xkcd is completely unfunny and overrated. It's riding on the coattails of 3-4 years ago, when it actually used to be good. Now it just panders to high schoolers and "misunderstood nerd" living stereotypes.
...if you (like myself and my fiancee) are one of the few people out there that still appreciate dead-tree books...
Nitpicking, maybe... but you actually think that there are only a FEW people who still appreciate paper books? We must live in very different places, because even the nerdiest of my social circle (and I work in InfoSec) won't touch e-books with a ten foot pole.
Which sums up the impression I get reading your average xkcd strip, if I'm not about to hurl at Munroe's insipid melancholy. It turns out you don't need to be that clever; nevertheless I am in xkcd's presumed target audience, and despite getting many of the gags still don't find them that funny. Moreover, I cannot see what the hell my peers think is so great about it. Seriously, do they need a bunch of mathsier-than-thou stick drawings to reaffirm their abilities? Roughly speaking, xkcd is to geeks what The Mighty Boosh is to trendy undergrads. As far as I can see, they're both guilty of flattering their respective audiences to the point where the latter forgets that anything comic should, at least once in a while, make one laugh.
This is exactly how I feel about xkcd. It doesn't seem to exist as an honest form of expression for its own sake, but rather as a series of attempts to get its readers to go "yeah! I get that reference! go me!" When it tries to be sentimental or romantic, it ends up being syrupy-sweet glurge. When it tries to make a statement, it comes off preachy. Most of the time, it's just warmed-over references to year old memes and random, bizarre situations that are weird for the sake of being weird rather than actually creative.
The worst part of it all is that I could just dismiss it as yet another webcomic I dislike if it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE to avoid. It's linked to and +5 funnied in nearly every Slashdot thread. You can't bring up something computer or science related on a forum without some "clever" person digging out a tangentially related xkcd strip. Oh, and because I work in computer security, I got that idiotic "Bobby Tables" strip emailed to me about a thousand times.
I'm just glad to find out that there are a handful of like-minded nerds who don't deify xkcd. It's cute sometimes, I guess, but we're not taking Bill Watterson level material here.
I grew up in Windham, Maine. It was a 6.5 mile drive just to my High School. Plus, riding your bike on the narrow shoulder of US-202 while cars are flying by you at 40mph wasn't exactly the safest thing in the world, and that's if the shoulder wasn't piled up with snow. If you were lucky, you'd know some kids living on your road, but in most cases you were stuck begging for rides.
I tend to drown myself in books when I'm depressed. I find TV more of a passive activity (watching other people do stuff) and books more engaging (I tend to put myself into the action of the book I am reading.) TV actually pisses me off when I'm in a bad mood, especially sitcoms, as my life problems don't typically resolve themselves in 30 minutes.:P
So you mean you've never, ever had an evening where you're in the mood to hang out with people, but circumstances (a bad cold, on call at work, really shitty weather,) prohibit you from doing otherwise? Right.
I'm single and have no roommate. I find it soothing to have the TV or a movie on when I am home, even if I am reading or doing chores. I don't get the same effect with music. My theory is that just having some kind of conversation in the background helps me to feel less lonely when I'm by myself.
Do I consider myself "unhappy?" I suppose a little lonely at times, but who isn't?
Wow, so you've never, ever lost touch with someone you knew in a former life (job, school, neighborhood) and/or never had the desire to look them up? You must have one hell of an address book.
Lucky you. Neither my crappy uni nor my hick high school has alumni lists. Well, I am sure the uni does, as they manage to send me letters begging for money once a month, but none of that info is available to me.
I've managed to find my old friends on facebook and linkedin; hopefully none of those sites become as shady as classmates have become, though facebook is starting to get there.
Here, here. I'm single because I haven't found the right guy yet. I'd love to be in a relationship, but I refuse to settle for someone I'm not really into. Some people seem to think it's actually UNHEALTHY that I want a boyfriend, even though I'm obviously not desperate for one, nor do I feel my life is lacking because I'm unattached. I simply think it'd be nice to have someone to curl up with on the couch and watch movies, share nice dinners with, etc.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people who prefer to be single, but I wish they'd stop thinking of me as a codependent loser because I'd like to be with someone.
