458: Regrets
| Regrets |
 Title text: And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.' |
Explanation
The comic is a bar graph that shows more people regret having not pursued/kissed a love interest than regret having pursued/kissed one.
It should be noted that as of June 20, 2023, the position has reversed: there are about 55.4 million results for "I should have kissed her" and 57.5 million for "I shouldn't have kissed her."
The title text refers to the Friedberg and Seltzer movie Epic Movie, a "comedy" movie that received overwhelmingly negative reception, and is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made. In referencing that movie, Randall agrees with that opinion and expresses the theme of regret in a completely different context by suggesting that people who watched the movie overwhelmingly regretted doing so.
After this comic was released, the search results for "I'm glad I saw Epic Movie" at Google did grow up to more than 8,000 results.
Transcript
- [Bar Graph]
- Number of Google results for: "I _____ have kissed her" (or him)
- Shouldn't: 1,213
- Should: 10,230
add a comment! ⋅ add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ 
refresh comments!Discussion
Don't know how the original measure was made, but for curiosity's sake I just now checked the current raw Google search results for full-quoted "I should have kissed her" and its variants. That's "should" vs. "shouldn't" vs. "should not" (more imperative?), "have" vs. "...'ve" vs. "of" (to catch the ungrammatical) and of course "him" vs. "her" vs. "them" (plural/ungendered?) vs. "it" (..?).
Here are the figures reported (larger ones having been rounded to "About..." so many thousands). Some results (especially the main "should have kissed her" version) obviously were inclusive of the comic itself and direct references like this Wiki, and blogs from XKCD lovers and XKCD-haters alike who decided to make their own commentary.
| ..kissed | Her | Him | Them | It |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Should have | 1,120,000 | 446,000 | 310,000 | 859,000 |
| Shouldn't have | 4,100,000 | 1,110,000 | 6 | 1 |
| Should not have | 2,730,000 | 542,000 | 7 | ="shouldn't have" |
| ..kissed | Her | Him | Them | It |
| Should've | 799,900 | 274,000 | 94,000 | 6 |
| Shouldn't've | (Forced to "shouldn't have"... fair enough.) | |||
| Should not've | ||||
| ..kissed | Her | Him | Them | It |
| Should of | 24,900 | 18,500 | 1,050 | 411 |
| Shouldn't of | 6,840 | 6,180 | - | - |
| Should not of | 6,840 | 6,180 | - | 1 |
(Not everything is as intended. The lone "I should not of kissed it" result sends one to "...and i should not of kissed. it is the least i could do...", for example.)
Was going to try alternatives to "kissed", but might have gotten unwieldy. (And imagine the furore at Prism HQ for repeated searches using "killed"!)
I'll just leave this here for analysis and combining related figures however you so feel like. Not sure if the "of" camps are nicely small figures, in comparison, or still too uncomfortably large for my liking... 178.107.249.215 22:09, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
You should be more concerned with when the original measure was taken. 2008. flewk (talk) 19:33, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
(A) I may change my negative view of eugenics, regarding any native speaker of English who ever uses "shouldn't of".
(2) But the reason I decided to comment is that there should be an entire Movie Ratings website or app dedicated to counting how many people said "I'm glad I saw [movie]". This is secretly the most brilliant real-world-application idea that the strip has produced, to this very day. Except whatever I see tomorrow as I reread the series, of course.
(III) Insider Build 1703 disables alt-numpad for ascii/unicode characters, except in native Metro apps, which Chrome isn't, so I have to hit windowskey-alt-numpad to pretend to search Start for the special character I use regularly, like °, ™, and naïvetè, then copy/paste it...in this case, the long hyphen for my sig. Bleh.
— Kazvorpal (talk) 15:14, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
- I'd say it's nice to see you, Kazvorpal. But it's not. 172.69.34.246 15:50, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
