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*Fictionalised versions of well known real-life figures in the computing community sometimes appear: [[Richard Stallman]] is portrayed as a [[ninja]] defender of [[Freedom (philosophy)|freedom]] in "Open Source"<ref>{{cite web|title=Open Source (#225)|work=xkcd|url=http://xkcd.com/225/|accessdate=2007-11-17}}</ref> and the "1337" [[Story arc|arc]],<ref name="leet5">{{cite web|title=1337 Part 5 (#345)|work=xkcd|url=http://xkcd.com/345/|accessdate=2007-11-17}}</ref> while [[Cory Doctorow]] is said to "wear red capes and goggles and blog from high-altitude balloons" in "Blagofaire",<ref>{{cite web|title=Blagofaire (#239)|work=xkcd|url=http://xkcd.com/239/|accessdate=2007-11-17}}</ref> and is seen doing so in "1337 Part 5".<ref name="leet5"/> Stallman and Doctorow are both [[free software]] advocates.
*Fictionalised versions of well known real-life figures in the computing community sometimes appear: [[Richard Stallman]] is portrayed as a [[ninja]] defender of [[Freedom (philosophy)|freedom]] in "Open Source"<ref>{{cite web|title=Open Source (#225)|work=xkcd|url=http://xkcd.com/225/|accessdate=2007-11-17}}</ref> and the "1337" [[Story arc|arc]],<ref name="leet5">{{cite web|title=1337 Part 5 (#345)|work=xkcd|url=http://xkcd.com/345/|accessdate=2007-11-17}}</ref> while [[Cory Doctorow]] is said to "wear red capes and goggles and blog from high-altitude balloons" in "Blagofaire",<ref>{{cite web|title=Blagofaire (#239)|work=xkcd|url=http://xkcd.com/239/|accessdate=2007-11-17}}</ref> and is seen doing so in "1337 Part 5".<ref name="leet5"/> Stallman and Doctorow are both [[free software]] advocates.


=="Life Imitates xkcd"==
==Life Imitates xkcd==
<!-- NOTE: do not add the thing about a meet up here again, it is already in the article! -->
<!-- NOTE: do not add the thing about a meet up here again, it is already in the article! -->
[[Image:Cn.png|right|thumb|upright|[http://xkcd.com/285/ "Wikipedian Protester"] in Cambridge, 23 September 2007]]
[[Image:Cn.png|right|thumb|upright|[http://xkcd.com/285/ "Wikipedian Protester"] in Cambridge, 23 September 2007]]

Revision as of 01:56, 24 December 2007

Warning: Display title "<i>Xkcd</i>" overrides earlier display title "xkcd" (help).
xkcd
It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat.
Panel from "Philosophy" (#220) with tooltip text
Author(s)Randall Munroe
Websitehttp://www.xkcd.com/
Current status/scheduleMondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
Launch dateSeptember 2005
Genre(s)Geek humor
Men's romance

xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe,[1] a Christopher Newport University graduate who worked as a contractor for NASA.[2] It calls itself "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language."[3][4]

The subjects of the comics themselves vary. Some are statements on life and love, and some are mathematical or scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. Although known for its crudely drawn cast of oddball stick figures,[5][1] the comic occasionally features landscapes, intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals, or imitations of the style of other cartoonists (as during "parody week"). Occasionally, realism is featured.[6][7]

The comic is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.[8] New comics are added three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,[2] although so far they have been updated every weekday on three occasions: parody week, the five-part 'Choices' series and the 1337 series.

History

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd

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,"[4] making xkcd a self-sufficient webcomic.

