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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."
http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/
http://xkcd.com/1190/
It's about time.
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.
so....it has come to this...
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$
it just falls into the category of one of those things it seems like geeks spill way too much jizz over.
Like when people say "turn in your geek card" when someone fails to get an inside joke related to an uncited quotation from some science fiction movie like Blade Runner or WarGames.
You must mean this sign: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/?frame=3094
Wiki
Replay
Because you quoted a character name, I could Google that it came from Blade Runner. But a lot of these allusions change a line's nouns, pronouns, and verb tense to fit the context, making it harder to search by exact phrase to figure out what people are talking about when they speak this Tamarian language of movie quotes. So yes, I'm for real. I'm trying to figure out what specific films, video games, webcomics, etc. I'd need to catch up on to keep a geek card current.
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.
Okay, and the author has expressed any of that... where, exactly?
All he did was make a comic. Other people turned it into a thing, and that somehow makes him a diva?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I enjoyed it. But then, over time I got to see Munroe as generous and friendly rather than cynical and manipulative. So no, to me that was definitely not the point of the exercise.
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.
And then we find out it was a nine line Python script that wrote, drew and uploaded the entire 1190 comic.
... and Tolstoy wrote fiction books. The medium has changed, the audience has changed, but it's still art, and I think it's quite insightful for the most part. Look at the number of times it's referenced here on SlashDot. Randall has vision, a good understanding of math and science and a great sense of humour. Personally, I wish a lot more people were like him, rather than bitter critics.
Londo Molari: "My shoes are too tight, but it doesn 't matter, because I have forgotten how to dance."
It's a comic, guys. I don't read Cathy, but I don't feel obliged to mustard all over Cathy Guisewite because her comic doesn't amuse me. Why do people dump so hard on xkcd and Randall Munroe? If you don't like the comic, don't read it, and don't read Slashdot articles about it—and shut the chirp up and let the rest of us enjoy it in peace.
I found it fun. That's all. It was fun. It was original, and intriguing, and a little challenging, and a nice change of mood when I got home from work (or when I needed a break at work).
And it was something I don't believe any webcomic had ever done before. When I submitted the original Slashdot story about "Time", I thought that aspect might interest people. Instead, the story got the same sort of molpy-chirping geek-elitist hate posts that this one is gathering.
For the record: "Time" was followed by college students and septuagenarians (I'm in my 50s, and xkcd regularly makes me laugh). Musicians, math teachers, writers, and astronomers contributed to the forum thread. The last figure we saw was that over 2 million words of original material had been posted to the thread. We weren't doing it for geek cred; we were doing it because we enjoyed ourselves.
Grow up a little, guys, OK?
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
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.
Don't forget Antares was missing from the night sky; I cling to my theory that it going supernova damaged to ozone layer sufficiently to precipitate an ice-age that dropped the ocean levels, closing Gibraltar.
Incredibly stupid people frequently project the over zealousness of fans onto humble authors. Because, you know, you can tell how big an ego an author has by how much his fans talk about him. If someone says you're really good at what you do, that means you've got a big head, right? Yeah, it almost hurts trying to psychoanalyze that level of stupid...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
...
I don't click on stories that don't interest me. That'd be an utterly stupid waste of time. Moreso to take the time to comment on them.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."