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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."
I looked at it. Big black flat space with two stick figures. The Economist cares about this why?
I don't really care? I even like xkcd
Sure, the author of XKCD might have a sarcastic streak, but even if part of the reason is a shaggy-dog joke, I'm sure part of the reason is also art.
I mean, it's not an either-or situation, and setting it up as a false dichotomy isn't going to generate meaningful discussion.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
If anything, it shows how bored we are with the internet and that ANY new content sparks interest, however trivial.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Either the site's slashdotted already (after twelve minutes, on a Sunday afternoon?), or it's The Most Boring Movie Ever Made.
When done for the first time? Yes.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
http://xkcd.com/1190/
Are the frames worth any money? Is there any way I mine my own and sell them?
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Explained xkcd has a gif that combines most of the individual 'time' comics: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time
Every now and then, a graph or a chart or some insight appears in the xkcd lineup that seems somehow very different from what has gone before. I remember the day I brought up Time and was initially puzzled. I didn't get it. I moused over it and saw "Wait for it." and started staring at it intently. My mind started playing tricks on me and I thought I saw a pixel or two change, but after awhile I realized they hadn't. I checked back an hour later and the castle had changed a little, and I laughed at the notion that my experience with and interpretation of the comic had already changed with the passage of Time. I decided that that was one of the primary points. I like it.
I bet this makes the people who look at it think a bit more than they would during the first two minutes of Fantasia. If your own mind is a barren wasteland, then I guess moving slowly is a waste --- but if you can bring something of your own mind to the work, so you don't need to be force-fed sound and color full-blast to make up for your own lack of creativity, the comic gets more interesting.
No, just down the mouths of liberal arts *majors*.
There is a difference, you know.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Finally some use for my LCD picture frame.
No, "the field of liberal arts" is a division of study in university environments. "Art" is a fundamental part of the way in which humans express themselves. The difference is subtle, just like hurricanes and clown make-up.
It's not MORE impressive than Fantasia. They're both innovative animations in their own way. They're both impressive.
Well, their oceans and rivers (and general hydrological cycle) seems to have something going on that the characters (and us viewers) don't understand --- and might not be quite like our world. A monotonically rising ocean (with no waves)? Uncertainty about whether rivers are "broken"? Unknown gigantic rivers within a relatively short walk of where they live? Something tells me we're not in Kansas anymore.
and the author of XKCD takes a gigantic shit down the mouth of liberal arts on his main page?
It's a major part of art to question itself. XKCDs "gigantic shit" is a tame in joke compared with what Magritte and Duchamp did.
Well, their oceans and rivers (and general hydrological cycle) seems to have something going on that the characters (and us viewers) don't understand
That sounds very terrestrial to me.
A monotonically rising ocean (with no waves)?
Time flattens out short term fluctuations and leaves the trend.
Uncertainty about whether rivers are "broken"? Unknown gigantic rivers within a relatively short walk of where they live? Something tells me we're not in Kansas anymore.
Not knowing. Questioning. Researching. Something that takes a lot of time.
Did Dorothy leave Kansas? Or was she at home all the time. Those faces looked awfully familiar didn't they.
You mean that there are people that don't consider most of xkcd a piece of art?
Anyway, of all the amazing, insightful, and informative things things that are in xkcd, probably the one that impressed me more recently was one in What-if, explaining whats the worst that could happen missusing pressure cookers, few days before Boston bombing. That it remains there is a big message.
To be honest, the comic copied the musical piece:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
bickerdyke
Art is both a process and the product of an attempt to encapsulate and transfer a human experience through a medium.
Without audience, it's just masturbation.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The moving people aren't "smoothed out" by time --- so something odd is happening if their world is time-averaged differently than their bodies.
You're being quite literal. Art isn't literal, it combines ideas. It hints at things.
I don't know what Randall has planned; however, if the result of the characters' research/exploration endeavors turns out to be a simple elementary-school picture of the terrestrial hydrological cycle (rather than something more of a philosophical/metaphysical allegory), I'd be a bit surprised.
That wasn't what I was alluding to. I'd be gobsmacked and disappointed too if it was that. But I don't want to spell out what I think it is about.
The other 13 books in Baum's Oz series indicate a separate existence and continuity for Oz outside of Dorothy's mind.
Indeed. That's also clear from the current OZ movie. Again I was hinting, nor trying to prove or argue something.
I see something different in the story being told. The characters spend a bit of time building something amazing, and then worry that it's going to be taken away from them. They set out to figure out the reason for that.
Maybe because I've read his blog, or just because of http://xkcd.com/931/ that I see something darker in the story he's telling. Maybe it's just a metaphor, all good stories are. But that, as of now, the characters are almost visually back to where they started seems . . . poignant.
I prefer something less frantic, like: http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment.
Cannot run out of time. Time is infinite. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This... is wrong tool.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Javascript's turned on. Firefox/Iceweasel on Debian wheezy. Refreshed, now I see two miniscule stick figures on a black shoreline looking out over water(?) under a white sky. Zzzzz ...
