Carl Sagan is a popular astronomer and cosmologist who is most commonly admired for his ability to get even the most non-scientific people interested in space with his poignant and vivid descriptions of astrological entities. If there is one person that Randall wants to be like (and probably, to a certain degree, thinks he is like), it would have to be Carl Sagan. To compare, this comic is a normally pretty shy guy that delivers a cute, but not really funny joke, that is so inoffensive that you chuckle at it so he doesn’t feel bad, whereas normal xkcd is an annoying, fat tub of lard that constantly screams 4chan memes at the top of his lungs in response to every statement, expecting people to be rolling on the floor with laughter. I can’t think of much to insult with this comic, simply because of how inoffensive it is in its delivery, with none of the things like unwarranted nerd feelings of superiority or mindless references that usually characterize xkcd comics these days. Of course, the mouse-over text ruins the trend by adding nothing good to what was already a shut and locked comic, but that’s to be expected.Īnd that’s really it. It’s a small mental chuckle at best, but the fact that Randall wasn’t totally incompetent in communicating it is a miracle for xkcd. Certainly, in most comics, Randall skates the thin line between “not communicating an idea properly because of imprecise drawing/writing/communication” and “communicating an idea properly but making it slightly obtuse in its expression or requiring you to think for a few seconds before you get it”, and in this particular strip, Randall finally landed on the right side. So because of the diode, the man feels guilty and the woman doesn’t. There is a 15 second pause where you don’t understand, before you finally realize that the diode, in this case, is only allowing guilt, as opposed to electricity, to flow in one direction, that is, from the woman to the man and not the other way around. In the next panel, the two explain ways that they have each hurt each other, but only the guy apologizes in the final panel. In the first panel, it is unclear why exactly she wants him to hold the extremely large diode, but it actually ends up paying off slightly at the end, unlike usual. A diode is a device that only allows electric current to flow in one direction and inhibits its flow in the other direction.
But before that, stick-Megan (being the clever gal she is, as xkcdwomen are always more clever than xkcdmen, and maybe Randall depicting Megan as smart will get her t– well, you know, although this comic if considered as an actual comment on women can be considered pretty misogynistic, though not entirely untrue) wants stick-Randall to hold a diode. Stick-Megan and stick-Randall need to talk, presumably about how Randall is constantly depicting Megan being shot/sexual assaulted in his comic. The joke is so simple that it really doesn’t need much explanation. In fact, I might even go as far as to say that this comic is “average”, which is a high compliment when talking about xkcd.
While this comic is extremely simple, with a very basic joke that isn’t that funny, at the very least it avoids the majority of xkcd’s usual problems: a bunch of references for no reason, absolutely no buildup to the punchline, explicitly spelling the joke out (or linking to Wikipedia), etc. It’s not very often here that we give Randall credit, but I did promise to give credit if credit was due, so I will in this post.
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