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[Reelya]

Ctrl-Alt-Del as a whole is hardly less cringy than the low-tier animes out there.

[Yoink]

Did... did you just call that particular issue (or whatever the appropriate term is in webcomic lingo) "good"?


Edit: oh no, pageroll. I'm not really WTFing about anything in particular at the moment, either... oh, apart from "When TF did it get so late?!" shit, I need to get to bed.

Also this POS phone keyboard periodically wipes all the swears I add to its dictionary. WHY.

[overseer05-15]

I    Ii
Ii   I_

[JoshuaFH]

Did... did you just call that particular issue (or whatever the appropriate term is in webcomic lingo) "good"?

Well... the resulting memes are good.

[Yoink]

Oh, I getcha. Yeah the whole comic looks like a dumpster fire from the pages I have seen.

I    Ii
Ii   I_

I fear I will never be able to read comic books the same way again...

[Arx]

I dunno about loss memes being good. They're... something, alright. As an exercise in the peculiar edge cases of memetics or something, they're fascinating.

[Yoink]

Memes are like puns and dad jokes. The more nonsensical, overused, silly and just plain bad, the better.

[Reelya]

Did... did you just call that particular issue (or whatever the appropriate term is in webcomic lingo) "good"?

"Issue" isn't right, the term "page" works for webcomics.

That particular page can't be objectively said to be good or bad at all. It would entirely depend on how it fits into the narrative. In this case, exactly that panel and two after it deal with the loss, and then it's back to gamer-gags. The entire "dealing with baby death" thing lasted a full 7 days worth of strips, before it's 100% back to gamer hijinks and one-liners, and then they throw in the occasional strip where he's all mopey in between the gamer joke pages. It's ... brave but not very well handled.

EDIT: I'll admit I laughed at this version of the meme:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But I don't really get all the outright hate of the original comic author over it. I've seen people calling him a douchebag, asshole, pretentious author over it. None of that makes sense. A guy doing a comedy series decides to throw a serious topic in once in a while doesn't deserve that. Perhaps it has connections to something happening in his own life, for example the arc of XKCD which deals with a loved one having cancer. That's not "pretentious" it's just talking about things that happen in real people's lives.

[Putnam]

http://explosm.net/comics/1310/

[Rolan7]

I agree with critics who point out that "emotional whiplash", yeah.  It's objectively poor storytelling from a technical standpoint.

That didn't bother me as a reader at the time, at least consciously.  I was fine with the strip having two interlaced contexts, serious/silly.  Consider that these strips were coming days apart, rather than seconds apart when reading an archive.  It's not really jarring at all at that pace.

Of course, that pace is reserved for people with self-imposed limits, now.  It doesn't hold up for a normal webcomic reader, here in the future.

Also I think the backlash was embarassingly overblown.  The meme is kinda cute in that it's hard to spot, so there's a dopamine hit when I manage to see it, but it's not like it's an actual criticism.  Just a reference to a supposedly cringy thing.

I kinda liked the direction Ctrl-Alt-Del was going, evolving into a more serious drama rather than a explicit parody of Penny-Arcade.  Kinda like how Penny Arcade evolved into constructive analysis (and jokes) rather than dickbutts (and jokes).  I'm glad both comics are still running - and I think it's good that Ctrl-Alt-Del "rebooted" (ha!) with a more explicit mission statement.  With the silly gags in their own side-section, sorta like a modern version of the Chef Brian asides.

[TamerVirus]

We analyzing the societal contributions of Bum Tickley's Loss.jpg?

[Rolan7]

All the cool kids were doing it...  (You know they're cool because they're mean and there are a lot of them, and they repeat the same message)

[TamerVirus]

I'm surprised at how long lived the Loss meme is.
Loss came out in 2008. And folks are still using it as a gag. 10 years!
Remember the height of memeness back then were LOLCATS and Rage comics

[Reelya]

We analyzing the societal contributions of Bum Tickley's Loss.jpg?

IDK but that seems like over dramatizing it. Nobody is saying that the comic is some masterpiece, we're saying the frothing hate doesn't make any sense. It's an obscure comic, get over it. No need to insult the author, and that doesn't mean we're saying the comic is some shining example of 21st century story telling either. It's just some dude's amateur comic, and deserves neither excessive hate or love.

[scriver]

Lolcats are still the height of memecry