Sunday, February 22, 2009

My "critisisms" of xkcdsuckssuxsucks

Last night, I registered this blog and handed it over to Carl, hoping that it would be used to good effect as a forum for debunking the very serious criticisms leveled at him by Dan, the maintainer of this other blog. I have a lot of respect for Carl's intentions, and I agree with his views regarding xkcd, as expressed on this blog here. However, I'm really not sure about the way in which he's gone about maintaining this new blog of his. Let's have a look, shall we?

First of all, the blog layout is all messed up. You'll notice that, unlike the nice and tidy descriptive sections utilized by xkcdsucks and xkcdsuckssux, xkcdsuckssuxsucks simply contains Carl's "About Me" section below the "Follower" and "Blog Archive" fields, as in the default layout. It also contains Carl's name, "Carl," as if he is some sort of egomaniac who feels the need to put his name everywhere. What is with that, sirs? I understand that the blog was just created last night, but Carl--surely if you have the time to write a highly well-thought-out post like this one, you can spend the time to make your blog layout look a little nicer.

That's not the main problem, though. Take another look at the post I linked. Sure, Carl offers a friendly and mostly unbiased look at the content in question, and you might even start to get the impression that Carl is a very amusing and eloquent fellow. For me, though, that illusion was shattered when I came upon this little "gem":

He's critisizing timing? What the hell?

That's right. Carl Wheeler--who maintains a blog devoted to criticizing the exploits of noted SMART COMPUTER MAN and SMART MATH MAN and GUY WHO USED TO WORK FOR NASA OR SOMETHING AND HAS A LOT OF GIRLFRIENDS AND SEX Randall Munroe--doesn't even seem to know how to spell the word criticizing? You put it best, Carl: what the hell?

Now, I'm not really against xkcdsuckssuxsucks, and I'm excited to see how this new blog develops from its infancy. I was going to call this blog "xkcd sucks sucks sucks: overrated," but this URL is more catchy, I think, so forgive me. But I think Carl is going to have to step it up if he wants to attract a readership of more than the 0 comments he currently has.