Wait for it...
Art escapes all attempts to define it. enjoy being wrong.
...your onus is showing.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You want transcript? Have transcript. You're welcome.
Your time dilation factor is gamma = 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). Thus, to go from 1 frame per hour to 24 fps, you need gamma = 3600*24 = 86400. This means a velocity v/c = sqrt(1-1/gamma^2) = sqrt(1-1/86400^2) ~ 1 - 1/(2*86400^2) ~ 1-6.7*10^-11. As a percentage, that's about 99.9999999933% of the speed of light.
I was puzzled by the image, the first time I saw the regular XKCD page -- I didn't see the point. So I looked at Explain XKCD, and found out it that the image was being updated periodically. I checked in again later, and saw that it was basically an animated movie, which is easily missed if you look at just one static image. The thing is, there's no point to watching an animation going up, one frame at a time, over months. You're not going to get any special insights that way that you can't get when it's completed, by watching the whole thing. You could presumably go back over individual frames at that point if you want to do a close analysis of it. But there's not enough to go on yet to make sense of it.
From what I've seen of this series so far, I'm guessing it will turn out to have some meaning that can be fully explained in a sentence or two.
There's a trend in entertainment of measuring out some serial narrative, one tiny fragment at a time, and encouraging the development of a fanbase that will analyze each succeeding fragment. This happens with Webcomics, and augmented reality games, as well as with series of computer games, series of novels, and television series. While there's no shortage of bunk that appears in the fanbase's theorizing, you'll inevitably see theories emerge that are far more interesting than what the writer originally had in mind. Inevitably, the fanbase will end up burned out and disappointed.
At some point, people need to learn to develop the self-respect to just stop hitting refresh to find out what the answer is to the enigma. Just check in again in a few months, when it's all over. It'll probably seem quite clever or interesting for the minute or two it takes to watch the whole thing.
Many people probably found out from the forums, just like with Click & Drag. XKCD has comics where the full content is not immediately obvious, so people assume there is something more.
null
I wonder idly if he has drawn every frame and they are now sat on a server waiting to be served up each hour, or if he's still drawing frames for it as it goes. Obviously he must have drawn them with at least some buffer space, but I wonder how much? A day? A week? If he's drawing them as he goes, is he going to keep it up forever?
I don't want to get involved in any discussions about whether it's high art or low nerd sniping or whatnot, but you've got to hand it to that guy for dedication to the art of internet stick men. Between this one, the massive pannable one, and his excellent log-scale ones, he's a man who puts some serious effort into his website...
I'm not sure that's quite right as a definition.
It's almost a distant cousin of trolling. It's where you basically post something which you know will cause a nerd to "nerd out", with the intention specifically of getting them all fired up. The meme-maker was probably this XKCD comic:
http://xkcd.com/356/
Other examples might be asking in a sci-fi forum about which spaceship was bigger, the Battlestar Galactica from the reboot series or the Mothership from the computer game Homeworld 2. Suddenly the whole place descends into heated discussion about the pixel count of the cockpit on the video game fighter-craft versus the size of the maintenance hatches on Cylon Raiders, in a passionate forum thread that runs for 6 months and 50 pages of comments. That would be a "nerd snip".
When I first saw "time," I read the caption, "wait for it."
"Wait for what," I thought to myself.
I then spent a brief moment pondering, and then decided that whatever it was I was supposed to wait for was not worth my time, and moved on with my life.
Since then, I've cleaned my garage, put my TV up on my wall, and planted some grass seed, all of which probably would not have been accomplished had I allowed myself that nerdy sense of self-importance that comes with being a self-righteous elitist who misplaces value on "art" projects like this.
Of course, I suspect that of the number of people that do enjoy it, there is only a very small percentage that sit there and literally "wait" for an update. There are those of us who will clean our garages, put TVs up on walls, plant grass seed and so on and then once a day or so, go back and spend 2 minutes or so checking what's happened over the course of the day in the comic.
Personally, I'm really enjoying it thus far. The characters are somehow beautifully naive about the world and have a curiosity to go and learn as if they somehow didn't exist prior to the existence of the comic itself.
Call it art; call it wonderful; call it crap; call it masturbation... whatever - as long as I and others enjoy it, we really don't care what you think.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Sure, things date. I saw Fantasia just once, on the big screen at a film festival. And because the festival were good about putting the film in context of it's achievement, I could appreciate it for what an achievement it was when it was made.
It's a bit like Laurel and Hardy. It doesn't make many people laugh out loud these days. But you can still appreciate how it had people rolling in the aisles at the time.
I wonder what people will make of our best, innovative stuff in 70 years time?!
If you are watching it unfold as it goes, your imagination can get involved.
It's like reading a book and speculating about what is going to happen. Sure you can do a little of that in a movie running at 24 fps, but not for long before the next bit of info comes along.
There is merit for those watching it in real time.
We can see why the new XKCD comics have been lacking any humor or quality....