I’m not ‘back,’ whatever that means in this context. Illness beat me down and then the start of the school year with its glorious 90 hour weeks and no weekends off and…

Yeah.

Though we bought a grill. It’s still in the car, mind, but we bought it. But I digress.

I couldn’t let this strip go by without making an observation, though. In The Giving Tree, the tree gives of itself, time and again. At no point does the tree get its branches or tree trunk back.

Also, whether or not the tree has a USB port, I’m relatively certain it’s not Shel Silverstein. Since the giving tree gives of itself in sacrifice, time and again, for a child who quite honestly is on the selfish side, I’m not certain the metaphor works even a little. The tree doesn’t give up a thing it bought that someone else made. It gives of its own substance. And the tree certainly doesn’t lend it.

Look, I’m all for DRMless electronic books — especially since 95% of my book purchases are electronic now. (Honestly, it’s to the point that when I get a paper book, it seems needlessly inconvenient to me.) But… this just doesn’t work. That it feels like an anvil being hammered down on top of it all and the surrealist element isn’t executed well enough to break either the willing suspension of disbelief or absurdist thresholds (a USB port in a tree? The tree is… one big flash drive? Huh?) just makes it more jarring.

It reminds me of the strip he did about Facebook privacy issues. In that one, he conflated the open source community’s dislike of Microsoft Office in the early noughts with Facebook privacy issues, along with reductionist tendencies, claiming that folks who thought the Microsoft Word format thing was overblown were often idiots who accused Open Source advocates of autism were getting their just deserts on Facebook having questionable privacy policies. Which… just kind of laid there on the ground after he posted it, smelling somewhat strange and giving the reader the sense that Munroe just didn’t get something about all this. (For the record — most true word processing programs including various Open Source ones and a surprising number of straight text editors will open .doc format files without any trouble at all. Way more, it must be said, than those that can open ODF files.)

It’s not the causes, in other words. It’s his execution of his statement. There’s a vague feeling of smug prediction that’s coupled with a sense that he hasn’t quite connected with his material that just makes it all… odd.

Honestly, it’s days like this I miss Illiad from User Friendly. He didn’t always stick the landing on his jokes, but I never got the sense he was trying to play Quake with keyboard macros set up for The Sims.