Forgot to mention that it's the OIL (in the petals) of these flowers that I am allergic to, not the pollen. Put a drop of rose oil on my skin and I'll blister.
Why have a living, breathing flower in a pot when you can have a pretend one that wastes so much more energy? Who wouldn't want that?
Because some of us have dogs and/or cats that love to eat a real plant. Because bugs like to lay eggs in the potting soil, and then you have bugs and a dead plant. Because flowers wilt after a few days/weeks, and then you have to wait for new blooms. Because you need to remember to water them, but not too much, because then have mold/fungus and a dead plant.
Because some of us just don't have green thumbs and want something pretty in our houses without continuing the endless cycle of slaughtering poor innocent flowering plants. WON'T YOU THINK OF THE PLANTS?
To be honest, I'd rather have to do my research on a variety of online retailers (and miss any that were purchased in meatspace) than have to wade through a bunch of astroturf/badmouthing spam. I understand that Amazon wants to be inclusive, but it opens them up to mass attacks like this. Who knows then the b-tards on 4chan will get bored and decide to mass-defame (or mass-hype) some undeserving product.
The fact that people were allowed to post reviews the game BEFORE IT EVEN CAME OUT shows just how useless Amazon's ratings system has become. What would be the big loss for them to only allow people who have purchased the game from them to make a rating? Doing otherwise just makes it highly vulnerable to abuse from astroturfers and haters alike.
Seriously. Why not allow the customer to set some sort of cap on their account? Let the customer specify "If my usage comes within 75% of $n a month, send me an email. If it reaches this limit, disable further usage until I authorize a higher cap."
This would have come in handy for me when my friend decided it'd be funny to download 20 MB of porn with my phone's web browser, which turned into roughly a $300 cell phone bill.
I don't know, man, I have revealed my gender on slashdot many times throughout the tenure of my membership. I don't have any offensive body odor, am not overweight, am unoffensive looking (picture on blog,) and last time I checked, lack a penis. According to the legends I should be neck-deep in my choice of pasty white men, but alas, nada. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG, SLASHDOT?
Call me when they find the gene marker for "couldn't get a date if her life depended on it." That's the one I (and ostensibly a big chunk of the Slashdot population) need gene therapy for.
I got this email this morning but received a DVD today anyway. Unfortunately, that DVD turned out to be "Attack of the Clones," so somehow I'm not entirely pleased to have been unaffected by the shipment problems.
I never quite understood how "the pill" got so popular to begin with. Messing with your hormones is not a good idea. When so many other good methods exist, it's a miracle that women actually want to take medication, and mess with their bodies, to prevent having kids.
All methods have their issues:
IUDs- near impossible to convince a doctor to give you unless you are married and have had children already (chance of damaging the uterus)
Tubal ligation- Most doctors will not perform on a nulparous woman. Expensive.
Diaphragms/caps/sponges- difficult to insert, messy (some require lots of spermicide), lack of spontaneity, not as effective as IUDs and hormonal BC
Condoms- perceived loss of sensation, sometimes ill-fitting, chance of breakage, sensitivities to ingredients, lack of spontaneity, not as effective as IUDs and hormonal BC
The benefit of messing with hormones, means less painful and/or excessively heavy menstruation, and a decrease the risk of ovarian cysts and cancers (as it stops ovulation.) Personally, I'd rather have an IUD, but that's not going to happen.
InfoSec positions may require writing small scripts for proof of concept/testing purposes, but in general you'll be more tapping into strong networking/data management/systems engineering areas. Sadly, most universities still don't instill much security prowess into their CS graduates, so you'll have a lot to learn before you can really get deep in that kind of work. You'd probably start out running and analyzing security scans and work your way up.
Stay away from code auditing; only the most hardcore and fastidious code lovers truly enjoy (and do a good job at) it.
Slashdot Mirror
xkcd is completely unfunny and overrated. It's riding on the coattails of 3-4 years ago, when it actually used to be good. Now it just panders to high schoolers and "misunderstood nerd" living stereotypes.
...if you (like myself and my fiancee) are one of the few people out there that still appreciate dead-tree books...
