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Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Backstory of His Epic 3,990-Panel Comic
- Jeremy1026 13y agoIt'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.
- xradionut 13y agoConsider the readership that xkcd appeals to...
- Jeremy1026 13y agoEven still. Quite amazing what they were able to do with just a handful of clues.
- xradionut 13y agoNot 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...)
- gknoy 13y agoI 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.
- lotharbot 13y agoOf 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/ http://www.stellarium.org/ -- which was forked for use in portable planetariums at http://digitaliseducation.com/products-nightshade.html http://digitaliseducation.com/products-nightshade.html [1] http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hypothesis http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hyp...
- archagon 13y agoxkcd 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/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/10/01/the-meetup/
- jvreeland 13y agoHe put the time into making it correct, he clearly intended people to figure it out.
- xinn 13y ago[0] http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
- M4v3R 13y agoIt'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 http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043
- mherdeg 13y agoI 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".
- brazzy 13y agoAnd a great subject of parody in xkcd itself: http://xkcd.com/915/ http://xkcd.com/915/
- viraptor 13y agoDoes it get more obscure than _why's printer spool documents a couple of months ago?
- LanceH 13y agoObviously it gets more obscure. Just think of all the things you don't know about.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoNot 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.
- dbarlett 13y agoDone even better in Ready Player One http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307887448 http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307887448
- Aardwolf 13y agoI'm actually also interested in how he made it (drawing so much frames).
- ygra 13y agoAs 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.
- Aardwolf 13y agoDoes 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!
- timdorr 13y agohttp://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ You can tweak the pause time where appropriate.
- Ethan_Mick 13y agoI 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.
- 9ac345a5509a 13y agoThere 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.
- sampo 13y ago> manual click through and thus waaaay too slow I used the mouse wheel.
- laserDinosaur 13y agoAs someone who is just hearing about this now, isn't this just an animation?
- x1024 13y agoYes, in the sense that 'Star Wars' is just a movie.
- nknighthb 13y agoNo. 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".
- wikiburner 13y agoReleased one frame a day. That's pretty unique.
- Steuard 13y agoOne per hour (or per half-hour, at first), not one per day. But yeah.
- efdee 13y agoImagine watching a Youtube video that is buffering so badly, you only get to see one frame per hour.
- igorgue 13y agoAren't startups just companies? Isn't that program just code? Isn't living just life? Are paintings just paint?
- tehwalrus 13y agoJust 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! :)
- omegant 13y agoSo 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.
- jerf 13y ago11,000 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.
- GoLongOrShort 13y agoQuick question - should I go long or short AAPL, considering I'm going to hold it for the next 11,000 years?
- GoLongOrShort 13y agolawl
- raldi 13y agoWhat 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
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- pearjuice 13y agoSo any estimate on how long Randall was busy with this and what it earned him in then end?
- ygra 13y agoAbout 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/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
- joshaidan 13y agoI was sad when they lost the water bottle.
- hadem 13y agoOr when she loves his flag so much that she colors it red.
- eykanal 13y agoThis 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/ http://xkcd.com/657/ [2]: http://xkcd.com/980/ http://xkcd.com/980/ [3]: http://xkcd.com/887/ http://xkcd.com/887/ [4]: http://xkcd.com/1037/ http://xkcd.com/1037/
- conroy 13y agoAlso 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/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/
- brown9-2 13y agoAlso great - the @WhatIfNumbers twitter feed: https://twitter.com/whatifnumbers https://twitter.com/whatifnumbers
- BrandonMarc 13y agoSpeaking 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/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/ [1] http://what-if.xkcd.com/54/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/54/
- altrego99 13y agoWhat if a diamond 100ft in diameter hits Earth in near-light speed? http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
- Oculus 13y agoThere'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.
- doktrin 13y agoOut 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?
- shurcooL 13y agoI think the two things you described are one and the same. To me, it is anyway.
- Oculus 13y agoI 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.
- larrys 13y agoInteresting how someone can be so loved based by providing entertainment and information (which is free) without doing anything to piss anyone off.
- saraid216 13y agoI don't think the concept of altruism actually has meaning at this level.
- rsfinn 13y agoI'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)".
- darasen 13y agoxkcd truly elevates the web comic genre to an art form. Mr. Munroe really should be considered for a Hugo or a Reuben.
- jvanderbot 13y agoWhy do they know what castles are without knowing if there are rivers?
- siddboots 13y agoOral tradition?
- sage_joch 13y ago"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.
- hollerith 13y ago>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.
- alxhill 13y agoIt 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.
- BrandonMarc 13y agoNot 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 ...
- gizmo686 13y agoThose things always seem to be dwindling.
- jnevelson 13y agoAnd 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.
- AsymetricCom 13y agoI'm not seeing at all how this is related to money.
- pbreit 13y agoxkcd is incredible by why oh why is the title above the buttons?