In May 2007, the comic caught the attention of many by drawing the Web in geographic form.[9] Various websites were drawn as continents, each sized according to their relative popularity and located according to their general subject matter.[9] This put xkcd at number two on The Post-Standard's "The new hotness" list.[10]

xkcd is not an acronym, and Munroe attaches no meaning to the name, except in a joking manner within the comic.[11] 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.[4][12]

On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered at GPS coordinates mentioned in a strip: 42.39561 -71.13051. Fans converged on a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the strip's author appeared; among his comments: "Maybe wanting something does make it real," a reference to a frame in the same strip.[13][14]

In October of 2007, a group of researchers at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute conducted a census of the internet and said that their data presentation was inspired by an xkcd comic.[15][16][17]

Recurring themes

File:The Problem with Wikipedia.png
Comic entitled "The Problem with Wikipedia"

While there is no specific storyline to the comic, there are some recurring themes.[18] 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 punchline. Romance is another subject often visited in the comic, with many strips not intended to be humorous. xkcd frequently makes reference to Munroe's "obsession" with potential raptor attacks,[19][20][21][22][23] the game Guitar Hero,[24][25] Vanilla Ice, characters making out with themselves,[26][27] and many "your mom" jokes. There have also been several strips featuring "Red Spiders", zeppelins, Joss Whedon's short-lived series Firefly, Wikipedia, and Mussolini. Each comic has a tooltip, specified using the title attribute in HTML. The text usually contains an afterthought or annotation related to that day's comic.[28] There are also many strips depicting "My Hobby", usually depicting the non-descript narrator character describing some type of humorous or quirky behavior often involving language games. [18][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]

Recurring characters

  • A man in a hat who looks like a normal stick-figure xkcd character, except for the addition of his trademark black hat (possibly in reference to black hat hackers). He is particularly intolerant of smartasses and internet newbishness. He does not shy from pointing out the foibles in others and has at times used extreme violence in order to emphasize a point. For example, he once cut off another character's hand for posing the original "-gry" puzzle,[38] which relies on specific wording rather than logic, and once inflicted a multi-spectral "Care Bear stare" on a person who wanted him to join MySpace.[39] He is closely based on the character Aram from the Men In Hats webcomic.[40]
  • A boy in a barrel is another recurring character, who has appeared in 5 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 the many doodles in the older comics, but as of September, 2007, has not been seen for over a year, since comic #31.[41][42][43] He is also a loose allusion to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's short novel, Le Petit Prince.[citation needed]
  • Another set of recurring characters is the nihilist and the existentialist, recognizable by their hats; the existentialist wears a beret and the nihilist wears a white top hat (or no hat at all). So far, they have only been seen together, never separately. They can first be seen in the "Nihilism" comic[44] where their conversation and actions romantically explain the similarities and differences between the two philosophies. They appear again in "Kayak",[45] "Hypotheticals"[46] and "Dignified."[47]
  • Munroe is often a character himself, either identified explicitly as such onscreen[48] or narrating scenes occupied by unnamed characters[49] or no on-screen characters at all.[50] As noted earlier, many of these comics portray the author as obsessed with velociraptors, although some comics convey personal stories or random musings.
  • Fictionalised versions of well known real-life figures in the computing community sometimes appear: Richard Stallman is portrayed as a ninja defender of freedom in "Open Source"[51] and the "1337" arc,[52] while Cory Doctorow is said to "wear red capes and goggles and blog from high-altitude balloons" in "Blagofaire",[53] and is seen doing so in "1337 Part 5".[52] Stallman and Doctorow are both free software advocates.

Life Imitates xkcd

"Wikipedian Protester" in Cambridge, 23 September 2007

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:

