1.) Munroe's condescending and outright insulting attitude towards anything that doesn't fall under "muh hard science", nevermind that STEM jobs aren't the only ones we need.
2.) His inability to write interesting characters. Yeah, I know they're fucking stick figures, but he could at least differentiate them a bit from carbon copies of himself and his opinions besides Black Hat Guy.
3.) Building off of that, his wasted potential. Munroe occasionally produces some genuinely funny content (ex. Black Hat Guy's 'Secretary of the Internet' arc featuring TRON Paul), but it's simply buried under the soul-crushing mediocrity of the rest of the strip.
4.) His preachiness. There was one strip (can't find the link at the moment) where his strawman stick figure rants about how technology is ruining people's lives, and Munroe's self-insert smugly dismisses him as irrelevant. The problem was, he undermined his own moral by having all the characters buried in their phones while this was happening.
5.) Addendum to number 4, he sticks his neck into situations he is totally unqualified to address (because SCIENCE can fix anything, amirite?). Example: mocking religion (xkcd.com
Whatever, I'm probably sperging out but I felt like sharing.
My Problems with XKCD
Other urls found in this thread:
xkcd.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
He's funny sometimes and I genuinely like the sappy stuff but he fits all the "muh STEM major" bullshit.
I fucking hate the "lol your college choices suck lol" joke, they're forced as fuck in anything.
Agreed, forgot about that "Every Major's Terrible" song.
Don't forget the shitty art.
I remember Nedroid accidentally copied an XKCD joke and did it much better, partially because the expressiveness of the characters added to the humor.
If it wasn't for my knowledge of others with them, I would be surprised he could convince others he had an English major.
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>Redwall, a kickass children's fantasy story about talking animals.
>Racist
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA kill me now
>one fantasy novel has similar tropes to another
stop the fucking presses
But the orcs, Sauron, and the forces of Mordor in general were based on the Nazis, not black people.
There's just such a sense of smugness that radiates from these comics that I find hard to put into words. I think it's the way he inorganically tries to show how "smart" he is when it just isn't appropriate like here how he shoehorns in encryption when though it doesn't make sense in context but he does so anyway because DAE STEM?? lmao xDD. It just feels so masturbatory.
>nazis
WW1 Germans
And 21st century progressives think that any white person making evil characters based them on black people, and then proceed to call others racist.
Didn't he make a pro-Hillary cartoon? Died for me there. Not because I am a trumptard, but because Clinton isn't any better.
Tolkien didn't base them off of anything deliberately. They were of course influenced by his own experiences but to say that he thought about any particular group of people when he was writing them is false.
The closest you can get is the people who are pro-industry/technology that in his view ruined the natural world. Which is really most of humanity.
have you ever noticed xkcd guy can be kind of racist?
They weren't even supposed to be any particularly white nationality, they were the forces of industrialization and secularism that Tolkien, a conservative Christian*, was so suspicious about given his experiences in WW I.
*Funny how many modern day progressives have been inspired by the reactionary fantasy authors of the 20th century, be they sword & sandal or high fantasy.
I truly and sincerely hope he dies as soon as possible so I don't have to hear about him anymore. You are giving him way too much credit to suggest he has untapped potential that he is wasting. He is producing at his full potential and beyond right now. And it's terrible.
kek
Sauron and the Orcs are the usual Devil and Demon figures who pop up regularly in mythology.
The Men who fought for Sauron (who sam notes are likley decent people decieved into fighting a war they have no stake in) are closer to the WW1 Germans.
Tolkien disliked allegory (which caused him to fall out with C.S.Lewis on occasion) and set out to create a mythology which, subconsciously or not, reflected how his ideology was shaped by the horror of fighting in WW1.
I don't feel like he's calling the book racist, so much as he's pointing out that both series have heavy racial allegory. He just phrased it poorly.
gosh he really dropped the ball on this one
>talking shit about Redwall
Fuck you, Munroe
You really can't compare Tolkien to the average modern day Neo-Con and have the latter come up favorably. He was well educated, mellow, pleasant and trolled Neo-Nazis by mail.
wow you guys care alot about stupid bullshit huh
>Whatever, I'm probably sperging out
Yeah, I'd say you are. You've probably put more thought into this post than he does into an average strip.
