xkcd

From MedBib.com - Medicine & Nature

xkcd
Panel from "Philosophy"
Author(s)	Randall Munroe
Website	http://xkcd.com/ RSS web feed Atom web feed
Current status / schedule	Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
Launch date	September 2005
Genre(s)	Geek humor Men's romance

xkcd^[1] is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe,^[2][3] a former contractor for NASA.^[4] He describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."^{[5] [6]} xkcd is a widely read webcomic; in November 2007, for example, it tallied between 60 and 70 million page views.^[7]

Munroe states there is no particular meaning to the name and it is simply a "treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings."^[6] The subjects of the comics themselves vary. Some are statements on life and love (some love strips are simply art with poetry), and some are mathematical or scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. Although it has a cast of stick figures,^[8][3] the comic occasionally features landscapes, intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals (for example, strip #17 "What If" shows an Apollonian gasket^[9]), or imitations of the style of other cartoonists (as during "parody week"). Occasionally, realism is featured.^[10][11][12]

The comic is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.^[13] New comics are added three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday^[4] at midnight EST,^[14] although on four occasions so far they have been updated every weekday: parody week, the "Choices" series, the "1337" series, and the "Secretary" series.

History

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd

The comic began in September 2005 when Munroe decided to scan doodles from his school notebooks and put them on his webpage. Eventually the comic was changed into a standalone website, where Munroe started selling t-shirts based on the comic. He currently "works on the comic full time,"^[6] making xkcd a self-sufficient webcomic.

In May 2007, the comic caught the attention of many by depicting online communities in geographic form.^[15] Various websites were drawn as continents, each sized according to their relative popularity and located according to their general subject matter.^[15] This put xkcd at number two on The Post-Standard's "The new hotness" list.^[16]

xkcd is not an initialism, and Munroe attaches no meaning to the name, except in a joking manner within the comic.^[17] He claims that the name was originally a screen name, which he selected as a combination of letters that would be meaningless, as well as phonetically unpronounceable.^[6][4] Some people have, however, inferred other potential meanings for the term xkcd: the Short Minds webcomic, for example, makes light of the fact that the ordinal values of the letters X, K, C and D add up to 42, Douglas Adams' celebrated Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.^[18] Most readers have discounted this explanation as mere coincidence, however.^[19]

On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered at coordinates mentioned in a strip: 42.39561 -71.13051. Fans converged on a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the strip's author appeared; among his comments: "Maybe wanting something does make it real," reversing the conclusion in the last frame of the same strip.^[20][21]

On April Fool's Day 2008, xkcd was part of a three-webcomic prank involving Dinosaur Comics and Questionable Content wherein each comic's URL displayed another comic's web page: questionablecontent.net displayed the Dinosaur Comics website, qwantz.com (the Dinosaur Comics website) displayed xkcd, and xkcd.com displayed the Questionable Content website. The prank was orchestrated by Randall Munroe, as Jeph Jacques announced on his website on April 2nd:^{[citation needed]}

For those of you still baffled/alarmed by yesterday's little switcheroo, I remind you that it was April 1st. Thank you for all the well-intentioned "I think your site has been hacked!" emails. I can't take credit for the prank as it was Randall's idea, but it was too good not to take part in (also thanks Ryan for playing along and bearing the brunt of my readers' confusion).

Recurring items

While there is no specific storyline to the comic, there are some recurring themes^[22] and characters, many of which are touched on in an xkcd parody of the Discovery Channel's I Love the World commercial.^[23]

Themes

"Wikipedian Protester", with title-text "SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION"

A large number of the strips are mathematics or computer science jokes. These jokes often feature university-level subjects, although many are written in such a way that a clear understanding of the subject is not usually required to get the punch line. Romance is another subject often visited in the comic, with many strips not intended to be humorous.^[22] There are also many strips opening with "My Hobby:" and usually depicting the non-descript narrator character describing some type of humorous or quirky behavior often involving language games.^[24] References to Wikipedia articles or to Wikipedia as a whole are an occasional theme in xkcd.^[25] xkcd also frequently makes reference to Munroe's "obsession" with potential raptor attacks,^[26][27] electric skateboards,^[28] the game Guitar Hero,^[29] and many "your mom" jokes.^[30] There have also been several strips featuring "Red Spiders", Joss Whedon's short-lived series Firefly, and the 1985 novel Ender's Game. ^[31]

Each comic also has a tooltip, specified using the title attribute in HTML. The text usually contains an afterthought or annotation related to that day's comic.^[32]

Characters

This section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (August 2008)

Although the artist does not maintain a list of characters, some recurring characters can be identified by their visual features (for example, hats) and mannerisms.

