Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Backstory of His Epic 3,990-Panel Comic | Hacker News Reader

Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Backstory of His Epic 3,990-Panel Comic

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634 pointsghosh92 comments

This is what makes Munroe so awesome. It's one thing to be able to make nerd comics. It's another thing to put in the effort to make accurate time/location maps of various movies [1], or attempt to explain money with all sorts of relative comparisons [2], or think up weird google searches and show the results [3]. It's a completely different league to execute on huge projects like this in such a novel fashion (as well as the "umwelt" one [4] which showed one of fifty different comics to the reader, depending on their location) that make Munroe so unique.

[1]: http://xkcd.com/657/

[2]: http://xkcd.com/980/

[3]: http://xkcd.com/887/

[4]: http://xkcd.com/1037/

Also see his fantastic "What if?" series[0] where he answers fantastical questions using similar research. Examples of recent questions include "If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you”, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?" and "What place on Earth would allow you to freefall the longest by jumping off it?"

[0] http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Also great - the @WhatIfNumbers twitter feed: https://twitter.com/whatifnumbers

Speaking of What-if, it now makes sense that he did the questions about what it would be like if the oceans of Earth were drained [0], and what it would look like on Mars if suddenly water were added and oceans (an ocean) formed [1].

--------------------

[0] http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

[1] http://what-if.xkcd.com/54/

What if a diamond 100ft in diameter hits Earth in near-light speed?

http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/

still hoping he'll tackle my question about what would happen if humans became 2nd most intelligent species on earth (perhaps to.. dolphins) and how that would play out :)

He's also my winner in the "you'll never guess what college he went to" contest. It's a college in my state from which my college roommate transferred, and it still would have been my last guess.

That's just a touch snobbish, don't you think?

May totally be "snobbish" but CNU is a weird place for him to have gone, from a variety of perspectives.

Every good comic author does that. Read up any of many of will eisner's instructional books on comics.

Also, it's a very cheap shot to get nerds, as every nerd is found of this. This is the characteristic in writing/playing RPG stories that i like the most. Thinking of the backstory for every single little thing.

The "umwelt" comic was even more complicated than that. It had different versions based on:

* location (getting surprisingly specific sometimes)

* browser

* what plugins work/don't work in your browser

* referrer (what you clicked on to arrive at the comic)

* operating system

* screen size

* browser window size

* hostname domain (i.e. you're at work, and your company's domain)

* hostname TLD (i.e. your computer's ISP is .net, .mil, etc)

Here are different compilations of the variations he created:

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1037:_Umwelt

http://imgur.com/a/faLz2

I'm not nitpicking, just helping demonstrate how far Randall went in that creation.

>"what plugins work/don't work in your browser" //

How'd he do that?

The panopticlick paper, https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf, suggests a JavaScript library called PluginDetect, http://www.pinlady.net/PluginDetect/

To me, one of the all-time great geek moments was when Munroe did a tech talk at Google, and Don Knuth gets up to ask him if he's thought about doing animated cartoons, and what is his favorite log log n sorting algorithm, about 21:30 in to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24

It's really worth to read, at least partially, the One True Thread [1] - a thread on XKCD forums when people were discussing the comic as it unfolded. It is really interesting to see how they reacted to first frame (at which point it wasn't known that it will last 4 months), and then how they began to dissect every frame after that.

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043

I like the idea of hundreds (?) of people obsessively consuming obscure media and discussing it in a Web forum, mostly because I thought it was a nice plot device in William Gibson's 2003 "Pattern Recognition" with "the Footage".

And a great subject of parody in xkcd itself: http://xkcd.com/915/

Does it get more obscure than _why's printer spool documents a couple of months ago?

Obviously it gets more obscure. Just think of all the things you don't know about.

Not to mention the things that are only ever vague ideas that may or may not occur to isolated individuals in your lifetime depending on your response to this thread.