Same horrible reddit retard. Fuck off.
I love that edit! Here's another one:
I don't want to sound like a memelord but there's a reason resistors love the comic so much. KXCD is basically the comic of the smarter- than- thou crowd. Rick and Mirth is also extremely popular amongst them, which makes me worried that Dan is going to start listening to their feedback more and ruining the show further.
What the flying fuck are you talking about? Sauron and Orcs had literally nothing in common with either nazis or any possible white supremacist group ever.
I'd say he was trolling just regular Nazis.
Yeah, he was much more devoutly Catholic than most religious people are nowadays towards their respective religions but LotR wasn't just him pushing Catholicism or anything like that. It dealt a lot of Catholic values but there was no direct reference to any Catholic material.
>dat 5 point
every toddler is qualified to call religion a waste of time to study, and a mental illness for those who defend it
My (devout Christian) physics teacher loves his stuff.
Sounds like you've been hurt, user.
>Moral Absolutes
Good job missing the point of Boromir's character.
>Racist undertones
When asked about is Racial Heritage by the Nazis, Tolkein replied by basically saying 'Im not Jewish, but I wish I was, the Jews are cool guys'. He may have been a bit stereotypical in his writing sometimes, but saying theres a malicious racism to his work is incorrect.
He's a retard.
>When asked about is Racial Heritage by the Nazis, Tolkein replied by basically saying 'Im not Jewish, but I wish I was, the Jews are cool guys'. He may have been a bit stereotypical in his writing sometimes, but saying theres a malicious racism to his work is incorrect.
Hahaha, there's a ton of racism in Tolkein's works, both internal (Various groups hating each other and having prejudiced opinions about themselves and others) and narrative (the gods flat out made some groups to be better than others, those groups coincidentally being the ones we follow around for most of his writing). Tolkien was a conservative British gentleman from the start of the 20th century. NOT having racist undertones in his writing would have been far more exceptional.
Yeah I know what you mean, it's the sort of "Reddit" crowd where they think they are smarter than everyone else so take every chance they can to show off fairly rudimentary things everyone else already knows when if they truly were so smart they would know better and it just makes them look like retards.
The same sort of person who brags about how much of an atheist they are or how much they love "science", they are just cancerous.
Sure there's racism in the books, one group of people hating the other, that's just being realistic. What the other user was saying was that he didn't make Orcs thinking of them as black people, or the Southrons as Native Americans or what have you. There was no, as he he put it, malicious racism on Tolkien's part. Which is correct.
All those groups are fictional. And while many certainly have connections to real world peoples, they are not intended to literally be that race/culture and have just as many elements unique to them.
What most mean when they accuse Tolkein of Racism is that Orcs are meant to be black people or the like, and Tolkien is saying these groups are subhuman. Even though Orcs are not naturally occuring and were corrupted from Elves to serve as foot soldiers by the Evil gods.
The best part is when they start turning on their patron saints, like Neil Degrasse Tyson, who I guess they all hate now.
Contrarianism is as boring as conformity. I'll watch my Big Trouble In Little China and read Clarissa because they entertain me, and if someone else likes it, awesome. If they don't, that's fine.
My only concern with pseudo-intellectuals is the impact they could potentially have on the writing for shoes, comics, etc. KXCD was actually funny and informative, but once the writer pandered to Reddit it just turned into a secret club. The appeal went from "learn while you laugh" to "validate your own ego, you special snowflake", and if I wanted my ego validated I would probably do something other than read a web comic.
You didn't read what I said. There is explicit narrative racism in Tolkien's work. There is an explicit hierarchy of races, Numenoreans being at the top and the peoples serving Sauron at the bottom, with the "higher" races having an implicit imperative to bring civilization to the lower ones.
That the various groups are not 1:1 stand-ins for real world groups doesn't mean there is no racism there. Tolkien clearly at least flirted with the 19th century racial theories and subscribed to the ideas that certain races are better than others. He wasn't malicious about it but the bias is clearly there.
