The Business of XKCD
nytimes.com
non advertising income
nytimes.com
- makes money on merchandising rather than ads
- generates a lot of traffic (80 million pages views/mo)
- he thinks only a couple of dozen web comic authors actually make a living off of it.
- believes this sort of niche comic is only successful because of the internet. in that he never could have gotten published traditionally. (that being said "tech/geek" isn't really a small niche for internet audiences)
In the case of XKCD, the limiting factor is not how fast he can do the artwork but how frequently he has good ideas. That frequency may not increase with free time... In fact, it may even decrease, since he might have less experiences from which to draw inspiration.
Not bad at all...
If it's old to you, don't vote it up. If it's new to you, great.
Purely selfish, but I'd rather folks do a quick search to be sure older stories haven't already been submitted. This one was on the front page here and at Reddit. It's a good story, but it's been covered.
Bottom line is: voting me into oblivion isn't going to make searching this site any easier, or change the way HN deals with dupes.
I didn't vote you down. Things that are worth commenting on (whether to agree or disagree) are not eligible for downvotes, as far as I'm concerned.
As soon as I realized that you were seriously citing Scott Adams as an authority on Funny, I knew we wouldn't find the same comics entertaining. You read a whole "5 or 10" of the xkcd comics, and you are a self-professed member of the target audience, so you afford yourself the expertise to declare it "not funny at all".
And, you know what? You're absolutely right.
xkcd isn't always funny. Sometimes -- some might say, often times -- it isn't funny at all. It certainly doesn't strive to deliver the same tired punch lines that so many other comics have.
Aside from being something that I can often identify with, xkcd is charming. In that sense, it strikes me in much the same way that Calvin and Hobbes did, or Pogo. Sometimes, the best comic isn't that one that leaves me laughing, it's the one that leaves a smile on my face, or a temporary reminder of a more innocent way of seeing things, or a peculiar wistfulness.
Those aren't effects that I've ever been able to credit to Scott Adams, and I don't think he could pull any of 'em off if he tried. If you can't see past your hunger for one more punch line, then I don't think you really "get" xkcd, either.
I like xkcd when it's thoughtful instead of cheap, and I'm even amused by yet another spin on 'Twas The Night Before Christmas, as are many other literate nerds.
(P.S.: When you put those "marks" around a word, those are quotes, not parentheses.)
i suppose i was that way when i was young also. i shudder to think.
And, I'll bet you dollars to dimes that most math/science geeks know more about the soft sciences (Economics, Psychology, History, Philosophy, Literature, etc.) than the other way around.
Most math/science people I know have read a fair amount of Dostovesky, Freud, Jung, Friedman, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and uncountably many other authors and social scientists.
I challenge you to find more than a handful of English or History majors who are familiar with the works of Turing, Galois, Knuth, or Euler.
It isn't polite to say, but not all academic disciplines are created equal. Some fields are just harder than others and tend to attract smarter people than others. Math, physics, and other hard sciences are simply more difficult than literature or history.
I would feel comfortable saying that anyone who understands Einstein's field equations is capable of understanding deconstructionism with relative ease. I don't think anyone would seriously make the opposite claim.
The thing is, advanced works of mathematics and computer science are almost completely irrelevant for people not working in these disciplines, whereas the humanities and social science arguably have applicability for anyone who considers him or herself a citizen. And in fact, these "English or History majors" are very likely to be versed in, not the works, but the insights of many mathematicians whose contributions are taught in high school and college mathematics courses, albeit without attribution.
Some people wind up majoring in the humanities and social sciences because they can't cut it in highly mathematical disciplines, sure. But it's also true that many of the mathematically adept are also weak in the humanities and social sciences.
As for Einstein's field equations and deconstruction, I can't claim to have studied the former (nor am I aware of why I should have), but I suspect you're overlooking the extent to which understanding them requires a considerable background of non-intuitive knowledge and an understanding of symbolic conventions in a way that understanding deconstruction doesn't. So pointing out that the set of folks who understand deconstruction that could understand Einstein's field equations with relative ease is likely to be much smaller, at least in proportion, than the other way around, doesn't imply much about how smart the two sets are on average.
Incidentally, the number of sci/math types who cling to the Sokal Affair as an excuse for believing much of contemporary humanities theory is gibberish suggests that an understanding of things like deconstruction probably don't come as easily to them as you might think.
At the end of the day, I really don't understand what disciplinary elitism gets you, other than an inflated sense of self-importance. What matters isn't what one is capable of understanding (except to college admissions staff), but rather what one does.
These are all very relevant to the world we live in today.
By the way, the whole Sokal affair is forgotten in the sciences. I first learned about it when a random passerby (an english prof) made an unkind comment about Sokal when he saw the name on a (physics) paper I was reading. Admittedly, this was at NYU (the epicenter). But this was also 11 years after the prank.
Also, engineers can pick up deconstructionism relatively quickly:
Well, in the sense that those with hard majors tend not to have learned the body of knowledge associated with any one discipline, sure. But in terms of the ability to write—which is pretty clearly the most important skill in the humanities—I'd put money on a technical major's skills over those of a non-technical major.
>Incidentally, the number of sci/math types who cling to the Sokal Affair as an excuse for believing much of contemporary humanities theory is gibberish suggests that an understanding of things like deconstruction probably don't come as easily to them as you might think.
"Cling"? The Sokal Affair showed pretty clearly that there's no easy way to tell the difference between honest literary criticism and bullshit. And the reason is that the entire institution of "literary criticism" consists essentially of people coming up with really trivial ideas and wrapping them in layers and layers of obfuscation. I understand deconstruction. And my reaction to it is, "People think that these ideas are profound enough to be given names?"
>I really don't understand what disciplinary elitism gets you.
Elitism isn't the driving force here. The driving force is that roughly 50% of academic disciplines are complete bullshit, and I (and presumably other logical, unbiased people) quite simply feel compelled to call that kind of stuff out. It might look like elitism if I happen to be working in a discipline that's NOT bullshit when I make that accusation, but rest assured that I would act in the same way even if I were doing nothing at the time.
I think the cartoon said something about the history of the Nazi's, which I'd read about, and it was wrong or wide of the mark.
I'm a computer scientist with a humanities diploma (media studies) and I recently started reading more history books.
Tell me, are the books you're reading which contradict popularly-held notions about the Nazis by a guy called David Irving, by any chance?
The basic complaint is some kind of "How are people like Hitler elected" statement was in the cartoon, and I knew the answer as I'd read up to 1939 of the book the Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich, which is I hope not revisionist.
I'll be careful to be more clear in future here.