5 ms·

A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

288 points by iamwil 14y ago

dkokelley 14y ago
It's interesting to me the awareness Munroe has about creativity, inspiration, and working environment. He sees that some things are purely distractions (E.G. Reddit, cleaning the bathroom floor) while no distraction (E.G. a room with blank walls) is detrimental to his creative process.
- Swizec 14y ago
  Wonderful talk about where good ideas comes from says basically the same thing - where different minds meet (HN, Reddit etc.) there creativity happens. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0ssmoXG1I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0ssmoXG1I
tisme 14y ago
Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.
- sciurus 14y ago
  http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&st... shows 285 stories and 1,303 comments matching 'xkcd'.
  - jmilloy 14y ago
    Compared to 1,352 stories and 18,269 comments for wikipedia, for the record.
adambratt 14y ago
Really interesting article. Thanks for posting it! Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful. Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Yep: Where did all this start? I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time. It's immensely fun and I really appreciate y'all's support. http://xkcd.com/about/ http://xkcd.com/about/
  - brc 14y ago
    The important lesson here is that some business models absolutely do work for the particular person. I have no idea what number of pageviews you would need to support a full-time t-shirt selling business. I imagine the conversion rate is frighteningly low. But it really is true that you can make a business out of any sufficiently highly-trafficked website with a sticky audience. But you have to match the costs with the revenues.
    - lurker14 14y ago
      > sticky audience xkcd has sticky content, too.
    - kn0thing 14y ago
      And don't forget books! http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self-publish-or-start-your-own-niche-publishing-company-or-not http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self-publi...
haberman 14y ago
"I got email from a bunch of physicists at MIT saying, "Hey, I saw your relativist baseball scenario, and I simulated it out on our machine, and I've got some corrections for you." And I thought that was just the coolest thing. It showed there were some effects that I hadn't even thought about. I'm probably going to do a follow-up at some point using all the material they sent me." God, that is just gold. Randall really has a gift -- he speaks to our imaginations so much that he can count on geeks around the world to participate in conversation with whatever he dreams up. Here's to hoping that we will get to see many more years of his creativity.
- msellout 14y ago
  You might enjoy Ringworld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Engineers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Engineers > ... many fans had identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. A major problem being that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, resulting in the entire structure colliding with its sun and disintegrating.
grumpygremlin 14y ago
He's pretty bad at drawing.
epidemian 14y ago
> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back." Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if you go Back that'll just bring you to the previous list item, instead of the previous webpage; not very predictable IMO.
- teraflop 14y ago
  On modern browsers, you can fix that by using HTML5's replaceState function.
  - epidemian 14y ago
    Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
    - chc 14y ago
      For one, widespread support for that feature is relatively recent -- in fact, it's slated for the next version of IE. For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them to the start of the page. They're sort of the awkward middle child between permalinks to an index and permalinks to posts, and even if they were there people wouldn't want them as often as the other two. This would probably put it in the "Maybe get to this later" pile.
      - andrewaylett 14y ago

288 points by iamwil 14y ago

It's interesting to me the awareness Munroe has about creativity, inspiration, and working environment. He sees that some things are purely distractions (E.G. Reddit, cleaning the bathroom floor) while no distraction (E.G. a room with blank walls) is detrimental to his creative process.

Swizec 14y ago
Wonderful talk about where good ideas comes from says basically the same thing - where different minds meet (HN, Reddit etc.) there creativity happens. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0ssmoXG1I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0ssmoXG1I

tisme 14y ago

Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.

sciurus 14y ago
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&st... shows 285 stories and 1,303 comments matching 'xkcd'.
- jmilloy 14y ago
  Compared to 1,352 stories and 18,269 comments for wikipedia, for the record.

adambratt 14y ago

Really interesting article. Thanks for posting it! Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful. Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.

brown9-2 14y ago
Yep: Where did all this start? I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time. It's immensely fun and I really appreciate y'all's support. http://xkcd.com/about/ http://xkcd.com/about/
- brc 14y ago
  The important lesson here is that some business models absolutely do work for the particular person. I have no idea what number of pageviews you would need to support a full-time t-shirt selling business. I imagine the conversion rate is frighteningly low. But it really is true that you can make a business out of any sufficiently highly-trafficked website with a sticky audience. But you have to match the costs with the revenues.
  - lurker14 14y ago
    > sticky audience xkcd has sticky content, too.
  - kn0thing 14y ago
    And don't forget books! http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self-publish-or-start-your-own-niche-publishing-company-or-not http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self-publi...

haberman 14y ago

"I got email from a bunch of physicists at MIT saying, "Hey, I saw your relativist baseball scenario, and I simulated it out on our machine, and I've got some corrections for you." And I thought that was just the coolest thing. It showed there were some effects that I hadn't even thought about. I'm probably going to do a follow-up at some point using all the material they sent me." God, that is just gold. Randall really has a gift -- he speaks to our imaginations so much that he can count on geeks around the world to participate in conversation with whatever he dreams up. Here's to hoping that we will get to see many more years of his creativity.

msellout 14y ago
You might enjoy Ringworld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Engineers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ringworld_Engineers > ... many fans had identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. A major problem being that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, resulting in the entire structure colliding with its sun and disintegrating.

grumpygremlin 14y ago

He's pretty bad at drawing.

epidemian 14y ago

> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back." Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if you go Back that'll just bring you to the previous list item, instead of the previous webpage; not very predictable IMO.

teraflop 14y ago
On modern browsers, you can fix that by using HTML5's replaceState function.
- epidemian 14y ago
  Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
  - chc 14y ago
    For one, widespread support for that feature is relatively recent -- in fact, it's slated for the next version of IE. For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them to the start of the page. They're sort of the awkward middle child between permalinks to an index and permalinks to posts, and even if they were there people wouldn't want them as often as the other two. This would probably put it in the "Maybe get to this later" pile.
    - andrewaylett 14y ago