Xkcd can you look more blocky

Waterproof interior only : Waterproofing is done to the outside to prevent water from getting in. Exactly what "interior only" means is unclear the case may be porous, or it may prevent water from escaping but it's clear that the designers have missed the point. Googleable : Another non-feature. Advertising as "-able" is a way for marketing to add features, without really adding features.

This may be for example a recyclable paper bag, when paper is normally recyclable. Any term may be "Googled", so being "Googleable" is not an actual feature. Alternatively, while "Googleable" meaning "being able to be Googled" is a non-feature, the related concept of "being able to Google" is a legitimate feature that a phone may advertise, as in having a Google search app built in.

This is also a real feature in the sense that you can type "Google find my phone" into Google if you're logged in and your phone runs on the Android operating system. Google will, in fact, find your phone to the precision allowed by GPS and assuming it still has power.

Cheek toucher : The screen will touch your cheek when making a hand-held phone call. Cries if lost: Arguably a useful function, as it would help the owner find the cellphone in case it was lost. This is offset by how annoying it would sound if it happened to cry with a human voice.

May refer to people's habit of calling their own cellphones to help find it. It also resembles the first xkcd phone's functions of 'Screaming when falling' and 'Saying hi when exposed to light'. Bug drawer: This is most likely the cover for other ports, though it looks like a small drawer, capable of only holding bug-sized items.

Possibly a joke on software bugs, which would, being virtual rather than physical, easily fit inside this area. SD cards containing software bugs may also fit in this area. Coin slot: In most phones, this would be the charging port. Payphones have coin slots, not smartphones. It is unclear what use such a feature would have, or if it implies that the phone either cannot be recharged through this slot as usual or if cash payment is somehow required to charge the phone.

This could also allow the phone to be used as a piggy bank. Scroll lock: A computer key on most keyboards which is practically never used.

This feature seems to be placed where a usual cellphone's "home" button is, which would make it very frustrating. Despite a previous xkcd strip , the Scroll Lock button was not invented by Steven Chu. Or it may be a reference to the rampant problem of code reuse, where programmers use the pre-written code on Stack Overflow rather than writing their own, regardless of the fact that the code on Stack Overflow may contain bugs, not be applicable to the programmer's situation, or otherwise cause problems for their specific program.

Alternatively, it could be saying that the OS was written by the people on Stack Overflow who go there with programming issues, implying that the OS was written from code that was posted as not working. May be a reference to Headache , in which Cueball claims that "3D stuff" aka the real world gives him a headache. Dog Noticer : Can be interpreted as either alerting the user to nearby dogs, or alerting nearby dogs of the user. The former is very situational, and the latter is probably a negative.

This comic is published on Boxing Day 26 December and is relevant as Fitbits are a popular Holiday Gift at this time. However, the name "Fitness Evaluator" suggests that the product merely gives an evaluation on the user's fitness, which may mean that in practice it only criticizes the user's weight, diet etc. Another interpretation is that this monitors the fitness of the user's FitBit, that is, the state of the armband the person is wearing.

Volume and density control: A pun between volume as in speaker loudness, and volume as in a physical property inversely related to density. Interpreting it as the latter, apparently this feature would allow the user to change the size of the phone which would indeed be a very useful feature, or a very worrying one , thus changing the volume and the density.

It may be able to affect its mass instead of volume in some unexplained way. Note that some computer mice indeed have a feature where the user can put weights inside the case to customise the weight and thus actually affect its density. And the alt text actually added to it.

I can understand people outside of math-nerddom thinking it's shit though, because it's still just stupid nichey reference humor. Carl I agree with you most of the time but it is possible for two different people to come up with related ideas separately.

Also the post seems rather short today, you should perhaps try to ignore the SMBC comic and judge the comic on its own merits. I don't read SMBC normally and so I didn't know about the "convergent joke" thing and even then I still thought was shit even on its own. First off: yes it is. Doing something better is a perfectly fine justification for imitation of the premise.

Say someone makes a zombie movie. Then YOU make a zombie movie, except yours is better. Hint: this has been done. Does the fact that someone else had a movie based on a similar premise invalidate your better one?

I say it does not. The same can be said for all sorts of things. Is HDTV crap simply because someone else already thought of forming moving images out of light?

Is the internal combustion engine crap simply because steam engines already used pressure to drive machinery? To be fair, I'm not sure it is.

I greatly enjoyed both the xkcd and SMBC versions, and while I think the xkcd version was slightly better, I recognize that that's jsut a matter of taste. The size of the screen seemed, to me, a more forced source of humor than video compression. I love xkcd and SMBC, and await updates of each with childlike glee. They both made a good joke, and I laughed both times. It's possible to have too much of a good thing, but I don't think 2 comics is enough to break that barrier.

I agree with fluffy on I didn't see the last panel coming, and it was actually pretty funny. I disagree with fluffy. I knew what he was talking about right away, since I'm a second-year math major. I just think it was an incredibly poor joke that he's done twice before, and with less waste of space. RE: Planning jokes ahead of time, I cannot believe that Randall does that. The fact that they're never edited, and frequently shoddy obvious mistakes show up in the posted product and are quickly erased when fans point it out It seems that there's a pretty short time between a strip's conception and its publication.

Like I said in the previous topic, I'm willing to give Randall the benefit of the doubt FOR NOW because it is actually possible that he got the idea separately, and SMBC isn't exactly of Penny Arcade fame or anything like with the damned Google Directions comic or whatever it was , but it's still weird that it's the second time in a short while that he posted a comic that's the exact same thing as a competing comic posted days earlier.

Three strikes you're out, Randall. The "I make the man go down on the woman because I'm not sexist" theory is good, but I still stick with the "I make the man go down on the woman because that way women who read my comic will see that I'm way into giving them head. It's too long and everything, but still. That first panel is pretty great. Man, startet out pretty good That art! But unfortunately, similarly to , it turns into a joke about "hey, when something extraordinary were to happen, we could totally use it for something no one expected!

Come on Randy, you had such a good premise! Even managed to deal with "resurrected science people" in a better way. I have absolutely no hopes whatsoever on monday's special th edition.

The last few comics managed to destroy any hope for a "good one" here. But hey! Randall has said he uses a week buffer. It's not impossible that he's copied SMBC and stuffed the comic up early he's overridden the buffer to comment on recent events before , but I don't see why he would.

So I'm going to give him benefit of the doubt on this one. I linked that comic. Thanks for the mention. Anyway, today's comic, , features some decent art for once. Some frames actually have a horizon line. Unfortunately, the joke is really obscure, and after looking the guy up on wikipedia, it doesn't seem any funnier than it was to begin with. After a quick trip to the forums, and actually understanding the joke, it's no funnier than it was to start with.

I think there are at least a dozen ways the comic could have parodied the dead coming back that didn't suck. The sticks are a bit less floaty on chairs, but they still aren't touching them. Bad thing you think of yourself as so clever, Carl, but I'm better than you!

See, an underground Icelandic cartoonist made a comic strip for an underground Icelandic college paper that is barely, just superficially, marginally similar to the xkcd strip! Bah, what does that Randall guy know about comic strips? Doesn't he know that any comic that touches the Internet porn topic will be mandatorily a plagiarism of that comic you posted? Oh, look, the newest comic features a cemetary sic! What a rip off. Randall is completely obsessed with portraying stick figure cunnilingus.

I think it's just easier to draw without enhancing the stick-figure anatomy. After all, you complain about the chairs-not-touching thing, right? Wow, people are really hatin' on Carl today. Not exactly the same. The SMBC version is punchier and more concise and not obsessed with making sure the joke is explained thoroughly when it doesn't need explanation. I'm just here to say that you shouldn't hotlink images from other sites.

It'll eat up his bandwidth. Copying the image makes it harder for people to find where it came from. Woot, I got the joke of without looking! I feel so smart. Therefore I won't be hating on it. Mal I'm a second-year math major toooooo let's be friends! Fred: Yes. He might also just find the concept of cunnilingus funny. I think it is more to impress the females.

Fernie: Way to miss the entire point. He and Zach have met before. I think is pretty good. Yeah, it feels 'done before', but the Erdos number isn't really that obscure. Anyone who got the occasional math joke in the earlier ones would have a decent chance of hearing of it at some point or another. But the art is above average, compared to recent strips, the joke is entertaining although probably too drawn out , and there's no painful stick figure secks.

Maybe it's just lowered expectations, but it's not bad. Okay, so loading a page with a hotlinked image means that the image will definitely be loaded and just linking to the page won't be, but one would hope that people are following that link to the other page. Oh, and if they follow a link to a page from a hotlinked image, that image will already be in their cache. I think that you meant to say "image" instead of the second time you said "page" in the part of what you said that I quoted?

Oh, yes, I see that now. Yeah, that's what I meant. Basically I was hamfistedly trying to point out that no matter how you decide to propagate understanding of a webcomic, you are going to be costing that webcomic bandwidth, and a visual propagation of that is better advertising for the comic anyway.

Also, webcomic creators tend to prefer a link hot- or otherwise over, say, the image being copied to someone else's webhost, which is an actual copyright violation since it's copy ing data which also potentially strips away the implicit attribution per the server the image is coming from.

Jokes do not always originate with that one thing you saw that one time, and everyone doesn't go through the same exact set of experiences as you do which allows you to be sure they ripped something off of what you think they did.

If a joke is dumb just call it dumb, but people aren't as creative as you think and similar ideas are used all the time. When Kill Bill came out, an army of webcomic creators all accused each other of plagiarism because they all came up with the same tiny cut leads to massive bloodloss joke, none of them realizing it was just an obvious idea. Unless someone is tracing panels or doing copies of dialog, drop the stolen joke criticisms.

I will give credit that it doesn't feature more painful sex jokes, but the joke is just so, so lame. As somebody mentioned earlier, the whole hotlinking issue is moot. This isn't like Penny Arcade, where a single link in a news post, hidden amongst multiple paragraphs of other links, can easily "wang" and crash a site with the influx of visitors.

I honestly want to know what everyone bases their criteria for whether or not these comics are good. Does "good" mean in relation to his past 5 or so? Does "good" mean when he spends more than 8 seconds drawing a panel? This comic is not good. I challenge anyone who thinks it is to a battle of wits. He spent a few minutes drawing an apocalypse scene in the first panel, then farted out the same low grade art. He took a concept about some math thing and had the guy going around so that he could get his Erdos number at 1.

So it becomes: Step 1: he heard about the erdos number and found out Erdos is dead Step 2: found out in the math community people want a low erdos number, 1 being the lowest and the only way is to get erdos to be in on a proof with you Step 3: found out Erdos is dead, the only way to get step 2 is to have him come back to life.

Here's a proof for everyone: if math reference, then unfunny. This is not funny, this is not good. If your basis for judging this is his previous few cartoons, then thats like saying shit smells good compared to vomit. This is so small it's something Randall would only have come up with if he saw it somewhere else. It has the exact same premise and punchline.

He didn't even have the decency to wait a week. Randy is a known talentless hack and plagiarist. While he may have his comics queued up in advance, I highly doubt it--I suspect he does them at about 10 pm the night before unless he comes up with something really good before that.

They are short enough he doesn't need a buffer to keep updating on time. I just kind of stared blankly for a while then was like 'uh, okay. Mike G. I mean, for fuck's sakes, at least Carl has the decency to pretend to be part of the target audience. And to have liked some of the xkcd comics at some point in the distant past. Anon: I do like a lot of his cartoons. I have a poster of his internet map and a print of the ball pit. That stuff was solidly good. There have been few of these cartoons that I haven't understood, this being one of them but I was a fan of his.

You're right about one thing, this comic is not for me. It WAS for me, but it is not anymore. Mostly because its unfunny and targets 14 year olds who think they're the smartest freshman in high school because they know a little python and researched mysql injection. Rob: The fact that you think you are important enough that we would point fingers at you and mock you for not getting the joke shows at best a horrible amount of sheer arrogance on your part and at worst brain damage which may lead to death.

Obviously, since you did not get the joke, you were not in the target audience and have no right to criticize the joke. Ok, me. Have it my way. And, BTW, I am not the ultimate authority on whether anyone likes or dislikes stick figures. Carl make this a forum. Amanda: how was Cuddlefish born? Jeez Mike G. CAD is a comic that targets mostly moronic fanboy "hardcore" gamers. Does that mean it's immune to criticism? Shredded Moose is a comic that targets mostly misogynistic frat members with no sense of humour or quality or morality.

