-text: Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.

I'll start off by saying I like something in this comic - the pose of the kid in the second panel perfectly shows what a smug little asshole he is. Especially the way he floats above his chair, mocking gravity. Beyond that, it's another dull comic, best described by the student in the fourth panel. Analogies are useful, but have flaws. Pedants are pedantic. Great.

The alt-text is again very slightly more interesting than the comic - obviously Randall worships Feynmann, as all nerds do, but doesn't Feynmann use the rubber sheet analogy as well? I'm pretty sure Feynmann was willing to use flawed analogies, as long as the flaws were pointed out.

Anyway, here is a related link to a completely insane man and his troubles with Einstein.

BINGO TIME!

Again, thanks to Jon Levi.

Almost! And Jon's crossing-off is becoming rather snazzy.

JON LEVI'S BINGO TIME!

Once more into the breach, my friends, once more!

Or close the wall up with our English dead! Actually, no, let's just use bricks and plaster like everyone else.

Comic 894: Robot Children

Alt-text: I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.

This comic a likely a response to the news that IBM's Watson supercomputer beat humans at Jeopardy. We'll just skim over the repetitive, general points – not funny, detached heads, floating over the chair, same desk/computer/chair as always, Megan is the clever one, yadda yadda.

The worst part of this particular comic is the blatant strawman. Who, upon hearing that a computer has won Jeopardy, says 'does our species have anything left to be proud of?' Notice that he doesn't mention Watson specifically, because that would make the comic utterly ridiculous. Notice the guy has to be a complete idiot for the 'joke' to work.

The most interesting part of this comic, however, is the alt-text. Does he actually have children, or is he messing with us? Or maybe it is a joke he came up with that only really works if you're talking about your own children? I still think it's possible he's married to Megan.

BINGO TIME!

Bingo is back for this thread. It is too bingo-friendly to ignore.

Not quite, but I think that may be a record for the most number of squares. Thanks to those who also filled out the bingo card, but I had already made this one.

JON LEVI'S BINGO TIME!

Into the the xkcd fora he goes...

...trawling through dregs to find bingo. The man is a hero.

Comic 893: 65 years of graphs

Alt-text: The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Oh good, another graph, this time predicting the deaths of astronauts. I sincerely doubt any of them read xkcd, but if they do, I'm sure they'll appreciate being told they're due to die next year. This is a pretty clumsy method of pointing out the paucity of recent manned missions to other parts of the solar system.

But I get you Randall. I understand the message behind your godawful lament, and I'm with you on this. It really is a shame that nationalistic dickwaving is the only reason anyone has stepped on truly foreign land. We all want to be part of the generation that ushers in Star Trek (well, something similar but less tooth-grindingly ridiculous), but guess what? It ain't going to be us. We don't have the technology or the infrastructure to make space travel useful in any way, unless some pretty spectacular resources are lying around out there.

You were born too early Randall, and you will have to live with that, just like all the rest of us.

JON LEVI'S BINGO TIME!

Once again Jon dives into the deepest abyss...

... and returns with a bingo card clamped between his teeth.