posted
When I first read today's xkcd I got two thirds of the joke, and thought it was hilarious. Then I looked up Don Quixote and "tilting at windmills" and it became even funnier.
Unfortunately none of the friends in the vicinity at the time were likely to have gotten the joke, so I had no one to share it with. The folks here seem to have a higher than average literacy and should be more likely to appreciate it.
posted
At first I only got the "War of the Worlds Ending" reference in the mouseover text, which I still think is the funniest part.
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I love Don Quixote. My dad read it to us in translation when I was about 9, it has been a favorite since then.
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posted
There's a fourth (fifth) bit of a joke, in that the windmills do indeed look like the tripods from the Tripod trilogy, if memory serves. I haven't read those books in so long though, I should go get a copy
*Wanders out of thread to get books*
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Are you sure? Maybe they (he? she? who writes xkcd?) were just referencing Don Quixote and by happy accident drew something that also referenced Picasso (I know some who would say it would be hard for a typical preschooler NOT to reference Picasso). Isn't that the beauty of being an "artist?"
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Are you sure? Maybe they (he? she? who writes xkcd?) were just referencing Don Quixote and by happy accident drew something that also referenced Picasso (I know some who would say it would be hard for a typical preschooler NOT to reference Picasso). Isn't that the beauty of being an "artist?"
The pose is pretty much the exact same.
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posted
Yeah, after looking at the picture I'd say it's pretty obvious. Plus, Randy was clearly trying to pack as many artistic references in here as possible.
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posted
I wanted to love Don Quixote. But I didn't. I thought it was incredibly boring. And, in a lot of ways, mean-spirited.
The musical movie, on the other hand, the one with Peter O'Toole that everyone loathes? That I love.
The comic...meh. Probably it was because Raymond's title clued me in, but it was obvious to me where they were going from the first panel. The only thing that elicited a chuckle (and that just barely) was "Al Gore you've doomed us all."
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Don Quixote is sort of supposed to be mean spirited. Man of La Mancha, though, is wonderful and uplifting. Cervantes would be annoyed.
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Yeah, I imagine if I'd been exposed to them in the opposite order, I would find Man of La Mancha to be maudlin and mushy. First exposure goes a long way to hardening preconceptions about valid reactions to characters.
One of the reasons I didn't particularly like the Bean books was that the character of Peter changed so dramatically (IMO) between the original books and the second series. This transformation was partially mitigated by excluding Ender's perspective from the second series, allowing the reader to attribute the brutal image of Peter from the earlier books to being an artifact of Ender's personal hang-ups. But I still felt that the Bean books didn't do justice, in a sense, to the version of Peter from the original series.
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: One of the reasons I didn't particularly like the Bean books was that the character of Peter changed so dramatically (IMO) between the original books and the second series.
That's exactly the reason why I like Peter so much in the later books.
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That dream scares me. I had it about Middle School in college, and I get middle school and college ones now. Oddly though, I don't get them about high school
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Oh wow, Randall really is inside everyone's head. Those dreams correspond exactly. I don't usually get a dream, but I often wake up in a panic because I think I'm late for class regardless of the day of the week or time of year.
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posted
I love XKCD, but this comic doesn't really do anything for me. I mean, yes, everybody has these dreams, but it's also incredibly common knowledge that everybody has these dreams. Reading this comic, my response was "Yeah? And?"
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"There's only two jokes in me And I just wrote the third Don't know where I got the inspiration Or how I wrote the words..."
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:I love XKCD, but this comic doesn't really do anything for me. I mean, yes, everybody has these dreams, but it's also incredibly common knowledge that everybody has these dreams. Reading this comic, my response was "Yeah? And?"
edit: i do like how he draws "waking up from a dream," though. he's done it before and it is just so artistically real to me.
Posts: 3516 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:but it's also incredibly common knowledge that everybody has these dreams.
Guess some of us missed that common knowledge though. For a while I had no idea that anyone else had dreams that fit that pattern. I think there was probably some thread on hatrack that clued me in, but I'd been having them long before then.
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Interesting. Until now I hadn't talked to anybody who wasn't aware that it was nearly universal.
[Edit - Given that you hadn't heard about its universality until recently, I can see why you'd have the reaction to the comic that you did]
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posted
I knew the dream was universal but didn't know to expect it long after leaving school. (I actually don't have that dream that often. My dreams tend to be pretty cinematic.)
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