>anything but high praise is shit talking
autism
To add, this isn't to say I'm putting Tolkien down or anything. His somewhat bendier ideas (and there are quite a few) don't detract from the power of his work and aren't particularly out of place for a man of his time. But to claim that they aren't there is just false.
>nevermind that STEM jobs aren't the only ones we need
Indubitably. I prefer my burgers served by arts majors.
>user was saying was that he didn't make Orcs thinking of them as black people
Why are SJWs obsessed with this trend of making the evil Orcs into innocent blacks? I keep seeing it everywhere. Even Max Landis wrote a terrible script for it.
The worst thing is his aren't-I-clever smugness over what amounts to internet memes about science.
e! pi! the square root of -1! Aren't I clever for knowing these terms!
It's called Torricelli's Law
en.wikipedia.org
We do get 200m/s.
To put it in the simplest terms, an upward-pointing jet of water made by a "drainpipe" 2km deep in the ocean would be 2km high (because of conservation of energy).
This is a pretty good example of both the smugness of the author and his detractors. The formula is a good approximation for a back-of-an-envelope joke calculation. The detractor looks dumb because they're nitpicking an obvious joke. The author looks dumb because they're taking an unphysical situation (a "hole" at the bottom of the ocean) and making wildly inaccurate pseudo-physical calculations about it.
This wouldn't be so bad if neither side was putting out the obnoxious "I'm so clever" attitude.
Well to be fair you are objectively wrong though and misinformed at best.
Did Tolkein do the orcs poorly so that faggots can characterise them as minorities instead of corrupted monsters? probably, he even writes about regretting not adding more complex layers to the orcs who never aksed to be born and by cruel nature are doomed to their life.
They're not fucking black
They're not your minority to virtue signal that an old british man was racist
They were an unfortunate evil born of twisted intent and are tied to their masters fate.
I wasn't even talking about orcs. I was talking about how different groups of men (and elves) related to each other in his works. Orcs are a completely different quandary, one stemming from his insistence at Catholic orthodoxy.
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> Nedroid
Now we're talkin'.
Why are you expecting good art or writing from a STEM major in the first place? Of course his webcomic is going to be shit. All the creative fields are beyond his reach.
The orcs are Tolkien's self insert. Checkmate, mongoloid.
(Specifically, the orcs are every poor son of a bitch in the trenches)
Munroe is, by all accounts, a creepy shitter IRL.
>The same sort of person who brags about how much of an atheist they are or how much they love "science", they are just cancerous.
Why do you hate them? They're ripe for triggering.
>I fucking love SCIENCE!
>"bell curve"
>GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT RRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
LOL
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>normies/autists who's entire political knowledge comes from seeing Trump making an ass of himself on TV/social media prefer to vote for Hillary, a career politician who always looks spotless on TV/social media
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOW I WONDER WHY????????
>I'm with her
I still can't believe anyone thought this motto wasn't garbage
It was meant to appeal to women and numales.
Oh he must be doing very well at the moment.
Hello, Trump supporters. I always wondered - was the only reason you voted for him because you hate the insanely anal politically correct people that much?
I mean, his stance on net neutrality means you're going to pay more just to access sites like this one.
Still salty huh?
Maybe they voted for him because they'd very much like to not go to war with Russia. Which seems more important than maybe having to pay more money to browse a mongolian throat singing forum.
I just wanted to see Rome burn.
>spotless
lol
she basically had a stale routine where each line is carefully rehearsed
meanwhile trump sharing his actual opinions was so notable to her that she made all her ads about it
+50 rubles
your college choices sucking isnt a joke user
>she basically had a stale routine where each line is carefully rehearsed
That's exactly what spotless means you retard.
>but once the writer pandered to Reddit it just turned into a secret club.
He removed the button for the Forums years ago. The forum still exists, but you have to type in the URL. There's no direct link to it anymore
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Eh. At this point, there's not much I myself can do. Might as well see why you guys liked the man so much so we don't make the same mistake in four years.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that we would have gotten into war with Russia. Yes, him and Putin are clearly butt buddies, but are you saying we should just turn a blind eye to what Russia's doing now?
You need your fiddle first, Nero.
