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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..."
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
Your face isn't all that impressive.
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.
Well, you can always enjoy the initial joke, then bookmark it and come back later. My complaint is that all the clicking and dragging gets boring real fast, and isn't adequately repaid by the little jokes you discover along the way. Maybe it would be more fun on a tablet.
http://clickanddrag.azurewebsites.net/
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Did you find Super Mario Bros?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
My buddy wrote up a script that pulls the whole map into a big clickable image: http://hydra.drawert.net/xkcd_clickdrag/
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.
I have just found a bigger time waster than Slashdot.
. .
Of course it is. It's a digital scavenger hunt :)
Quite fun, and will probably be the most-bookmarked webcomic of the year as people realize the size of it and flag it for perusal in their off hours.
Well played Mr. Munroe, well played indeed.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
That's easy, try finding these without zooming out:
2 MD-80s
2 other airliners, possibly 767s
Apollo 13
Two X-Wings
Soooo... Glass half empty kind of guy, huh?
Give Randall some credit, this must have taken ages to put together, and is all the more impressive once you realise that it's more or less all draw to the scale. The real mindfsck is when you read the comment from the girl on the far left and work out that, despite all of that apparently vast area to explore, the whole thing represents is only about five miles from one side to the other. I just didn't expect it [the drawing] to be so small!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
In other news, openmarket's servers just went down in flames.
Agreed - can we drop the tetchy comments? In fairness, it was kinda cool...
I did a couple screen shots and made the Mario Bros level my facebook cover picture
Find Icarus ;-)
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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
I knew I had forgotten something!
Clever. Another way to work out the dimensions would be to scale it to the Burj Khalifa located in the center.
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.
Yeah... I read the source, and downloaded the images. Who the hell has time for all that mouse work?
Facebook? Get out of here.
We are in agreement if by kinda cool you mean one of the coolest, if not the coolest, web comic ever, so far.
It is what it is.
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.
Really?
That'll be the day I stop reading it.
- 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 was hoping someone would do something like that. I hope that server can handle some traffic.
Anyone esle wish that one of the whales in the sky was a flower pot thinking to itself "not again"? (HHGttG)
Or the Saturn V just above it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There are other references to video games. Some of the caves look like the underground map in Another World.
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.
Poop Deck.
There was also a Minecraft Creeper chasing a miner...
References are everywhere.
The arch foe.
I investigated this, I really wish I hadn't...
Not because I wasn't expecting it, but because it wasn't scaled to epic proportions so I did it for pretty much nothing... :(
The arch foe.
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!
so i could go to the click and drag episode, find your mario bros tile, look up the png name in the developer toolbar, then take the png and drag it into a google image search and presto, there you are.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Impossible to tell until they reach the ground and we see whether they miss it or not.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
This is Randall's Magnum Opus.
-- Sig down
See if your buddy can add a gray background color, to make it easier to find clickable areas in the 'sky'
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 was disappointed by the whales. I thought should have been a whale and a bowl of Petunias.
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
Yep indeed - so far - I hear there are ponies in it but I haven't found them yet
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.
Did the same thing myself the moment I saw the comment. Didn't combine them into a single image, but got every bit of detail within a 100x100 panel square. Nothing was found further than 25 panels from the center, though.
Here's the python script I threw together. It's crude, but gets the job done. (Note that it needs wget on the path or in the same directory, didn't feel like tinkering with binary writes.)
import os, urllib
baseUrl="http://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/"
def convert(coords):
st = ''
if coords[0]>0:
st+=str(coords[0])+'n'
else:
st+=str(abs(coords[0]))+'s'
if coords[1]>0:
st+=str(coords[1])+'e'
else:
st+=str(abs(coords[1]))+'w'
st+='.png'
return st
x=1
y=1
flipX = 1
flipY = 1
while True:
coords = (x*flipX, y*flipY)
print coords
u = urllib.urlopen(baseUrl+convert(coords))
firstLine = True
img = False
for line in u:
if firstLine:
firstLine = False
if line == '\x89PNG\r\n':
print 'Found Image!'
os.spawnl(os.P_WAIT, "wget"," -nc ",baseUrl+convert(coords))
elif line == '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>\n':
pass
else:
print line
u.close()
if flipY==-1:
flipY = 1
y+=1
if y>x:
y=1
if flipX==-1:
flipX=1
x+=1
else:
flipX=-1
else:
flipY = -1
Soooo... Glass half empty kind of guy, huh?