Done even better in Ready Player One http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307887448

[0] http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/

Does there exist a watchable version of this comic where it skips through frames without text FAST, but pauses for long enough time to read it at each frame with TEXT?

Most attempts at making the comic viewable either went too fast to read the texts, or were manual click through and thus waaaay too slow.

Thanks!

http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/

You can tweak the pause time where appropriate.

I suggest selecting "Pause on debated frames" to get all the conversation and interesting frames. Took me about 20 minutes to go through at 10 fps.

There is a transcript at explainxkcd (explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time#Transcript). Perhaps somebody could clean it up and then use it to estimate how long each frame should last.

> manual click through and thus waaaay too slow

I used the mouse wheel.

arrow keys work too, IIRC.

So you see no problem with watching a movie and having to use the mousewheel to go to each next frame?

"In my comic, our civilization is long gone. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more," Munroe told WIRED.

It's an unfortunate reality that a thoughtful person could come to this conclusion. But I feel compelled to disagree. We're on the verge of becoming a spacefaring species. And people like Elon Musk give me hope that we could very well still make it, despite everything.

>Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years

Uh, writing is only approximately 5,000 years old, so, yeah, I agree with parent that Munro's argument is silly.

It always amazes me to see how much people don't realise that we are unlike any other society that has existed on this planet before us. Globally connected and scientifically advanced in the most important ways makes the past a terrible prediction of the future. Exciting times.

Not to mention, free in many ways, protected in many ways, and with a whole lot more leisure than our ancestors ever got. Though these things seem to be dwindling ...

Those things always seem to be dwindling.

And yet arrogant enough to think that we're so much smarter and more advanced than those that came before or all other life forms we share this planet with.

BTW, not saying I disagree with you - just a counterpoint that can be made.

We might not be much smarter than those that came before us, but the shoulders we are standing on are much larger.

I think the key is to have the humility to realize that we haven't had another Euclid or Archimedes in modern times. Possibly Decartes or Tesla compare, but it's arguable. We've come so far and have such promise, and yet we have so much to lose. I would argue that far from being being doomed to repeating history because we forget, we have the possibility of being the first to wipe out our own race, either through inaction or brazenness.

I think we live in an age of such people. It was easy to stand out as a brilliant polymath when we didn't know ANYTHING. I think we have more geniuses than ever today, but there are so many of them that it no longer feels special. We are advancing our knowledge and technology with dizzying speeds, but we are so accustomed to it that we sit around and go, "Meh, there are no geniuses anymore".

Might want to rethink your heroes. Save Archimedes.

responding to sibling:

Another Euclid? Euclid is famous for compiling other people's research into an accessible textbook.

It's true I've seen complaints that universities don't consider compilation and explication of math important enough to count towards tenure anymore, but we're not exactly short on the personality type or the actual project.

Every society is unlike any other society. Most of them consider their particular way of life to be superior to their neighbors or predecessors. In some cases they have a very good case for thinking so, too: they are a vast empire, scientifically advanced, culturally sophisticated, prosperous to a level unheard of before - for example, the Islamic world in the middle ages, or the Roman empire.

Yes, it's possible we'll become spacefaring someday, but right now today, things don't look so good.

Any one of a dozen sociopaths around the world could wipe out every living human in a couple hours by setting off a global nuclear war. It could be done on a whim; it could happen as a result of a stroke; it could be a bad ham sandwich that went down wrong.

We're in the age of global instant destruction right now today. Sustainable spacefaring is decades away at best, probably still centuries. The odds don't really look so good.

The Fermi Paradox is a pretty discouraging data point on the lifetime of technological societies, too.

