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xkcd's 13-Gigapixel Webcomic
New submitter Nomen writes "Today's xkcd: Click and Drag (Google Maps version) is probably the world's biggest web comic at an RSI-inducing resolution of 165,888x79,872 pixels. It's made up of 225 different images that take up 5.52MB of space. Now, if only the mines were powered by nethack..."
I check XKCD for a quick joke in the morning... generally takes just a minute.
To fully get this, I'd have to spend hours clicking and dragging... totally against the point of webcomics IMO.
When you see the entire thing and find out it's mostly background. :/
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
there was a huge, worldwide drop in productivity today. Especially at universities, research labs, software development companies etc.
How do you do it. Hell, how do you even THINK of doing it. This is so great.
"Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yeah... No problem."
Some guy made a keyboard-controllable fullscreen interface: http://ares.aylett.co.uk/xkcd/
www.xkcd.com/1110/
It will take all day to explore this whole thing using the Google Maps version, I can't imagine finding everything using the dragging method.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Anybody create or know of a thumbnail of the whole thing? I don't want to miss anything!
That comic should have been put out on a Friday - I only like to waste a lot of time on Fridays. I can only afford a cursory amount of wasted time on a Wednesday. All that clicking and dragging used up most of it, so I'll have to cut this /. post short.
only got a fraction of the way through it when my index and middle finger started to seize up like an engine without oil.
needs a zoom function!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
He's just trying to break goatkcd.
I'm not brave enough to verify.
someone save me some time and tell me if I need to chuckle, chortle, LOL or LMFAO...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
This would be one hell of a last comic before retirement.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Someone created a zoomable version of today's comic. Makes it a LOT faster to see everything:
http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/#1/65/-84
He's there.
Someone want to stitch this together and put it on zoom.it?
Thanks. Now i don't even have to bother stopping at XKCD, or xkcdsucks.blogspot.com, i can stay up to date from right here on slashdot. Now that that's done, on to the next article to troll pointlessly about the iPhone.
I kinda regret seeing this comic immediately when it became live, as just as the working day had just begun here and I sunk an enormous amount of time into exploring it, but I'm nonetheless thrilled whenever webcomics do something that extends the comic format beyond the limitations of paper.
Earlier XKCD strips could easily be converted to print format, just see the first collection XKCD Volume 0 that Randall published (yes, he found a way to put the alt text in there too). But taking advantage of HTML and Javascript, making the comic interactive to a degree, feels like something fresh. Cyanide and Happiness have also been employing animated GIF elements. There's a lot of room for creativity in the webcomic format.
I wasted 45 mins dragging around this morning. There's plenty of stuff hanging around and the jokes make it well worth the global productivity drop.
Except back then we used long rolls of paper, and we didn't fill in the solid parts because that would've used too much ink. So this is pretty cool, but not groundbreaking. From the way the entire Internet's in an uproar you'd think something important happened today, sheesh.
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
I have just found a bigger time waster than Slashdot.
. .
In other news, openmarket's servers just went down in flames.
Today's goatkcd didn't disappoint at all.
Here is another zoomable version. http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/.
Right, because we wouldn't be culture starved if we listened to your favorite no-talent, shithole hipster band, right?
Thanks for making my point. The only people who like xkcd are those so ignorant of modern culture that they think the two alternatives are "xkcd" and "Lady Gaga"...
You've done nothing impressive. Ever. Do the world a favor and go play in traffic.
...and they're the sort of well-adjusted basement dwellers who respond to criticism by telling the critic to kill him/herself.
http://servicesbeta.esri.com/demos/web-tiled/xkcd-1110.html Totally amazing work, my favorite XKCD. Now if someone turns it into a game...
~M "There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it." - Denis Diderot
Hey that is just uncool.
He might damage a car if he plays in traffic.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
WTF is an "artefact"?
It's very similar to an artifact, except artefacts are only found by people who don't know what the little red, squiggly line under the word is for.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I really hope that Randall trolls the internet (or at least slashdot) looking for mentions of his name. It's like having a friend on the internet. He's a genius, and sometimes (well, most of the time), I feel like he's writing and drawing just for me. Thank you.
- Right click the comic, select "Inspect Element"
- in the console, expand the "middleContainer" div
- select the "comic" div
- in the box on the right of the console, uncheck "overflow:hidden"
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I, for one, am relieved to know that the bottomless pits in Mario Bros. are not truly bottomless. If any of my Mario's survived the fall, they got to live out their days in comfortable pagodas buried deep within the earth.
In a good way....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You $oBee, what do you mean? I am not working? I spend my last freaking 30 seconds downloading the worst comic ever. And that didn't kill nobody or make any one poor. Wait a min, my effin boss is playing spider solitaire. Le me take a nap.
If you look over on the far right near the ship, there's a shark jumping out of the water.
Poop Deck.
It may be 13 gigapixel, but where's the fun when those gigapixels are all either black or white?
This one is more interesting - http://www.docbert.org/SantaCruz/
Someone needs to arrange a scavenger hunt list for this image. I'll get you started:
find two x-wings
find three whales
find one submarine
find three comets
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Eye preefur peepil unnerstan whut eyme seyin. Dondt ewe?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
More accurately, it /is/ an artifact. There are multiple acceptable spellings of artifact.
