Kickstarter
by Jeff
Image text: If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.
If you are not familiar with Kickstarter, it is (in their own words) a platform for funding creative projects in which anyone can give money at any level of funding starting usually as low as $10. Funding at different levels gets you different perks.
In this comic, Black Hat is attempting (and as you can see, failing) to game the system by raising money to work on the perfect Kickstarter pitch. That is surprising because usually Black Hat is successful with his gambits. The irony of the image text is that you do not need to be on any VIP list to have dibs on the pledge levels. Anyone can give any amount of money. That is the goal of Kickstarter and it has been wildly successful.
Pickup Artist
by Jeff
Image text: Son, don't try to play 'make you feel bad' with the Michael Jordan of making you feel bad.
Black Hat makes a cameo! In this comic, a character attempts to use new "Pickup Artist" tactics on a random girl in a bar. His tactic is "negging", which is just as it is explained in the comic. However, as the image text says, he attempts to use this tactic on a girl who is the "Michael Jordan" of making other people feel bad about themselves. His "negging" pales in comparison to hers.
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever to play in the NBA. He played for the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards. His name is often used as a noun to notate that someone is the best in their field.
Also, a thousand times this: "Pickup artists are dehumanizing creeps who see relationships as adversarial and women as sex toys."
And this another thousand times: "Just talk to them like a fucking human being."
Don't be a douche, guys.
That is all.
Car Problems
by Jeff
Image text: Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.
Ok, so in this comic, Megan's friends, including our old friend Black Hat take the phrase "Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?" literally and are critiquing the style and composition of the picture and not the subject. Megan is hoping that they have any insight to why her car was on fire this morning and not a photography critique.
November
by Jeff
Image text: November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.
This comic is an homage to Charles Schulz the creator of the comic Peanuts, who was born on November 26, 1922. Here's the comic in question by Schulz with Black Hat playing the Linus role, in a way and Cueball, the Lucy role. In both comics, when you start thinking about your tongue, you can't stop thinking about it. Similar in the way that if you start thinking about your breathing, you stop breathing unless you consciously think to breathe.
(ed note: And now I can't stop thinking about my tongue and have to think to breathe...)
This link also indicates that Schulz's comic is not completely about tongue awareness, instead has deeper meaning about one's existence in the world.
Caroling
by Jeff
Image text: For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.
Here are the lyrics for the first part of the Christmas Carol, "Good King Wenceslas"
Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night, tho' the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, gath'ring winter fuel.
First and foremost, Wenceslas was not a king, but merely a duke. The "kingship" was given to him ceremonially after his death. Secondly, the Wenceslas that the carol is about did not massacre any people and I'm sure that this is Black Hat merely playing a prank on unsuspecting innocent carolers. (As an aside, does anyone "carol" at random people's houses anymore? Seems like an antiquated notion. Plus, who wants people singing loudly in front of their house?)
The image text references "the Feast of Stephen" which is also known as the "Feast of St. Stephen" or "St. Stephen's Day", which is a holiday celebrated on the 26th or 27th of December, depending on the Western or Eastern church respectively. It is not actually a feast of a person named Stephen, instead a celebration of the Saint.
Hotels
by Jeff
Image text: 'Rating: 1/5. Room filled to brim with semen, and when front desk clerk opened mouth to talk, bedbugs poured out.'
Alright, it is pretty clear what Black Hat is doing here. He is putting bad reviews on all the hotels he has stayed at and likes and wants to stay in again, which lowers demand. But, he claims it is not low enough to put them out of business. Which seems strange to me. He knows that his reviews lowers demand enough for the hotel to lower prices, but not enough to put them out of business. That seems like a very fine line there.
The tragedy of the commons," is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen."
I think Cueball is right and the tragedy of the commons does not apply here.
In the last frame, Black Hat references the invisible hand which is the term economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace. Black Hat appears to be taking advantage of this invisible hand by metaphorically stabbing it with a knife and eating it.
Chin-Up Bar
by Jeff
Image text: Those few who escaped found the emergency cutoff box disabled. The stampede lasted two hours and reached the bottom three times.
In this comic, our old friend, Black Hat rides up the longest escalator in the country and when he gets to the top, he puts a retractable chin-up bar at about waist height. This causes a massive pile-up on the escalator as people are pushed back by the bar while the escalator is pushing them forward.
In the image text we find out that Black Hat has also disabled the emergency cutoff box to further the pile-up and stampede.
Stud Finder
by Jeff
Image text: According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.
In this comic, Cueball is attempting to hang a painting. But, in order to hang his painting, he will need to find a stud, which is a vertical piece of wood in the wall that allows the painting to hang more securely. The device used to find the studs is call a "stud finder" originally enough.
When Cueball can't find the stud finder, he asks our old friend Black Hat if he has seen the stud finder. However, instead of suggesting where it might be, Black Hat starts to introduce his new product "A Stud Finder Finder". But Cueball cuts him off before he can finish.
Speculation
by Berg
Image text: 'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'
Hello all, Berg here.
You might remember my goings-on from last summer around this same time, when Jeff went on sabbatical. As he has once again been lured away by the siren song of vacation, I'll be filling in for him this week. Let's get started, shall we?
I am perhaps the worst person on the planet to try to explain today's xkcd, as I don't use Google +, IRC, or even Facebook (Though I do have a profile, I've never logged in. It's a long story). Luckily, I think there's only one real joke here, and it occurs in the fourth and fifth panel. That, I can handle.
The conversation in the first three panels is fairly banal- it's a quick rumination on the nature of social networking platforms, and a brief reflection on their evolution. Whether or not everybody switches over to Google+ or stays on Facebook is of no matter, as evidenced by the fact that AOL and IRC still both have devoted (if dwindling) followings.
And then, Black Hat shoots a crossbow bolt through the basketball.
It's a symbolic gesture. When Black Hat says he's not the 'catch' type, what we're really meant to take away from the comic is that Black Hat will do what he wants to do, regardless of what his friends are doing. They're shooting hoops, he's on his phone. They're playing catch, he's got a crossbow. In the image text, we hear of another instance of him playing by his own rules at a skeet shooting range. Given how good his aim with the crossbow is, it's a bit surprising to hear he was kicked out.
The point is that Black Hat doesn't care about universal acceptance. Black Hat cares about Black Hat. The fact that he's not the catch type symbolizes that while statisticians may portray social networkers as a sort of hive mind that will gravitate towards one platform over another, at the end of the day that hive mind is made up of innumerable individuals, many of whom will share Black Hat's easily summarized world view: My way.
Thanks for reading, guys! I'll be here all week while Jeff cruises around the Pacific Northwest. See you in a few days!
Cell Phones
by Jeff
Image text: He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.
In this comic, after hearing about the "Cell Phones Don't Cause Cancer" study, Black Hat plots "Total Cancer Incidence" per 100,000 and "Cell Phone Users" per 100 on the same graph. The graph in frame 3 shows that the number of cell phone users rises after the number of cancer incidence, which makes Black Hat comically come to the conclusion that Cancer causes Cell Phones.
Also, since the image text asks, yes, the way that Black Hat holds the laptop in frame 2 totally makes me cringe.