xkcd vs. MATT

Last panel = he is free to go about his business older and wiser, rather than being actually trapped amongst libertarian skeletons.

so instead of rand being a secret key into understanding the real world, the setup is that someone (?) built a library (?) where if you gravitate to rand, then you are told you have bad taste (?)

metaphor getting stretched here

needs more amontillado

his wife is dying of cancer

yeah i clicked over a few panels and i saw something about cancer. that's awful.

Holy shit.

Just...keep going.

http://xkcd.com/1110/

Yeah... wow, holy shit is right.

lol @ the bitcoin island

I have no idea if there's meant to be one specific end point but I've reached an end point, and it feels just right.

lol, I tried, but I have work to do and gave up past the pirate ship to the left

This is a hell of a thing.

Some bits:

At 165888 x 79872 pixels, or 1.3 terapixels, the image would fill the screens of 4212 iPads with retina displays in an 81 x 52 grid. The grayscale image is 12.3 gigabytes in size. If it was printed at a size big enough that you could see the people, it would cover a football end zone.

as noted in the comments to Ned's link, a low-res spoiler map version

Someone created a zoomable variation:

http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/

videogames as art

this is... kind of cool? are we sure XKCD did this?

Hahah yeah, I was wondering that myself.

It's very strange, I never thought that this would have left me with a sense of the sublime but in a weird way it has. Also, given the mentions earlier in the thread re: his wife's cancer, a lot of it feels very elegaic, especially towards that endpoint I mentioned I stumbled upon.

the more I scroll through this, the more amazed I am

most of the jokes are terrible but the scale is staggering

btw if you keep going past bitcoin island there's a detour that blew my mind

http://blackspherestudios.com/storage/xkcd_huge_static.html

i believe this is less than 12.3gb

i followed a hole in the ground and came to a graveyard.

tbh it reminds me a lot of Jet Set Willy

http://www.retrobabble.com/games/emus/spectrum/jsw/jet_set_willy_crash_map.jpg

Is there anything if you go up? I tried that out but then there was no way of telling if I was still scrolling or if I'd hit the top, as it was all blank white space.

there is, not much, but there is some stuff

fuck this

huge lols at anyone who was on the page for more than 3 seconds

yeah i suppose that time could've been better spent clicking through listicles over at spin

oh no, i've enjoyed a wrong thing

reminds me more of the procedurally generated Exile map

http://www.stairwaytohell.com/gamehelp/MAP-Exile-BC.html

massaging my listicles as i type this

Amazingly huge? Yes
Funny? Not in the slightest

no, i never laughed. did have fun poking around though.

tbh anyone who laughs when they stumble across the graveyard probably needs to talk to someone

Yeah, I don't think it's much cop aside from being an interesting idea reasonably well executed. Though I didn't see the graveyard, maybe there's some unutterable pathos he's got going on?

huge lols at anyone who was on the page for more than 3 seconds

― centibutt hz (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, 20 September 2012 06:42 (16 hours ago)

Pup

with whiney on this one -- can see being impressed by the amount of work that went into it but not at the actual result

don't really care about this dude's comics but i do like the austere black & white landscape look here

with whiney on this one -- laughing at you for spending more than three seconds looking at something potentially interesting

I like exploring even if what I'm exploring is a bit pointless and boring, e.g. making sure I've seen every last corner and opened every box on an RPG level, so I did enjoy this for more than the 3 seconds allowed by WGW.

But it was kind of sparsely populated, like (on my screen at least) if you go down the mineshaft it takes a hell of a lot of mouse-swipes to see even a tumbling stick figure or a small side niche with nothing amusing in and then it goes further down and I just thought "err... nah". I liked the concept though.

The pic and concept itself is a lot of work but the javascript code is a bit weird and maybe hastily assembled? Every time your viewport goes (even partially) into undrawn territory it still tries to load an image for that section, e.g. on the aforementioned mineshaft you're probably not exactly horizontally aligned with the image boundaries so every time you move down it requests two new images, one which exists and one which doesn't. Dude's web server logs must be full of literally millions of image 404s this morning.

Yeah nobody except me is enough of a nerd to care about that.

this was fun to screw around with for a few minutes, but the earnestness of this guy's style makes me squirm... makes winnie the pooh look like a william friedkin movie.

honestly it sort of gave me carpal tunnel

when will this guy learn how to draw

What would you consider the benefits of learning how to draw for him?

better at job?

more money

for a couple of weeks some people might not realise it was just awful until they read the words

not really thinking about benefits for him tbh

All good points from the fun-haters!

XKCD is for those of us who realize life is not all about happy endings and trophy wives and who is better than who and all that shit. It's for those of us who live in reality. It's for the intelligent. It's for the insane.

kudos guys, I now hate XKCD again, plus all of you, and the baby Jesus

Actually sort of surprised it took you guys as long as 24 hours to completely ruin this.