Lore’s latest Rant Lite is from his pre-dating-everything-on-the-internet-except-Al-Gore-Porn “Capsule Reviews” series, about Logic Puzzles, and my last minor doubt about the awesomeness of his videos, even when dealing with something as trivial as, well, Logic Puzzles, disappeared completely at 1:59 into the three-minute production, where, instead of loudly expressing his disapproval like every other opinionated ass-hat on the Web, he pauses to give a severely disapproving look. If looks could kill, he’d have the inside track for the lead in “Saw 13: We’re Running Out Of Things To Kill People With”.

Whoa. And Woah. When you can get your message and a good chuckle across without saying anything, you have truly mastered the art of video commentary and are ready to get in line at the back door of “60 Minutes” to wait until Andy Rooney keels over.

But I need to address the last part of his video where he deals with the scourge upon the logical landscape that is Sudoku. And while he does correctly define the proliferation of Sudoku books as “Paper Kudzu”, he still “looks kindly” upon it and gives it a B+. Obviously, he has not been afflicted, as I have, with a severe, disabling Sudoku addiction that was harder to beat than the five-star 16-by-16 puzzle in the Sunday Tribune.

Yes, my name is Wendell, and I am a recovering Sudokulic. And I did indeed try to solve the Sunday Tribune 16-by-16 puzzles every week (thinking, how hard can it be, I know hex!) only to be reduced to a drooling wreck who never saw the light of day on Sundays, never completing one successfully even those of supposedly two-star difficulty. I’m not proud of that.

I had to cut off my newspaper subscription entirely to get away from the Sudoku. I was buying Sudoku books, ranging from the 99-cent Dell SUPER SUDOKU publications to 400-page collections authorized by Puzzlemaster Will Shortz, who should have been above this kind of thing himself. I was playing Sudoku on-line… at news media sites, game sites, sites that had no reason to feature a Sudoku game but did… did you know the US Mint had a Flash Sudoku game on its site using nine different coin denominations instead of numbers*?

Yes, I have played the Mutant Sudoku Variations, some even more random than the “Farmer’s Pen” variation that Lore used as an ‘it could be worse’ example in his video:

Cows, chickens, wolves, cabbages, rutabegas, portable TVs, Trader Joe’s frozen Pad Thai dinners, human cadavers and HOPE. Seriously, that is not the worst possible combination I have seen AND PLAYED.

I practiced every anti-social Sudoku-based behavior featured in the not-very-viral “Sudoku Song” video of 2006, except one.

No, I have never worn a light blue suit four sizes too big.

I thought I would never beat the Sudoku monster, either the unsolvable five-star puzzles or my addiction to them, but then I saw something in, of all places, the xkcd webcomic.

I realized that Sudo, the programmer’s term for a command that overrides everything, is part of the word Sudoku. And then I realized that it wasn’t really my fault. I had no control over the Sudoku because it was a Sudo Ku. Once I realized that I carried no responsibility for my Sudoku addiction, it was suddenly easy to beat, as if I had switched over from a Unix-based system to Microsoft Windows. Once I accepted Bill Gates as my Personal Savior… but that’s a story for another time. It’s like a 12-Step Program but you only have to go up to 9. Except on Sunday, when it’s 16.

I’ve been Sudoku-free for over seven months now, except for that incident last week when I was waiting for my car to have its brakes done and there was a newspaper in the waiting room, but I paid my price for that; when the bill for the brakes came, it had all nine digits from 1 to 9 unrepeated.

I did develop a secondary addiction to the xkcd webcomic, but the “Secretary of the Internet” series a couple weeks ago made that easy to kick.

*Removed from the US Mint site after I quit Sudokuing, possibly because I had singlehandedly provided half the traffic to the feature.

One of those comics is “Little Gamers”, and on Friday, it achieved a level of suckiness that has rarely been reached by the talentless souls who haunt the webcomics world.

Coming across as Another Penny Arcade Clone (and I’ve already confessed to be a PA non-fanboy), substituting cute little Fisher-Price-esque characters seemingly for the shock value of “oooh, those cute little kiddies are using all the bad words!” (and really, doesn’t South Park OWN that schtick?), Little Gamers uses well-drafted but oversimplified characters lacking basic features like mouths (severely limiting their emotional expressions, compared to Diesel Sweeties’ amazing use of pixel minimalism I noted before) and fingers (a recent series involving a character with both arms wrapped/bandaged up so he can’t play games didn’t work for me, and why the “Argh! My spine!” if he’s getting arms broken?). Maybe I’m expecting too much. Maybe nasty negative commentaries of video games are enough – it works for Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation, but he has things going for him like animation, a narration voice with an interesting accent and one other thing – FUNNY.

Meanwhile, anybody who follows webcomics knows the surprising (and to many, annoying) success of xkcd, the “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language” – to which you can add science, pop culture, pop science, the internet, programming, dreams, fantasy, practical jokes, hats, fruit (odd combinations of the above) and very badly drawn stick figures. While not the consistent work of genius its rabid fans consider it, xkcd is funny more often than not, thanks Randall Munroe’s obsessively geeky interest in all of this stuff and his sharp sense of humor. (And yet, with all these obsessions and scientific interests, he doesn’t bother to learn how to draw? Nice irony there.)

One of xkcd’s signature strips is…

…which, in theory, was only funny to computer geeks who knew what sudo means, but inspired others of us to go and found out, resulting in a time-delayed chuckle. And less than a week after that particular joke was featured in a New York Times article about xkcd, who would be so clueless/crazy/prickish to copy it?

You guessed it… Little Gamers.

They even added verbal awkwardness to the gag with the word combination “sudo do”. More like Soo Doo Doo, I’d say.

Of course, I had to comment, and since I knew the Twitter username of one of LG’s co-authors, I did:
wendellosity @MrMadsen I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU COPIED ONE OF XKCD’S MOST CLASSIC NERD GAGS. http://xkcd.com/149/ BAD LITTLE GAMER!

…to which he replied…
MrMadsen @wendellosity AND INTENTIONALLY TOO!! Prick

Well, if I’m going to have an enemy in the webcomicking universe, it’s good to have one who’s both obnoxious AND dumb.