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."

Comments

Nooooooo!!!!!!

[d33tah]

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

oblink

[yo303]

http://xkcd.com/1190/

Re:oblink

[SJHillman]

#1190 is ending, not XKCD is ending. #1190 is titled Time.

Re:oblink

[FatLittleMonkey]

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.

Well good

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time.

Re:Well good

[Anonymous Coward]

You both suck at reading comprehension.

Sequel

[MavEtJu]

I'm waiting for the sequel: More time.

(before anybody flames, I follow it every couple of days via http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/).

The concept of a geek card

[tepples]

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.

Re:The concept of a geek card

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a geek cargo cult out there, and it's populated with people that desperately wished they finished that astro physics degree or didn't drop out of DeVry. They believe that by adorning themselves with tokens and fetishes of geekdom, that they will become smarter or work hard by osmosis. This typically happens later in life as an attempt to masquerade their way through technical interviews. I honestly don't care all that much about Dilithium crystals because the real world operates on fossil fuels and electricity, but that doesn't stop these charlatans from wishing it did.

Re:The concept of a geek card

[PopeRatzo]

There is a geek cargo cult out there, and it's populated with people that desperately wished they finished that astro physics degree or didn't drop out of DeVry. They believe that by adorning themselves with tokens and fetishes of geekdom, that they will become smarter or work hard by osmosis.

Either that, or it just happens to be another fashion phenomenon, and doesn't say anything at all about their inner lives or philosophy or willingness to look directly into reality's hard face, as you have apparently done. Maybe they just, you know, enjoy sci-fi and tech stuff and chicks in horned-rim glasses.

Like tattoos. People who don't have tattoos seem to want to create an entire psychodrama in their heads about the motivation and world-view of the person with the tattoo. But sometimes, it really is just because somebody wanted a fleur-de-lis on their calf because they like the way it looks.

Everybody is so anxious to diminish other people as this AC seems to want to do. I wonder what's made so many people so grumpy that they feel the need to try to minimize others with such ersatz psychological profiles based on data picked out of their underpants. Maybe it's the economy. Or maybe it's just that grumpy people seem more apt to complain loudly.

There's a Wiki and a replay site

[Anonymous Coward]

Wiki
Replay

Re:There's a Wiki and a replay site

[De Lemming]

I know about a second replay site. It's not as good as the one on geekwagon.net, but it has sound :-)

And don't forget the forum thread, which currently has 51583 posts. In this thread a new religion that worships the One True Comic was started. Also a few new standard units were introduced, based on the NewPix (half an hour), which was later replaced with the LongPix (one hour) when the update interval of the comic changed. People in the thread did extensive analysis of the comic, and later on some started analyzing the forum thread itself. The thread was also the starting point of the replay web sites.

Re:The Oracle

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Misleading summary

[DG]

Agreed! How dare people enjoy something!

(Oh, I think Kevin Bacon may be teaching your daughter how to dance. You should probably check into that)

Re:Darmok and Jihad at Viagra

[tedgyz]

Has anyone noticed it is impossible to be "current" anymore, geekly or otherwise? There are too many information streams.

Damn you internet! Damn you all to hell!

Re:XKCD "experimental comics"

[Tridus]

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?

Re:Misleading summary

[Art Challenor]

Couple times per year?

You must not read many threads here on Slashdot, because there seems to be an obligatory link in every story.

Citation Needed! http://xkcd.com/285/

Re:Darmok and Jihad at Viagra

[Nerdfest]

It used to be possible but they killed Google Reader.

Re:title plus the comic is full message

[SJHillman]

And then we find out it was a nine line Python script that wrote, drew and uploaded the entire 1190 comic.

Re:XKCD "experimental comics"

[Nerdfest]

... 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.

Re:Misleading summary

[Bengie]

Everything stopped being funny YEARS ago

Welcome to being old.

What the chirp is wrong with people?

[Fortran IV]

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?

Re:What the chirp is wrong with people?

[thoth]

Exactly!

Sure, not every XKCD comic is brilliant, but plenty are funny, appealing to a tough demographic for subject material.

I think his various infographics are fantastic (money, radiation) and a handful of info comics are similarly amazing (gravity wells, ocean depths, movie plots). His "What If?" series is also extremely interesting.

Sites that feed off the "XKCD is overrated" vibe come across as pathetic calls for attention from people too lame and stupid to produce their own work. Basically some members of the geek community have this bizarre calling to drop their pants and publicly poop all over whatever they think is overrated. The fact is their sum total contribution to the world is being a shit stain on the fabric of the web.

Re:What the chirp is wrong with people?

[osu-neko]

I'll admit that I used to be a regular xkcd reader. I checked out this article as "Time" seemed like it could be interesting. I was wrong. It's the same nonsense that I and others outgrew years ago.

People's interests change over time. They get bored with some things and move on. But trolls like to use the word "outgrew" to try to offend current fans, and particularly immature people view these sorts of continuous, inevitable shifts in interests over time as signs of increasing maturity on their own part, not so much to offend anyone, but as a way of making themselves feel superior. Often then aren't smart enough to realize that's what they're doing.

(Yes, in case it wasn't obvious, the irony is intentional...)

Re:The Oracle

[Fortran IV]

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.

Antares

[xiphmont]

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.

Re:Misleading summary

[fahrbot-bot]

Everything stopped being funny YEARS ago

Welcome to being old.

Actually, as someone who turned 50 in May, I find many things/people getting funnier/stupider as I get older. Probably as I gain perspective and realize how ridiculous and unimportant most things really are, especially in contrast to how serious and important people think those things are. Losing my wife of 20 years to brain cancer in 2006 (just 7 weeks after diagnosis) probably helps with that perspective -- Remember Sue...

All life's little problems are just a distraction from the one big problem - that there's no fucking point to anything. (Just my 2 cents.)

Re:Misleading summary

[Jaruzel]

Dude...

I just read this:

http://remembersue.tumblr.com/remember

Wow. :( Made me cry a little.

I won't say I'm sorry, as I don't know you, but thanks for sharing; There's so much shit on the Internet not worth reading these days, it's nice sometimes to find something so real and emotive.

-Jar

Re:XKCD "experimental comics"

[osu-neko]

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...

Re:Darmok and Jihad at Viagra

[Calydor]

There are too many information streams.

Just don't cross them and you'll be fine.