More reasons to love XKCD

[prog]

* The ambiguity of this comic:

Slashdorks will read it and be like "rofl i deal with idiots like this at work every damn day, but they'd fire me if I hung up on them for real", even though I'm fairly confident that's not the joke. Something for everyone!

* The comic is hand-lettered. I have probably already mentioned this as a reason I like the comic, but I'll say it again. Hand-lettering makes any comic look about ten times better to me. (And you could make a "zero times ten" wisecrack here, but I would retort that there is a basic charm to the art. Very basic, sure, but still.)

* There are no comments or ratings or anything attached to the comic. Everyone likes getting comments, and I'd understand if he wanted to have comments so that every comic would have an ever-growing beard of public "LOL ^^;" messages attached, but I wouldn't like it.

* The cartoonist invites and even encourages direct linking to the cartoon images, even printing the necessary HTML code beside each one. That's great.

Comments

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

The slashdork reaction didn't even occur to me when I first saw this comic. In fact, I thought it was making fun of slashdorks, and as you note, that is likely the joke rather than the other way around. Interesting.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yes, that is without a doubt the intended joke. But I can totally see the crowd it's mocking as laughing without irony that the dude deserved what he got for not RTFM, and feel like I can call that interpretation wrong but not invalid.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I thought it worked perfectly on both levels, and both are valid. "RTFM" is a deeply satisfying response to hapless newbies, for some value of "deeply satisfying" that has mostly to do with my inner chimpanzee. On the other hand, would we be as (in)tolerant if everyday objects behaved in the same bizarre and unexpected ways software does?

And on the third hand, the mouse-over text says, "Life is too short for man pages, but occasionally much too short without them." Having on occasion flirted with death for want of RTFM'ing, I'd say there's something too that sentiment.