Why I Don't Like XKCD

Something about the comic that is popular with nerds, geeks, programmers, and philosophy majors (on about the same level as a discount hooker on the first day of shore leave) turns me off. It's pretentious as shit but that doesn't really seem to bug me too much. I, myself, can be pretentious as fuck, given the right subject and blood-alcohol level. And the commentary on relationships, while so emo you could turn it into music and sell it as the boxed set "Songs to Which One Runs a Hot Bath, Slits His or Her Wrists and Drifts Slowly into the Warm Embrace of Death," is sometimes spot-on. And it's drawn with stick figures so most of the laughs and/or tears and/or suicides have to come from the text and/or context and/or content; a rare level of depth I appreciated in any medium but that is particularly lacking from the long stream of goat urine that is the online comic clusterfuck.

Seriously, that goat started peeing in 1999 and hasn't stopped since. What's in his bladder, the North-fucking-Sea?

Here's why XKCD doesn't tickle me in the naughty place it tickles most socially awkward beings of higher brain function. I think it's that in everyday life, I work very hard to make a distinction between being clever and being intelligent - and before I sound like I'm stepping on a box that may or may not be filled with soap, it's something at which I don't succeed very often. On a good day, for every hundred moments of cleverness, we maybe have one moment of true insight. It is those rare meta-moments where we can take a step back, even if it's just one quiet tip-toe, and really think about what we're doing and why. XKCD always seems to nail the joke, but never quite drives it home, and for a comic that is revered for it's depth, it's the stunning lack of depth that always stands out. It's like laughing at a George Carlin joke without really knowing who George Carlin is.

The clencher is that the air hanging around the comic and its crudely-drawn inhabitants is the stale mist of desperation. It seems that the overall point is that we will never find true happiness, and either by our own character flaws or circumstances beyond our control, happiness is temporary and fleeting, and each time it comes we're doomed to forget its fragility and end up crushed, over and over, taking the pain but none of the lessons that come from it.

Of course, XKCD can do whatever it damn well wishes, and there's no real need for it to constantly try to ram knowledge in readers' faces. And given the locus of most online comics, that would just sound preachy. I suppose it's the reaction to the comic that bothers me more than the comic itself. I still won't give it more than one or two clicks a year.

Incidentally, the following is absolutely true:

http://xkcd.com/231/