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Xkcd
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xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe, a former contractor for NASA. Munroe describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." xkcd is a widely read webcomic (it tallied between 60 and 70 million page views during October 2007 ) and has been recognized in mainstream media such as The Guardian.
Munroe states there is no particular meaning to the name and it is simply a four-letter word without a phonetic pronunciation, something he describes as "a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings." The subjects of the comics themselves vary.
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Encyclopedia
xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe, a former contractor for NASA. Munroe describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." xkcd is a widely read webcomic (it tallied between 60 and 70 million page views during October 2007 ) and has been recognized in mainstream media such as The Guardian.
Munroe states there is no particular meaning to the name and it is simply a four-letter word without a phonetic pronunciation, something he describes as "a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings." 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, the comic occasionally features landscapes, intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals (for example, strip #17 "" shows an Apollonian gasket, or #543 "" and #95 "" for a Sierpinski triangle), or imitations of the style of other cartoonists (as during "parody week"). Occasionally, realism is featured.
The comic is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. New comics are added three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at midnight EST, 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
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," making xkcd a self-sufficient webcomic.
In May 2007, the comic caught the attention of many by . Various websites were drawn as continents, each sized according to their relative popularity and located according to their general subject matter. This put xkcd at number two on The Post-Standards "The new hotness" list.
xkcd is not an acronym, and Munroe attaches no meaning to the name, except in a joking manner within the comic. 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. 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.
On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered at coordinates mentioned in a : 42.39561 -71.13051. Fans converged on a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the strip's author appeared, commenting, "Maybe wanting something does make it real," reversing the conclusion in the last frame of the same strip.
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, author of Questionable Content, announced on his website on April 2:
In October 2008, The New Yorker magazine online published an interview and "Cartoon Off" between Randall Munroe and Farley Katz. For the "Cartoon-Off," Katz and Munroe each drew: "the Internet, as envisioned by the elderly," "String Theory," "1999," and "your favorite animal eating your favorite food."
Recurring items
While there is no specific storyline to the comic, there are some recurring themes and characters, many of which are touched on in an xkcd parody of the Discovery Channel's I Love the World commercial.
Themes
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.
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. References to Wikipedia articles or to Wikipedia as a whole are an occasional theme in xkcd. xkcd also frequently makes reference to Munroe's "obsession" with potential raptor attacks, electric skateboards, the game Guitar Hero, and many "your mom" jokes. There have also been several strips featuring "Red Spiders", Joss Whedon's short-lived series Firefly, and the 1985 novel Ender's Game.
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.
Characters
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, not to black hat hackers as is often supposed. This character first appeared in the comic Poisson (the twelfth comic published on the website). The character refers to himself as a "Classhole" (a portmanteau of "classy" and "asshole"). He does not shy from pointing out the foibles of others and has at times used extreme violence in order to emphasize a point. In the January 30, 2008 comic, his hat was taken by a woman, who to date is the only person to foil one of his schemes. The latest appearance of the two together was comic #542. The character is one of the most frequently occurring in the comic, though he remains unnamed (he was referred to in the tooltip for comic #493 as "hat guy"). In the "Secretary" story arc, he is nominated for the post of Secretary of the Internet when the Internet has started to collapse, but after a variety of hijinks involving Ron Paul, Cory Doctorow, and the Auto-Troll Shuffle, is sentenced to death, escaping by filling the Capitol rotunda with plastic ball pit-style balls, which distracts the pursuers, while he flees 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, and again several times afterward. 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.
- Another set of recurring characters is the nihilist and the existentialist. Until comic #291, they had only been seen together, never separately. They are first seen in the "Nihilism" comic, and again in "Kayak," "Hypotheticals", and "Dark Flow."
- Fictionalised versions of well known real-life figures in the computing and scientific community sometimes appear, such as free software advocates Richard Stallman, Cory Doctorow, and physicist Richard Feynman.
- Mrs. Roberts was a main character in the "1337" 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.
- Firefly character River Tam—and actress Summer Glau, who played her—have appeared in a few comics, usually in a dream sequence where a character in the strip makes reference to her.
Activities inspired by xkcd
On several 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:
xkcd readers sneaking chess boards onto roller coasters – inspired by "" An xkcd reader created a "" installation program – inspired by "" Munroe himself solicited contributions from his readers of people playing electric guitars while in the shower on wetriffs.com after posting the comic "", in which a character registers that domain. A subgroup of "" xkcd readers has emerged, members of which travel to random nearby latitude/longitude locations calculated by the geohashing algorithm described in "".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. YouTube has placed a feature on comments that plays back the comment aloud on "Audio Preview", based on the strip . Running the following code is an easter egg in Python 3.0: import antigravity
Awards and recognition
xkcd has been recognized at the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards: in the 2008 Awards, it was nominated for "Outstanding Use of the Medium," "Outstanding Short Form Comic," "Outstanding Single Panel Comic," and "Outstanding Comedic Comic," and won "Outstanding Single Panel Comic." xkcd was also voted Best Online Comic by readers in the 2007 Weblog Awards.
Translations
Many xkcd comics have been translated into Spanish by one reader. The comics available are the ones that, according to the translator, can be translated without losing their humor. Near a half of the comics have also been translated into Russian by a community of readers.
Further sources
External links
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