References

  1. ^ a b Guzman, Monica. (May 11, 2007) Seattle Post-Intelligencer What's online. Section: Life and Arts; Page D7.
  2. ^ a b Fernandez, Rebecca. (October 12, 2006). Red Hat Magazine. "xkcd: A comic strip for the computer geek."
  3. ^ The Times (June 6, 2007) xkcd.com; The click; Wednesday. Section: Features; Page 2. (writing, "Web comics have thrived and one of the best is xkcd.com. The comic strip of "romance, sarcasm, math and language" is brilliant on the stupidity of people who comment on YouTube videos and, oddly, how we take dreaming in our stride: "I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience."")
  4. ^ a b c "About xkcd". Retrieved 2007-03-06. Cite error: The named reference "aboutxkcd" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  5. ^ Kalamazoo Gazette (August 17, 2006) Ad lib. Section: Ticket.
  6. ^ "The Cure (#56)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-09-10.
  7. ^ "Girl sleeping (Sketch -- 11th grade Spanish class) (#7)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-09-10.
  8. ^ "License". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
  9. ^ a b Tossell, Ivor. (May 18, 2007) Globe and Mail We're looking at each other, and it's not a pretty sight. Section: The Globe Review 7; Page R24
  10. ^ Cubbison, Brian; Thompson, Keith. (May 6, 2007) The Post-Standard. Get each of these links at the news tracker blog at blog.syracuse.com/Newstracker and remember, our blogs don't need www. our blogs start with blog. Section: News; Page A2.(Compiled from news services and online research by the authors)
  11. ^ "What xkcd Means (#207)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  12. ^ Fernandez, Rebecca (2006-11-25). "xkcd: A comic strip for the computer geek". Red Hat Magazine. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  13. ^ Dream Girl (#240)
  14. ^ Cohen, Georgiana (September 26, 2007). "The wisdom of crowds". The Phoenix. Retrieved 2007-09-27.
  15. ^ Paul McNamara (October 9, 2007). "Researchers ping through first full 'Internet census' in 25 years". Buzzblog. Networkworld.com. Retrieved 2007-10-10.
  16. ^ "62 Days + Almost 3 Billion Pings + New Visualization Scheme = the First Internet Census Since 1982". Information Science Institute. October 8, 2007 (Last modified October 9, 2007). Retrieved 2007-10-10. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |1= and |2= (help)
  17. ^ "Map of the Internet (#195)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-10.
  18. ^ a b Andrew Moses (November 21, 2007). "Former NASA staffer creates comics for geeks". The Gazette (University of Western Ontario). Retrieved 2007-11-22.
  19. ^ O'Kane, Erin (2007-04-05). "Geek humor: Nothing to be ashamed of". The Whit Online. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
  20. ^ "Velociraptors (#87)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  21. ^ "Substitute (#135)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  22. ^ "Search History (#155)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  23. ^ "Goto (#292)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-09-26.
  24. ^ "Guitar Hero (#70)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  25. ^ "Music Knowledge (#132)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  26. ^ "Parallel Universe (#105)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-07-20.
  27. ^ "Choices: Part 4(#267)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-07-20.
  28. ^ Peter Trinh (2007-09-14). "A comic you can't pronounce". Imprint Online. Retrieved 2007-09-16.
  29. ^ "Hyphen(#37)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-13.
  30. ^ "Hobby(#53)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  31. ^ "Super Bowl(#60)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  32. ^ "Curse Levels(#75)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  33. ^ "Mispronouncing(#148)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  34. ^ "Reverse Euphemisms(#168)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  35. ^ "That's What SHE Said(#174)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  36. ^ "Collecting Double-Takes(#236)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  37. ^ "Clichéd Exchanges(#259)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  38. ^ "Words that End in GRY (#169)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  39. ^ "Join Myspace (#146)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  40. ^ "Hitler (#29)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
  41. ^ "Barrel - Part 1 (#1)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-04-10.
  42. ^ "Barrel - Part 2 (#11)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-04-10.
  43. ^ "Barrel - Part 3 (#22)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-04-10.
  44. ^ "Nihilism (#167)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
  45. ^ "Kayak (#209)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-01.
  46. ^ "Hypotheticals (#248)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-23.
  47. ^ "Dignified (#291)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
  48. ^ "Snacktime Rules (#183)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-25.
  49. ^ "Engineering Hubris (#319)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-25.
  50. ^ "YouTube (#202)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-10-25.
  51. ^ "Open Source (#225)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  52. ^ a b "1337 Part 5 (#345)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  53. ^ "Blagofaire (#239)". xkcd. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  54. ^ "Life Imitates xkcd, Part II: Richard Stallman". xkcd. 2007-04-19. Retrieved 2007-08-20.
  55. ^ "Stallman trumpets free software". The Yale Daily News. Retrieved 2007-10-19.
  56. ^ "Richard Stallman Debate". Blog of the YPU. 2007-10-18. Retrieved 2007-10-21.
  57. ^ "Cory Doctorow, Part II". xkcd. 2007-03-28. Retrieved 2007-09-05.
  58. ^ Chun Yu (Nov 12, 2007). "The man [hiding] behind the raptor". The Tartan. Retrieved 2007-11-12.
  59. ^ "People Playing Chess on Roller Coasters". Retrieved 2007-08-20.

General

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