xkcd is a Stick Figure Comic by Randall Munroe. It is a gag-a-day comic, and generally does not have a continuing plot line or continuity (though there are occasional short story arcs). Many of the jokes are based on math, physics, UNIX and Internet memes, as well as romance and sex.Originally a relatively unknown set of personal sketches and doodles, it grew in popularity in 2006 when other webcomics (such as Dinosaur Comics) began linking to it. However, it was when Randall posted a "Map of the Internet", and said map was subsequently featured on Slashdot, that xkcd's popularity truly erupted. Since then, it has been among the most well-known of webcomics.Of course, you wouldn't know that just by looking at the comic. The characters are still drawn as very basic stick figures, with no facial features other than hairstyle (which is often used to distinguish males and females). However, there are three recurring characters who can be recognized by their respective headgear:
A beret-clad Cloudcuckoolander and Anti-Nihilist, generally thought of to be an Existentialist, albeit one with a thing for pastries.
A dark haired woman, referred to in several comics as "Megan"; she shares many of the same interests with the nondescript Author Avatar and is commonly shown to be in a relationship with him. Was the main character of the "Choices" Series.
There also seems to be a recurring main character with a distinct personality (most likely the author's own), but since he looks exactly the same as all the other stick figures without hair or hats, it could be argued that he's just a stock character.
There are other recurring characters in the same social circle — e.g. the dark-hairedexistential nihilist — but most of them are less distinctive.Has mentioned this very wiki. The wiki has returned the favor, taking many XKCD comics for page images (see Trivia.XKCD for the list).xkcd is part of the documentation for goto on the PHP website, and was mentioned as a ticket in a changelog◊note For those curious, here's #619.Numerologists take note: adding up the numerical values of the title's letters yields a sum of 42. Coincidence? ...Yes.Reached one thousand comics in January 2012. As the above-mentioned main character says, "Wow — just 24 to go until a big round-number milestone!"In June 2012, xkcd added a section called What If? to its website, where Randall tackles hypothetical questions with physics and silly drawings. Has a lot of snark.Finally, be sure not to miss the Alt Text possessed by each and every comic which contain additional jokes and context.Completely unrelated, but some fan had the bright idea to create mathematics in XKCD style.
Affectionate Parody: 141: Parody Week, whose strips don't really make fun of anything and, in some cases, could actually have been used by the regular cartoonist except for the artwork. It turns into a deconstruction of parody with the author halting his MegaTokyo parody because he feels sorry for the writer. The author also stops a later Penny Arcade parody because he respects the writers too much (with the respect transitioning to Ho Yay and then Slash Fic before he finishes.)
And now for 2012, the comic itself changes depending upon the web browser one views the comic with (as well as various other factors, such as location and operating system, but the web browser is the easiest to view the change with), with at least four different variations in Google Chrome, Windows Explorer, Moxilla Firefox, and Opera.
The Alt Text for 1036 reads: "I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord."
Asbestos-Free Cereal: The "Free" strip, featuring three brands of cereal, with one of the being asbestos-free! Provides the page image for the trope and is the Trope Namer.
"I hate whatever marketer first realized you could do this."
Art Evolution: Compare the first 150 strips or so with the newer ones.
Art Shift: A few strips actually shift up in terms of quality. The author doesn't seem to have a strong inclination to keep up such things though. On occasion, Randall has created temporary UNIX-themed and 3D-versions of the comic.
Each group of four bits represents one nibble (hexadecimal digit): 6261 7365 2032. Each pair of digits is the ASCII code for one character in "base 2".
Now and then, I announce "I know you're listening" to empty rooms. If I'm wrong, nobody knows, and if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.
Buffy Speak: Up Goer Five is a cross between this and an inverted Expospeak Gag: it describes a Saturn V rocket using only the 1000 most-frequently-used words in the English language.
In "Useless", an early comic, a heart is inserted into various mathematical formulas ending in question marks. It was captioned "My normal approach is useless here." Five years later in "Probability", he wrote a strip about a terminally ill woman. The Alt Text reads, "My normal approach is useless here, too."