I have thought about the unsettling possibility that we are presently navigating The Great Filter. It may ultimately be a question of whether our philosophy can keep pace with our technology (and right now it is quickly falling behind). But things have looked bleak in the past, and we have found a way to overcome them. The Fermi Paradox doesn't necessarily imply spacefaring civilizations are as rare as they appear to be. It's possible that the vast majority of spacefaring species became spacefaring because they found a way to keep their philosophical understanding on par with their technological understanding. And given that possibility, it might not be a huge leap to assume a Prime Directive-like policy is at play. (There are a number of ways to explain the Fermi Paradox, but this is probably the one I most subscribe to.)

I'm worried less about the malice of a dozen psychopaths than the hungry and unwashed billions, the consumerist millions, and the power-hungry tens of thousands.

Any system of government which must listen to its citizens is uniquely unsuited to becoming a spacefaring nation.

And of these, which are you?

Different category--bootstrapped maker.

But on a larger scale, I think it's equally likely that we will either become spacefaring species, or destroy ourselves - just because we are not at a brink of a Nuclear War, as long as the stockpiles of nukes exist there is always a chance of that happening. Or that we will deplete our resources before reaching deep-space travel.

I'm prepared to nominate this for a Hugo award.

I just double-checked the categories to make sure it goes in "Best Graphic Story" and not "Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)".

It's pretty amazing how close the people who were deciphering the comic were in the time frame and that they nailed the location so early.

Consider the readership that xkcd appeals to...

Even still. Quite amazing what they were able to do with just a handful of clues.

Not really.

Inferring epoch from constellations is an old sci-fi theme and a topic that's discussed in basic astronomy classes. Considering the knowledge base and nature of this web comic's readership, I'd expect that this would intrigue and capture a certain percentage. (Smart people are smart and usually inquisitive...)

I think it's partly amazing (though it shouldn't be, given past work of his) that Munroe took the time to render time-accurate futuristic stars, and other details. His attention to detail is what makes this kind of sleuthing possible.

Of particular note: there is now excellent astronomy software which many geeks already have on their systems, which can be used to nail down dates from constellations fairly accurately. xkcd fans used Stellarium [0] to determine the epoch (at one point, picking out a specific day and hour due to the locations of Jupiter and Venus [1]!)

[0] http://www.stellarium.org/ -- which was forked for use in portable planetariums at http://digitaliseducation.com/products-nightshade.html

[1] http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hyp...

xkcd has a history of doing stuff like this. Take the "Dream Girl" comic, for instance. In one of its panels, it featured an innocuous set of coordinates and dates. As it turned out, they were a hidden invite for a meetup a few months into the future. Nothing about them was explained beforehand: it was up to the readers to figure it out. I've come to expect that every detail in an xkcd comic probably has some meaning.

http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/10/01/the-meetup/

He put the time into making it correct, he clearly intended people to figure it out.

Just sat and watched the whole thing in the video on this post (nightmare pausing for text - well done timdorr for posting a link to a better way to watch).

This is such a cool story! and the explanation makes me want to start working decoding Linear A! :)

"and the explanation makes me want to start working decoding Linear A! :)"

Exactly what went through my mind as well.

If you start gathering a corpus to work from on Github, I'll happily contribute :)

There's not a lot of people in the world that are this dedicated to making other peoples' days just a little bit better.

Thanks Randall.

Out of curiosity, why do you feel that Randall did this out of pure altruism? Would his work have less meaning for you if he did it purely because he had an itch to scratch, or thought it might be fun?

I think the two things you described are one and the same. To me, it is anyway.

I don't think Randall does xkcd out of pure altruism. I also don't think he does it just for fun (although I believe that's how he started). I think it's a mixture between the two.

If the comics were exactly the same, I'd probably still enjoy them just as much, no matter the reason Randall does them. I feel that we'd be able to tell by the quality of the work and the dedication that he puts into them if his reasons for doing it were different.

Interesting how someone can be so loved based by providing entertainment and information (which is free) without doing anything to piss anyone off.

I don't think the concept of altruism actually has meaning at this level.