Hillary had to have her turn! It was just fair, are you telling me you didn't think it was fair to let Hillary have her turn at president? Fuck what she can do for you or the country or why you would want her as a president, the DNC has already pushed so hard for Hillary to have Her Turn and by god, that's the campaign they'll run on.
Fucking Hillary. What a shitshow, they'll be talking about how pathetic this electoral defeat was for decades.
The most delicious part was how Trump won three times
Won the election
Got more votes from the recounts
Had fewer faithless electors (Seriously, the democrats even replaced two electors who refused to vote for Hilary)
>Not sure where you're getting the idea that we would have gotten into war with Russia.
Really, I didn't even care about Hillary. I just was concerned with letting the Republicans get control.
They say they fight for the common man, yet they cater exclusively to the rich. They ignore scientific fact because it isn't convenient for them. They want to return everything back to when they were 12.
I honestly couldn't have given a lesser shit about Hillary. I just didn't want Trump to win.
>but are you saying we should just turn a blind eye to what Russia's doing now?
Helping a longtime ally destroy radical islamists we've been supporting for years?
>They say they fight for the common man, yet they cater exclusively to the rich.
Both parties do this, stop thinking it's just the Republicans because it lets the Democrats get away with it
He never gets tired of it!
>Both parties do this, stop thinking it's just the Republicans because it lets the Democrats get away with it
Saying both sides do it ignores the problem.
>the objectively single most corrupt presidential candidate in history's thirty year long+ political career which culminated in a rigged DNC election and a political campaign running entirely on the platform of "I'm ENTITLED to have MY TURN as President because I've been a politician for SO long!"
>only to get picked off at the post at the last second by a reality TV star bumbling about
It's like a movie or something.
>I just didn't want Trump to win.
Then you should be mad at Hillary. Trump was the least likely president to succeed in god knows how long, and his win is entirely on Hillary's shoulders for being such a goddamn fuck-up. I truly believe that any other democratic candidate would have won in a landslide. Trump had a zealous support base, but a small one because he was such a hugely divisive figure. The only way he could win was against a candidate with absolutely zero support base at all, in an election where the majority are voting against the other one instead of for their own.
So in other words, you don't have any legit reasons to be a bitch.
It clearly describes it as "undertones." Didn't phrase it poorly at all.
Her entire campaign was garbage
She was also the worst candidate the democrats could have picked, what the fuck were they thinking
The same thing they were thinking when they propped Trump up as an easy win
>"We can't possibly lose"
ITT: people getting mad at their intellectual superiors.
Basically they felt sorry that Bill cheated on her, so they though she deserved to be president.
I just like watching Amerifats have bad presidents. The Obama years were just getting stale, but Trump's victory is shaping up to give me more laughs than the Bush years.
There's plenty of hate to go around. Both Clinton and the retards who voted Trump are to blame.
>Three consecutive terms in the White House is what normally happens right?
Oh look, it's another tiresome retard holding forth about how he hates XKCD. Why don't you write a blog about it somewhere and stop polluting the board?
You can tell me more things about my president than I can tell you about your entire country.
She bought and bribed her way to the nomination. The entire DNC is corrupt as shit, didn't you pay any attention to the election?
That's also because he was an incredibly harsh critic of the catholic church as well.
And you're proud of how retarded you are. Kind of proves his point.
Their slogan before that was "america is already great"
The people running her campaign were utter imbeciles.
Redwall couldn't be more racist if it tried. Did you miss the fact that the bad guys are objectively evil and can never change despite the best upbringing, are called VERMIN? Even the one raised at Redwall got written off by the good guys as "Always evil" at the end of his book. A more powerfully racist message is hard to imagine.
If a democrat had run the slogan "make America great again" Republicans would be asking why they hate America.
Yeah, because we're not as entertaining to watch.
Not my fault every irrelevant country sucks my President's dick.
See? gets it. No one cares about his country
and the 'crats would need to shut that argument down.
Hell, Obama's slogan was "Change". Not like the Democrats have never had anything similar.
Thing is if your first idea for the tag of your campaign is just a poor rebuttal of your opponent's catchy tag you've probably got an issue on your hands