Analyzing XKCD: Click and Drag

blackhole12.blogspot.com

35 points·malloc47··14 comments

"If Randall spent, on average, one hour drawing each frame, it would take him 9.375 days of constant, nonstop work to finish this. If he instead spent an average of 10 minutes per frame, it would take ~37.5 hours, or almost an entire 40-hour work week."

This statement is a bit flawed since he doesn't differentiate between almost empty frames and frames with much detail. It obviously took longer to create frames with a lot of details than empty frames or frames with little detail.

Still, it's an interesting post. Randall clearly put a lot of time and effort into creating the "Click and drag" world.

He did say "on average."

Yeah, but that might be a poor estimate for the average since the majority of frames are either pure black or pure white.

Frames that are pure black or pure white are not included in the count.

Oh, I see. I had missed that.

http://libesyr.so/dump/montage.png http://libesyr.so/dump/montage_small.png

I believe, that time Randall spent planning and sketching before actually drawing it, should be taken in account. I really hope Randall (though he is not very open on such things) would give "making of" info.

Anyone managed to stitch together the full picture?

A lot of people, the current top link on HN is this http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/ an interactive "map" of the click and drag world.

http://dagar.ca/xkcd_1110_combined_256.png

That's scaled down -- do you have a full full full resolution?

Here's each tile scaled from 2048x2048 -> 512x512. http://dagar.ca/xkcd_1110_combined_512.png

I haven't been able to find libraries that can handle the full 165888x65536 10 gigapixel image.

http://libesyr.so/dump/montage.png

Cool, thanks! Care to share how you created this?

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