So its a dam!, i didn't understand how the gibraltar strait managed to close and open in only 11000 years. It's too wide yet. On the other hand, I don't think it makes sense to close the strait, there is too much commerce flowing through there, also all the mediterranean economy would colapse, and the weather change quite a bit.

11,000 years is a long time, especially when we're hypothesizing a future in which apparently once the fossil fuels disappeared, nothing else was a viable energy source. (It's possible. They aren't the only energy source, nor even the only dense energy source, but it's possible that long-term, the other ones can not be economically maintained. Fission reactors aren't trivial, and we still don't know how to build fusion reactors.) One could imagine a long-term, slow-burn conflict between a culture located in what is now Spain and one in what is now Turkey, and Spain deciding that building the dam would be worth it to cut them off at a point in which they are on the ascendent and Turkey is on the decline, so as to make the decline permanent, or who knows what crazy thing like that. 11,000 years is a long time for human history.

What if, 350 years from now, rising seas levels threaten to destroy most of the Mediterranean coast, so they build a structure to return the level to present height, and it can even allow for the passage of ships... but then, one day, perhaps centuries later... something goes wrong

Some people have been thinking about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

There even was an institute! Amazing thank you, I had heard the idea of a dam but didn't know it was so serious.

Not a dam. Or, it's a natural dam. I suspect a big piece of the phenomena is sea levels massively shrinking, and then expanding ... massively, but slowly. 11000 years is plenty of time for, say, an ice age cycle (even a minor one).

After all, if a large % of the water on earth suddenly collected at the poles, it's not as though every water body's shoreline would contract at the same width, like a photoshop "contract selection" command. Undersea geography, depth, etc would play a factor.

The novelization for the first Star Trek movie talks about such a dam.

I'm actually also interested in how he made it (drawing so much frames).

As far as I know he draws by hand, scans the images and cleans up in Photoshop (or similar). Since Time is mostly a static background with actors I guess he uses the same technique as stop-motion animators by drawing the background and foreground on different cels (or maybe just compositing afterwards). Or lots of copies of the background to draw the foreground into.

I was sad when they lost the water bottle.

Or when she loves his flag so much that she colors it red.

So any estimate on how long Randall was busy with this and what it earned him in then end?

About the timeframe of the comic's updates and a good bit longer. He wrote in his blog post [0.6983]:

> Time was a bigger project than I planned. All told, I drew 3,099 panels. I animated a starfield, pored over maps and research papers, talked with biologists and botanists, and created a plausible future language for readers to try to decode.

> I wrote the whole story before I drew the first frame, and had almost a thousand panels already drawn before I posted the first one. But as the story progressed, the later panels took longer to draw than I expected, and Time began—ironically—eating more and more of my time. Frames that went up every hour were sometimes taking more than an hour to make, and I spent the final months doing practically nothing but drawing.

[0.6983] http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/

Ok, I think I'm missing something: Why [0.6983]?

Some people start with 0, some with 1. I got bored and just resorted to random numbers. As long as they are unique there shouldn't be a problem looking them up.

xkcd truly elevates the web comic genre to an art form. Mr. Munroe really should be considered for a Hugo or a Reuben.

As someone who is just hearing about this now, isn't this just an animation?

Released one frame a day. That's pretty unique.

One per hour (or per half-hour, at first), not one per day. But yeah.

Imagine watching a Youtube video that is buffering so badly, you only get to see one frame per hour.

Yes, in the sense that 'Star Wars' is just a movie.

No. Parts of it may almost seem animated, but it's not watchable at something like 30 frames per second. Frames skip ahead varying amounts of time in the sequence, dialog is single-frame -- you can't watch the whole thing at even 1fps, you'll miss the dialog.

It is truly a long series of single-panel "comics".

Aren't startups just companies? Isn't that program just code? Isn't living just life? Are paintings just paint?

Why do they know what castles are without knowing if there are rivers?

Oral tradition?

xkcd is incredible by why oh why is the title above the buttons?

I'm not seeing at all how this is related to money.

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