Nitpicking, maybe... but you actually think that there are only a FEW people who still appreciate paper books? We must live in very different places, because even the nerdiest of my social circle (and I work in InfoSec) won't touch e-books with a ten foot pole.
Are you kidding? I've been obsessively reloading status.twitter.com since I got in this morning!
Which sums up the impression I get reading your average xkcd strip, if I'm not about to hurl at Munroe's insipid melancholy. It turns out you don't need to be that clever; nevertheless I am in xkcd's presumed target audience, and despite getting many of the gags still don't find them that funny. Moreover, I cannot see what the hell my peers think is so great about it. Seriously, do they need a bunch of mathsier-than-thou stick drawings to reaffirm their abilities? Roughly speaking, xkcd is to geeks what The Mighty Boosh is to trendy undergrads. As far as I can see, they're both guilty of flattering their respective audiences to the point where the latter forgets that anything comic should, at least once in a while, make one laugh.
This is exactly how I feel about xkcd. It doesn't seem to exist as an honest form of expression for its own sake, but rather as a series of attempts to get its readers to go "yeah! I get that reference! go me!" When it tries to be sentimental or romantic, it ends up being syrupy-sweet glurge. When it tries to make a statement, it comes off preachy. Most of the time, it's just warmed-over references to year old memes and random, bizarre situations that are weird for the sake of being weird rather than actually creative.
The worst part of it all is that I could just dismiss it as yet another webcomic I dislike if it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE to avoid. It's linked to and +5 funnied in nearly every Slashdot thread. You can't bring up something computer or science related on a forum without some "clever" person digging out a tangentially related xkcd strip. Oh, and because I work in computer security, I got that idiotic "Bobby Tables" strip emailed to me about a thousand times.
I'm just glad to find out that there are a handful of like-minded nerds who don't deify xkcd. It's cute sometimes, I guess, but we're not taking Bill Watterson level material here.
I grew up in Windham, Maine. It was a 6.5 mile drive just to my High School. Plus, riding your bike on the narrow shoulder of US-202 while cars are flying by you at 40mph wasn't exactly the safest thing in the world, and that's if the shoulder wasn't piled up with snow. If you were lucky, you'd know some kids living on your road, but in most cases you were stuck begging for rides.
I tend to drown myself in books when I'm depressed. I find TV more of a passive activity (watching other people do stuff) and books more engaging (I tend to put myself into the action of the book I am reading.) TV actually pisses me off when I'm in a bad mood, especially sitcoms, as my life problems don't typically resolve themselves in 30 minutes. :P
So you mean you've never, ever had an evening where you're in the mood to hang out with people, but circumstances (a bad cold, on call at work, really shitty weather,) prohibit you from doing otherwise? Right.
I'm single and have no roommate. I find it soothing to have the TV or a movie on when I am home, even if I am reading or doing chores. I don't get the same effect with music. My theory is that just having some kind of conversation in the background helps me to feel less lonely when I'm by myself.
Do I consider myself "unhappy?" I suppose a little lonely at times, but who isn't?
Wow, so you've never, ever lost touch with someone you knew in a former life (job, school, neighborhood) and/or never had the desire to look them up? You must have one hell of an address book.
Lucky you. Neither my crappy uni nor my hick high school has alumni lists. Well, I am sure the uni does, as they manage to send me letters begging for money once a month, but none of that info is available to me.
I've managed to find my old friends on facebook and linkedin; hopefully none of those sites become as shady as classmates have become, though facebook is starting to get there.
Here, here. I'm single because I haven't found the right guy yet. I'd love to be in a relationship, but I refuse to settle for someone I'm not really into. Some people seem to think it's actually UNHEALTHY that I want a boyfriend, even though I'm obviously not desperate for one, nor do I feel my life is lacking because I'm unattached. I simply think it'd be nice to have someone to curl up with on the couch and watch movies, share nice dinners with, etc.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people who prefer to be single, but I wish they'd stop thinking of me as a codependent loser because I'd like to be with someone.
Forgot to mention that it's the OIL (in the petals) of these flowers that I am allergic to, not the pollen. Put a drop of rose oil on my skin and I'll blister.