If people want to go there or whatever. I don't really care. Ideally yes fluffy, but it would be impossible to migrate the users here to that one. Tim: i'm not sure what you're argument is. Do you think there should be CADSucks. Who said anything was immune to criticism i'm honestly curious not trying to be mean.

Well it is impossible to add a forum to a blogger. So no matter what there would be a domain change involved.

Carl Wheeler waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were fanboys in the blog. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Fernie Canto were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway. Carl was a blogger for fourteen months. When he was young he read the xkcds and he said to dad "I want to be on the fora daddy.

Then as he got oldered he stopped. Carl blogged at him and tried to make him look stupid. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill. I must kill the fanboys" he shouted The radio said "No, Carl. You are the fanboys" And then Carl was a Randall.

Mike G: "Obviously, since you did not get the joke, you were not in the target audience and have no right to criticize the joke. Not everyone reads these threads religiously?

So there are people who DONT refresh this every 15 seconds? Since you didn't think it was funny, you have no right to criticize the joke. I get email updates on threads I'm paying attention to but lately a lot of i.

I got to "i also killed carl 4 months ago" and immediately thought "so that's why the blog hasn't updated! Anon Not being part of the target audience does not mean you can't criticise the joke. Criticism isn't limited to whether you like it or not, it can also factor in the merit of the target and the quality of execution. Of course, I also don't see Rob actually criticising the joke in , just saying he didn't get it. I did get if you count my undergraduate senior project, my number is either 3 or 4 and it's still not very good.

My thoughts on I laughed a bit at the reference to Paul Erdos and beret guy, but that's just like laughing at an inside joke or running gag. The thing about an inside joke or running gag is that it's not a joke in itself, it's funny because, man, wasn't it funny when it happened the first time? So, the pleasure of a reference comes in three parts: 1 The humor of the original not your copy 2 Being part of the inner circle appeal to pride 3 The wit in coming up with it spontaneously, which only applies to a comic if it actually happened cf.

And the joke itself isn't very well done. As pointed out by others, it's dragged out too long. Keep the first four panels, then have panel 5 or 7 for a beat, then the last panel. Alternatively, have the drawing out be part of the joke e.

The joke is also essentially the same as and similar to , but I don't know if that's frequent enough to criticize the repetition. I also won't say that the general theme of taking something far too seriously is over used in xkcd because that's part of xkcd's schtick so liking that is more a matter of whether you're the target audience or not.

However, the whole idea is so much a part of xkcd that you basically knew what the joke would be by the third panel at the latest, the only thing left was to guess exactly what he'd reference.

So, I will say that it seems like a sign that Randall is running out of ideas. It's like shows on TV: after a few seasons, you just get the feeling that the writers have explored every aspect of the characters and they either need to introduce something new change their schtick or recognize they had a good run and move on.

In 's favor, I did really like the art in the first panel, and have no problem with the stick figures in the rest of it. That's actually very classic xkcd cf. As for , it would actually be good if it weren't for the long chain of sex jokes and the SMBC connection.

Way Walker: wow. A big response to a clear troll post. I put in a massively transparent piece of irony in it, and you totally missed it. Thats a pretty damn good summary Way. There's actually not much left that can be said at all about this cartoon after reading that. Holy crap guys, SMBC turns out to be awesome.

Why did it take until a crappy XKCD comic for me to come across it? Since SMBC was originally a single-panel comic I generally like Zach Weiner's stuff. Heck, I even thought Captain Excelsior was okay.

A circle surrounds him; the rest of the panel is black. The text is written in a square panel above the white circle. A computer screen is shown. It displays an on-line video player, with what appears to be a Cueball-like guy performing cunnilingus on a Megan-like girl. Five other windows maybe ads are also visible, though what they depict is not clear.

One of them has readable text above a picture of what appear to be a fleshlight. The rest of the text, including a heading at the top, is unreadable. There is picture with a lady with "big" hair holding her arms out.

She has two black blotches on each side of her body. Maybe representing her breast, perhaps in a bra. Ad text: X 10 [A modem is shown between the two text parts. The text is in two square frames.