This reminds me of the PBS show Secret City, hosted by COMMANDER MARK!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrnwNFmdxvM
I loved his pen murals.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
1) Almost all of the comic is black or white space;
Um have you ever read an XKCD comic before? They are almost always done in that black white style.
2) The artwork is awful;
scroll past the parking lot and look at it. It is not Awful as you say. the Saturn V rocket, the massive radio antenna. the Pirate Ship, tons of detail.
3) The "random occurrences on a random landscape with nearly identical characters" theme brings "Where's Waldo?" to mind, except that WW had some fairly detailed and amusing artwork;
I take it you never looked through a Where's Waldo book, all the characters are similar in those books too. I still like them. But Where's Waldo never made a 13 gigapixle book (wish they did though, talk about time wasted)
4) All the speech brings to mind the kind of things you think then immediately dismiss from your mind as being irrelevant and not worth saying;
So? I thought that of your post.
5) Culture-starved nerd-fans will nevertheless regard the comic as one of the most amazing cultural artifacts of modern times.
No we appreciate the amount of time it took to make. Little references that are there that we the nerds enjoy. It might be one of the best web comics of 2012 at least it will probably be the most viewed, by all kinds and not just nerds. Take the time and look through it.
This is Randall's Magnum Opus.
-- Sig down
It's the normal British spelling of artefact. No red squiggly line for me :-)
More accurately, it /is/ an artifact. There are multiple acceptable spellings of artifact.
Ha, yea, I actually remembered that shortly after hitting the submit button. Where's a time-limited edit button when you need one?
My high school English teacher is probably spinning in her grave...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Still funny, though.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I love the way you crafted this slam without actually specifying what you consider to be "modern culture", other than that you agree with the xkcd fans that Lady Gaga doesn't qualify. All the reward, none of the risk. Excellent.
The enemies of Democracy are
When I was a bit younger, I used to draw labyrinths in MS Paint, zoom in and try to find the way out, sometimes cheating with Ariadnes red 1 pixel line. Well, I was never good at football.
I got bored and quit. Time to go read a book.
165,888x79,872 pixels.
Wow!
It's made up of 225 different images
Wow.
that take up 5.52MB of space.
W- meh.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If You Can Hear Us,
Friend Us On Facebook!
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Please!
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genius!
It's not a shark, it's a whale.
When you look at this, take into account that the full resolution is closer to this.
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
who have Javascript disabled.
Randall must have played too many games back in the day.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Take your time. scroll around. let those associatrons work. look at the walls. Rorschach is hiding somewhere. Take your time. There's galleries in this gallery, matey. Obligatory ITLAP.
...like me, here's a zoomable version. As for the comic itself, the idea isn't genius, but the implementation is very smart.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Very good job, but I can't help thinking he could have gotten the download smaller by using SVG.
I added some code by jywarren to do a hashbang with location, so you can copy/paste references to direct locations. (latitude/longtitude/zoom reference)
http://code.nervhq.com/xkcd_map/
that you had to do this instead? Clearly, it must be something big.
And just how did you do it? Did you just use Gimp, find some nice images to threshold, cut and paste, or did you set up a custom pipeline?
(Note regarding tone of this message: please read with "awe", not "sarcasm".)
I finally found a use for it.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Wouldn't it have just been easier to say, "I don't like it, much like I don't like xkcd overall"? Oh, wait, that wouldn't have stroked your ego by letting you pretend to be some absolute judge of artistic quality, instead of just another Anonymous Coward on /.
Talk like a pirate day.
Can't wait to see this one in the printed version.
This was one of the coolest things I found on the Internet since quite a while.
And, despite the RSI-effect and all, it kind of loses something in the various maps, deep zoom, etc. versions. As soon as you can zoom, it doesn't have the scale/size feeling anymore. Something is lost.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When I was younger, my brother and I would often have a sort of pseudo-game for those rainy afternoons.
We would draw a simplified piece of terrain on A4 paper, usually just a wobbly line that went up and down (a bit like a Scorched Earth kinda outline, similar to the game we used to play on the Spectrum: Tank Trax).
Then we'd fill it it with various stick figures, with various comedy elements. With two of you, you could work on different bits and then show each other what you'd done and tie it in with the other drawings on there. And because half was mountain, half was sky, there was opportunity for all kinds of things. Some of the things we used to include were:
A "cave" with no entrance/exits in it, and a stick-figure either bored or skeletal within in (how he got there, we never explained), something like a sports car "jumping" off a ramp in the terrain, maybe a little water somewhere collecting in a small valley and "dripping through" or cracking the "rock" below it, a little mine with stick figures pushing carts along rails, etc.
This very much reminds me of those drawings we used to do, on a much larger scale, even down to having odd little characters every now and then and a mine system.
The mountain seems to be the famous Corcovado Montain (the one with the big Jesus statue on top) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. See here for comparison.
Why install a browser? You have telnet and prefer to use your brain.