• A man who looks like a normal stick-figure xkcd character, but for the addition of his trademark black hat. The man's hat is a reference to Aram from the now-defunct webcomic Men in Hats.^[33] The character refers to himself as a "Classhole" (a portmanteau of "classy" and "asshole").^[34] He does not shy from pointing out the foibles in others and has at times used extreme violence in order to emphasize a point.^[35][36] In the January 30, 2008 comic, his hat was taken by a woman, who is, to date, the only person ever to foil one of his schemes. As of June 6, 2008, the two have entered a "relationship." The character is one of the most frequently occuring in the comic, though he remains unnamed (he was referred to in the tooltip for comic #493 as "hat guy").^[37] In the "Secretary" story arc, he was nominated for the post of Secretary of the Internet when the Internet started to collapse, but, after a variety of hijinks involving Ron Paul, Cory Doctorow, and the Auto-Troll Shuffle, ended up by being sentenced to death, filling the Capitol rotunda with plastic ball pit-style balls, and finally escaped on Doctorow's hot-air balloon.

• The most common recurring female "character" is known as Megan in several strips; she was first referred to by name in comic #159 - Boombox^[38], and again several times afterward.^[39][40][41] She is recognized by her short, dark hair.

• A boy in a barrel has appeared in five strips. Unlike most other characters, he is not a stick figure. He was repeatedly seen inside a barrel, floating in a large body of water. The boy in the barrel was one of many doodles in the older comics, but has not been seen since comic #31.^[42]
• Another set of recurring characters is the nihilist and the existentialist; while the existentialist wears a beret, the nihilist wears no hat at all.^{[citation needed]} Until comic #291, they had only been seen together, never separately. They are first seen in the "Nihilism" comic,^[43] and again in "Kayak",^[44] "Hypotheticals"^[45], and "Dark Flow."^[45]

• Fictionalised versions of well known real-life figures in the computing community sometimes appear, such as free software advocates Richard Stallman^[46][47] and Cory Doctorow.^[48][47]

• Mrs. Roberts was a main character in the "1337"^[49] series, and has appeared in other comics along with her children, Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- aka "Little Bobby Tables," (a reference to SQL injection) and Help I'm Trapped In A Driver's License Factory Elaine Roberts, the protagonist of the "1337" series.^[50]

Life imitates xkcd

"Wikipedian Protester" in Cambridge, 23 September 2007

On at least ten occasions, fans have been motivated by Munroe's comics to carry out, in real life, the subject of a particular drawing or sketch. Some notable examples include:

• Richard Stallman was sent a katana^[51] and was confronted by students dressed as ninjas before speaking at the Yale Political Union^[52][53] – inspired by "Open Source"
• When Cory Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon^[54] – inspired by "Blagofaire"
• xkcd readers sneaking chess boards onto roller coasters^[55][56] – inspired by "Chess Photo"
• An xkcd reader created a "MBR Love Note" installation program^[57] – inspired by "Fight"
• Munroe himself solicited contributions from his readers of people playing electric guitars while in the shower on wetriffs.com^[58] after posting the comic "Rule 34", in which a character registers that domain.
• A subgroup of "geohashing" XKCD readers has emerged, members of which travel to random nearby latitude/longitude locations calculated by the geohashing algorithm described in "Geohashing".
• Munroe, the creator, has mentioned in two of his blog entries that he has a ball pit set up in his apartment, much like in the strip Grownups.^[59][60]
• In October 2007, a group of researchers at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute conducted a census of the internet and presented their data using a Hilbert curve, which they claimed was inspired by an xkcd comic that used a similar technique.^[61][62][63]
• YouTube has placed a feature on comments that plays back the comment aloud on "Audio Preview", based on the strip Listen to Yourself.^[64][65]

Richard Stallman is "attacked" by ninjas Inspired by "Open Source"

Cory Doctorow wears a red cape, goggles and a balloon as he receives the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award Inspired by "Blagofaire"

In other languages

Many xkcd comics have been translated into Spanish by one reader.^[66] The comics available are the ones that, according to the translator, can be translated without losing their humor.^[67] Some comics have also been translated into Russian by a community of readers.^[68]

References

Further sources

• Munroe, Randall (February 2007). "Once a Physicist: Randall Munroe". Physics World.
• Erg (2007-03-26). "Talking xkcd with Randall Munroe". Comixtalk.com. Retrieved on 2008-05-12.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Xkcd

Wikinews has related news:

Randall Munroe, writer of xkcd, talks about the comic, politics and the internet

• Official site
• RSS-feed
• xkcd in Spanish