Oblig: http://what-if.xkcd.com/6/
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Since the images only take up 5.52mb, I'd say it should be okay (if implemented well).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
It was extremely cool, but having to actually scroll all over, combined with a small scrollable window, made my hands hurt enough that I eventually gave up. I'm very thankful for the (multiple) people that repackaged it as a zoomable map.
The fact this got modded +5 Insightful makes the burn all that more impressive.
Ohh, and the guy in the grass is masturbating.
When you look at this, take into account that the full resolution is closer to this.
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
No life? Drawing XKCD is his job.
Dilbert RSS feed
Randall must have played too many games back in the day.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
You must be one of those persons who read tomorrow's comic on their dilbert calendar.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Ohh, and the guy in the grass is masturbating.
On a related note, Randall watches Peep Show.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
...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
Only there are 2 whales (falling) and no bowl of petunias.
There were of course two missiles in the source material.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
On a related note, Randall watches Peep Show.
Fucko, we like to call it inter-species erotica.
You forgot the Q400 in a drastic nose-up pitch. (possibly about to stall)
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".)
Maybe the whales are a reference to "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home".
I was disappointed because it comes up blank for me. Maybe it requires JavaScript, but I'm not going to whitelist some unknown, random web comic site.
Oh well, too bad for them.
I finally found a use for it.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
It's so big. Yet so really, really small when you compare it to the real world. More size comparisons:
Based on the Burj Khalifa being 829 meters, each image (cell) is about 100 meters.
The full image is 81 cells wide, 32 cells high. The highest point where the whales are at is 13 cells high (including the initial ground level), while the lowest point is around 19 cells deep (not including the initial ground level).
Mt. Everest is slightly higher than the image is wide (88.5 cells).
The deepest mine in the world is about twice the depth of the caves from ground level (39 cells).
In fact, the deepest hole ever drilled is about six times as deep (122 cells).
If the jumbo jets' cruise altitude were drawn to scale, they would be close to ten times the height of the whale from ground level (124 cells).
If this was a map of Manhattan starting at the tip of Battery Park, it would end near the southern parts of Central Park, specifically the whereabouts of the skating rink (according to Google Maps anyway).
Also, apparently, some forum-goers have found the images at the four 11x11 corners to be blank (present but blank, whereas the rest of the empty space is not an actual image). The theory is that this one, 1110, will be either the last or the penultimate comic (with 1111 being the last comic, or just blank). The last comic theory comes from the obvious reference to Calvin and Hobbes, and a reference to the very first comic at the eastern-most cell. There are more blank images at 1n4e, 1n5e, 2n1w, 2n3w, 8n1w, but its meaning has not been cracked yet.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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
About the plane, it's flying with wheels out so it's probably going down for landing. IE any altitude is valid.
Also, just to be a tard, it's not a "Jumbo Jet". That is usually what you call a Boeing 747, and the second floor is missing.
Sorry. I just had to get it out of my system.
This does it already: http://www.mrphlip.com/xkcd1110/?debug=1
Hehe, someone quoted the X-Wing calling a Red pilot and I'm going no wait, wasn't the X-Wing calling Gold Leader?
Then someone else said he'd started going west and I'd been exploring east, but was coming back through the tunnels and was wondering whether we'd meet, and we discovered we actually were just going through the same landcape.
Would be cool if you could see others exploring multi-player style, but too hard to code I suppose.
1n35e.png: my new Wallpaper :)
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
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.
This comic is very morish.
I did it with nested loops in ColdFusion. There are 33 "w" lengths and 48 "e" lengths. 11 "n" and 19 "s". Had to limit the outer loop because my server would time out, but with a bit of grinding I was able to generate a list of all the tiles.
/>
/>
<cfloop from="19" to="20" index="y">
<cfloop from="1" to="33" index="x">
<cfset testUrl="http://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/#y#s#x#w.png">
<cfhttp method="head" url="#testUrl#"
resolveurl="no" throwonerror="no"
<!--- Check if no status code or status code 404 --->
<cfif NOT IsDefined("cfhttp.responseheader.status_code")
OR cfhttp.responseheader.status_code EQ "404">
<cfset result=false>
<cfelse>
<cfoutput><a href="#testUrl#">#testUrl#</a></cfoutput><br
</cfif>
</cfloop>
</cfloop>
IMO nicer version: http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/
Just because I feel like it... I think you mean any positive altitude is valid. And given the type of plane, probably not in space either.
But yeah, I know what you mean ;)
That's what I was referring to :)
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
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.
I thought perhaps the flying whales in the Pines of Rome sequence from Fantasia 2000.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I found the petunias first, and didn't get the reference until I saw the whales. There's plenty of missiles too, but nowhere near the whales (yet?)
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>