this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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xkcd
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I imagine there will be fuss over this, “politics” in XKCD, as if (with the author being an academic) a PhD student getting grabbed off the street in your town against the state’s wishes for something she published somehow isn’t relevant.
People bitching about politics are bad faith Nazis trying to appeal to ignorant folk who don't know no better. Belittle them. Bash them. Tell them to go fuck themselves
Those people are strangely quiet when it's a conservative-leaning meme, so I've learned to, as you say, tell them to get bent.
I can think of no better situation for the phrase "fuck you and the horse you rode in on"
There might not be. The only people that read xkcd are those that can understand it, so there could be a cutoff where you just arent gonna get the other side of the “politics”
If that was true, there’d be no need for ExplainXKCD.com.
And even then on some of the more physics-y ones I just give Randall the benefit of the doubt that it’s funny.
I think there's a difference between being able to understand and having all the information to understand. Randall has a very wide range of topics that he makes comics on and most readers won't know enough about every topic to get every joke, even though he does his best to simplify it for a broad audience. That's the reason ExplainXKCD exists. But his audience is generally nerds, people who like learning new information, which is also what Explain caters to. So it is both true that his audience can (and are willing to) understand and that Explain helps them understand. (I also think that nerds love explaining stuff, so it makes sense that the main fandom website is ExplainXKCD, even if there were no demand for explanations.)
XKCD covers so many subjects, its hard to understand all of them
Sometimes even explainxkcd doesn't help :c
Maybe.
It’s fairly popular in tech circles where there’s a large intersection with MAGA, or at least a more “keep politics out of my programming” attitude predating that.