The flowers people are allergic to aren't the pretty ones.
I'm allergic to roses and lilacs. Those are both quite pretty, IMHO.
Why have a living, breathing flower in a pot when you can have a pretend one that wastes so much more energy? Who wouldn't want that?
Because some of us have dogs and/or cats that love to eat a real plant. Because bugs like to lay eggs in the potting soil, and then you have bugs and a dead plant. Because flowers wilt after a few days/weeks, and then you have to wait for new blooms. Because you need to remember to water them, but not too much, because then have mold/fungus and a dead plant. Because some of us just don't have green thumbs and want something pretty in our houses without continuing the endless cycle of slaughtering poor innocent flowering plants. WON'T YOU THINK OF THE PLANTS?
To be honest, I'd rather have to do my research on a variety of online retailers (and miss any that were purchased in meatspace) than have to wade through a bunch of astroturf/badmouthing spam. I understand that Amazon wants to be inclusive, but it opens them up to mass attacks like this. Who knows then the b-tards on 4chan will get bored and decide to mass-defame (or mass-hype) some undeserving product.
The fact that people were allowed to post reviews the game BEFORE IT EVEN CAME OUT shows just how useless Amazon's ratings system has become. What would be the big loss for them to only allow people who have purchased the game from them to make a rating? Doing otherwise just makes it highly vulnerable to abuse from astroturfers and haters alike.
Seriously. Why not allow the customer to set some sort of cap on their account? Let the customer specify "If my usage comes within 75% of $n a month, send me an email. If it reaches this limit, disable further usage until I authorize a higher cap." This would have come in handy for me when my friend decided it'd be funny to download 20 MB of porn with my phone's web browser, which turned into roughly a $300 cell phone bill.
I don't know, man, I have revealed my gender on slashdot many times throughout the tenure of my membership. I don't have any offensive body odor, am not overweight, am unoffensive looking (picture on blog,) and last time I checked, lack a penis. According to the legends I should be neck-deep in my choice of pasty white men, but alas, nada. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG, SLASHDOT?
Call me when they find the gene marker for "couldn't get a date if her life depended on it." That's the one I (and ostensibly a big chunk of the Slashdot population) need gene therapy for.
I got this email this morning but received a DVD today anyway. Unfortunately, that DVD turned out to be "Attack of the Clones," so somehow I'm not entirely pleased to have been unaffected by the shipment problems.
as for the personals. Just pretend to be a girl and you'll get mail all by itself.
Hey, I'm a girl! Where my emails at??
I never quite understood how "the pill" got so popular to begin with. Messing with your hormones is not a good idea. When so many other good methods exist, it's a miracle that women actually want to take medication, and mess with their bodies, to prevent having kids.
All methods have their issues:
IUDs- near impossible to convince a doctor to give you unless you are married and have had children already (chance of damaging the uterus)
Tubal ligation- Most doctors will not perform on a nulparous woman. Expensive.
Diaphragms/caps/sponges- difficult to insert, messy (some require lots of spermicide), lack of spontaneity, not as effective as IUDs and hormonal BC
Condoms- perceived loss of sensation, sometimes ill-fitting, chance of breakage, sensitivities to ingredients, lack of spontaneity, not as effective as IUDs and hormonal BC
The benefit of messing with hormones, means less painful and/or excessively heavy menstruation, and a decrease the risk of ovarian cysts and cancers (as it stops ovulation.) Personally, I'd rather have an IUD, but that's not going to happen.
InfoSec positions may require writing small scripts for proof of concept/testing purposes, but in general you'll be more tapping into strong networking/data management/systems engineering areas. Sadly, most universities still don't instill much security prowess into their CS graduates, so you'll have a lot to learn before you can really get deep in that kind of work. You'd probably start out running and analyzing security scans and work your way up.
Stay away from code auditing; only the most hardcore and fastidious code lovers truly enjoy (and do a good job at) it.
Quit misusing the word "Antisocial". Antisocial means you're a psychotic criminal who harms people or goes against society.
Don't judge my lifestyle!
So you've figured out from my facebook page that I'm an antisocial loser with no social skills. HOLY CRAP; are you some sort of detective?