monetizeyourcat:

I’m really glad the minimalist drawing aesthetic where everyone performs as awkward and inept for Honesty Points but is in reality a different kind of awkward and inept and mostly stunting their growth towards self-understanding by playing at a different form of inadequacy than their own is over. I’m glad XKCD is gone and Randall Munroe has become a monk

Every time I feel tempted to snark about XKCD or other contemporary Science!-brand humor product I try to remind myself that it’s actually quite an improvement over the last generation of uncley science humor.

Even “only nerds people with access to wikipedia will get this” references are better humor than cheesy puns and gimcrack wordplay; this greater stock of viable premises and the ensuing pressure to get ever more obscure leads to the deployment of more interesting science; and the melancholic sense of potential unfulfilled combined with the awkwardly unprompted sentiment that smart 15 year old girls are pretty cool, possibly cooler even than smart 15 year old boys, is uncley as fuck.