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Xkcd's Long-running "Time" Comic: Work of Art Or Nerd Sniping?
Fortran IV writes "Randall Munroe's xkcd webcomic has done some odd things before, but #1190, 'Time,' is something special. It's a time-lapse movie of two people building a sandcastle that's been updating just once an hour (twice an hour in the beginning) for well over a month (since March 25th), and after over a thousand frames shows no sign of ending; in a few days the number of frames will surpass the total number of xkcd comics. It's been mentioned in The Economist. Some of its readers have called it the One True Comic; others have called it a MMONS (Massively Multiplayer Online Nerd Sniping). It's sparked its own wiki, its own jargon (Timewaiters, newpix, Blitzgirling), and a thread on the xkcd user forum that runs to over 20,000 posts from 1100 distinct posters. Is 'Time' a fascinating work of art, a deep sociological experiment — or the longest-running shaggy-dog joke in history? Randall Munroe's not saying."
If anything, it shows how bored we are with the internet and that ANY new content sparks interest, however trivial.
In my head I hear my response in Louis C. K.'s voice: You've got a slab of plastic and metal you can carry around under your arm that lets you look up the answer to any question, have a text conversation in real time with anyone on the planet, access all the works of art ever created - and you're bored. Seriously. I just searched the word 'artichoke' and got 9.9 million links in under a second. And you are jaded. That's not even good enough to hold your attention anymore?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine