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Signs Point To XKCD's Time Ending
CaptSlaq writes "According to the current imagery, it looks like Randal Munroe has finished the story he was telling with the Time series. The long running series that has spanned over 3000 images and spawned multiple methods of viewing and comment appears to have come to an end."
Just because the comic titled "Time" may have reached its final panel doesn't mean that xkcd itself is ending any time soon. We'll see on Monday whether there's a #1244.
I'm waiting for the sequel: More time.
(before anybody flames, I follow it every couple of days via http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/).
bash$
You must mean this sign: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/?frame=3094
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Replay
Sure, though some of them were harder to read than others. The key takeaway from them was that a big sea (what we later realize is the Atlantic) was about to flood into the smaller one where our protagonists built their sand castle (a version of the Mediterranean that the Oracle explained had been cut off from the Atlantic, dried up, but was now reconnecting with the Atlantic which was eager to flood into the lowlands of the dried up Mediterranean). If you looked at the maps indicating where the new shore would be, you'd see quite clearly that the places where the new shoreline stretches on the map go from what we know as the Iberian peninsula to Italy and Sicily.
Apparently, the protagonists lived somewhere south of France in the middle of the Mediterranean, but their territory was swept away by the flood. The castle where the Oracle was located, which was supposed to be just above the new waterline, roughly corresponds to the location of Marseilles.
Though I haven't seen it said elsewhere, this may be a new fiction for the creation of the Atlantis myth.
#1190 is ending, not XKCD is ending. #1190 is titled Time.
Time is what's ending, not XKCD. Time is a single comic (one of the current 1,243) which itself has over 3000 frames. What makes it unique is that they were released one at a time (originally on the half hour, which later changed to hourly). The story itself isn't overtly interesting, but the way it was released one frame at a time kept people guessing. The official XKCD thread for 1190 is massive, mostly full of speculation and even odder than normal people.
Actually, "Time" appears to have been set in the remote future, about 11 millenia from today, after Gibraltar Strait has already been closed up again for a thousand years or more (no back story for that was ever given). At one point the comic presented nearly a hundred frames of night sky, with recognizable planets and constellations. Readers versed in astronomy were able to find a date 11,000 years ahead, with consistent displacements for nearby stars (within the limits of a 553x395 image resolution). Also, the castle of the "oracle" (nicknamed Rosetta in the forum thread, after her role as a translator) appeared to be the Chateau d'If of Count of Monte Cristo fame, in Marseilles harbor.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
1190 is a slow pseudo-animation, posted without any special announcements. It updated one frame roughly every hour since March. You can see the whole sequence (we think its the whole sequence) only on fan sites, such as this.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.