@nepfag @mangeurdenuage xkcd has always been about weird pseudo-intellectual science-worshipping bullshit, and Randall Munroe has always been a snivelling little creep with a milk fetish and stuffing his ex into the comic in really fucking bizarre ways. His entire nerd cred comes from the fact that he worked at an out-of-the-way subdivision of NASA for "robotics" then got fired after a few years. That, and his bizarre dedication to making idiotic and poorly-drawn visualizations and autistic ponderings on stupid questions doesn't suddenly make him qualified to become a new science messiah.

His ability to constantly shit out comics based on an hour's browsing Wikipedia, interspersed with virtue-signalling resistledrumpf imwithher sheforhe horseshit should tell anyone what they need to know about how this man's life turned out.

Hell, even I worked on a NASA project two years ago and personally helped design, assemble, and test a payload that went into the high atmosphere for two days of scientific observation. Ours was the only payload on that NASA project that actually lasted that long, since it was only supposed to be in the high atmosphere for eight hours. It survived that long because I was the one who had nothing better to do than to work overtime in order to do long-term cold-weather and vacuum testing on the payload until the power supply finally failed at 2 in the morning due to a preventable and fixable issue. I then went on to develop an error-and-anomaly checking algorithm for the CARISMA array, and later a new method for single-surface magnetospheric modelling using a bunch of statistical correlation methods.

Does that make me qualified to be some sort of authority that dumb impressionable nerds look up to? If Randy is the gold standard, then apparently it does. I certainly have more actual scientific cred than him, apart from being a "science communicator."

But I'm not an authority on science, I don't even have a master's degree or a doctorate. I'm just a fucking dumbass who had nothing better to do in the summers as he churned out a degree that's nothing more that says I can sit still for long enough to read some books and look at some blurry pixels from a telescope. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/362737