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xkcd To Be Released In Book Form
History's Coming To writes "xkcd creator Randall Munroe has revealed on his blag that the acclaimed stick-figure comic will be produced in real dead-tree book form. Fantastic news for all fans of comedy, maths, science, and relationship screw-ups — especially given that the book will be sold in aid of the charity 'Room To Read.' Rumors that the book contains a joke in the ISBN remain unconfirmed." The NY Times article that Munroe links (registration may be required) is from April of this year, and I am amazed that this community didn't note the story at that time. The book will be published by breadpig, which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit.
The NY Times article that Munroe links (registration may be required) is from April of this year, and I am amazed that this community didn't note the story at that time.
Well, using a very simple search (xkcd book) in the firehose, I found spongedaddy's submission, my own submission and even one of the bin spammers submitted it. And we all linked to the same NYTimes story.
... yet you yourselves do not use this tool to your advantage when looking for duplicates.
Your firehose search tool is there, yes it's slow and clunky. I don't care that you rejected my submission of this story three months ago but don't say I didn't notice one of my favorite web comics being published in book form. I mean, go ahead and say "slow news day" in your summary, I don't care if you feel obligated to dig up old news for stories at 12:25 AM EST on a Tuesday. Also, it confuses me greatly that you provide for us a means to make sure we don't submit a URL that's already been submitted as the primary link by another individual
My work here is dung.
http://www.xkcd.com/
I'm not a big fan of actually buying books--my tax money, to some degree, goes to finance my public library (and free library card), so I usually just check out books that I want--but I think this is one I might actually buy. If a Questionable Content compilation would come available at some later point, I'd probably buy it too. I'd venture to guess that webcomics are low-reward thingers, and those out there that are enjoyable, well, the creators should be able to get something out of it.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
Great - something to do on Saturday night! Obligatory link
My hope is they turn Dinosaur Comics into a flipbook!
So if I look at the pictures in the book long enough will the alt text pop up?
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Someone making a joke in base 11 instead of base 13.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Still, great news! May the force be with Randall.
So the editor is surprised no one told /. about the recent news? Hey, they only missed that story by a few months. Surprise? That's a funnier laugh than the best of XKCD, which is saying a bit, since some of them are pretty funny.
Gee, you don't suppose the so-called editor could be in a position to do something to improve /. to the point where interesting news and humor would again be visible around here?
Of course personal recollection is just one data point at best, but... Some years ago I used to visit /. quite often, perhaps several times a day versus several times a week these days--unless a month or two has gone by. On an average visit I expected to see at several very interesting articles and at least one first report that I hadn't seen elsewhere versus my current expectation of seeing one or two non-boring stories and nothing that I haven't seen elsewhere one or two days earlier. A typical visit would reveal a number of very witty comments and usually one or two actually funny and new jokes versus the current crop of a scattering of very tired memes. I remember looking at a relatively large thread (which are relatively rare these days) and finding exactly one comment that had even been moderated as funny--and that one wasn't even amusing.
Most importantly, the moderation used to be pretty poor instead of downright horrendous. Apparently the lousy moderators have won that game--and I expect the moderation of this post to prove my point (yet again).
But the so-called editors are apparently quite satisfied with the devolution of the system. I guess lower traffic on /. means less so-called work for them?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
>Rumors that the book contains a joke in the ISBN remain unconfirmed. Were we talking about any other author, I would scoff. But this being xkcd, it actually sounds plausible.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I like that you need somebody else's opinion to know whether something is enjoyable or not. I'd like you to check out my new websites: isslashdotshittytoday.com and arehatersshittytoday.com. I'm working on an iskdawsonshittytoday.com, but I keep getting divide by zero errors in the rss.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
I think they must just be suffering from the curse of hating things just because they're popular. I know I have a tendency to do the same thing, but I generally actually do a bit of investigation to find out if it's popular for a reason I can appreciate first.
The other possibility is hating something just because everybody else discovered it and now you can't be cool for knowing about this obscure but fantastic thing that nobody else knows about. Considering this crowd, I expect that's the more likely scenario.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Which sums up the impression I get reading your average xkcd strip, if I'm not about to hurl at Munroe's insipid melancholy. It turns out you don't need to be that clever; nevertheless I am in xkcd's presumed target audience, and despite getting many of the gags still don't find them that funny. Moreover, I cannot see what the hell my peers think is so great about it. Seriously, do they need a bunch of mathsier-than-thou stick drawings to reaffirm their abilities? Roughly speaking, xkcd is to geeks what The Mighty Boosh is to trendy undergrads. As far as I can see, they're both guilty of flattering their respective audiences to the point where the latter forgets that anything comic should, at least once in a while, make one laugh.