In "A-Minus-Minus", the Black Hat Guy sells an office chair on eBay, only for the actual package to arrive at the purchaser's home a bobcat. 251 comics later in "Packages", one character sets up a script that purchases something random off eBay every day so he can continually receive packages (notice the Alt Text). The bobcat gets mentioned yet again in "Coupon Code" (Alt Text again).
In "Barrel - Part 1", the very first comic, a boy starts floating around in a barrel. In "Ferret", the author puts wings on a Ferret hoping he will fly. Eventually, the boy loses the barrel, and 11 comics later, in "Barrel - Part 5", is rescued by the winged ferret.
The punchline for "Barrel - Part 1" is reused in Click and Drag", when you scroll all the way to the right.
The man with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish from "Loud Sex" gets a mention in the Alt Text from "Bass".
In "Forks and Spoons" scientists created fork/spork/spoon hybrids, with disastrous results. Only two comics later they are mentioned again in "Making Hash Browns".
The mouseover in "Cat Proximity" reads "You're a kitty!" The mouseover in "Turtles" "You're a turtle!".
He measures things by the silhouette which is always before his eyes in "Converting to Metric".
Oh, hey, speaking of cat captions... I IZ "IN UR REALITY"!
In "Circuit Diagram", the Alt Text remarks, "I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped." ("Nerd Sniping")
The comic Up Goer Five explains a space rocket with only the 1000 most common words used in English. It includes the phrase "you will not go to space today" for when something goes wrong. The (later) What IfModel Rockets explains whether it's possible to reach space with model rocket engines. That phrase ends the article.
Car Fu: Actually Submarine Fu: Black Hat Guy recovers his hat from his Love Interest in this strip by crashing a Russian nuclear submarine through the ice she's skating on.
I eat my body weight in food every thirty-one days. That's slightly faster than the human average. [stares off at the clouds then falls down] I'm part of the floor now.
Distracted From Death: In this strip a guy is so worried about this happening that he forces in sweet last words even when his love interest is just going to the grocery store.
Don't Explain the Joke: The comic frequently violates this rule. In many cases, the punchline occurs in the second-to-last panel, only to have a final panel that then explains it. Other times the punchline is in the last panel... but there's a final sentence that then explains the joke. On the rare occasion neither are done, you can probably check the Alt Text and find it explained there.
Early Installment Weirdness: Newcomers to the series will find it very strange that the first few dozen comics are actually just sketches and philosophical musings set to artwork. It wasn't until around 50 strips in that xkcd as we know it began to surface.
Evolutionary Levels: Parodied in "Evolving", which uses a Pokémon style cut scene to show a disease-causing bacterium evolving into a drug-resistant variant.
Flatworld: Here, in a reference to Flatland. (Bonus points for the Alt Text pointing out what a stick figure would look like in Flatland according to the book.)
Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle: Done with a wolf, goat and cabbage, it ends halfway through when the problem solver leaves the wolf behind, questioning why he had a wolf in the first place. The Alt Text goes a step further asking why there was a cabbage, taking only the goat, goats are fine.
Golden Mean Fallacy: Played for laughs here. The Alt Text explicitly states: "I believe the truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims."
Major General Song: "Every Major's Terrible", which is about choosing a course and how the person can't/won't/doesn't want to do any of them. Someone sang the whole comic (with accompaniment) here.
Note that the video was released within hours of the comic. Say what you will about XKCD's fandom, but damn.
The Masochism Tango: Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend. He blew up her car, for Chrissakes. By moving the mines she had set up to blow up his car. She stole his hat. He likes his hat.
Measuring the Marigolds: Subverted in "Beauty". Yes, scientists find beauty and wonder in their work. It's just not always what everyone else thinks of as beautiful.
Black Hat Guy: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.
Here. Just so you understand how weird this is, the guy on the right is talking to the past, and it's talking back.
This strip starts out fairly normal. Then the whole world falls apart all of a sudden.
The small print about "the algorithm" on the home page might also qualify as either an example or a parody:
We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves.note In context, possibly a reference to the search engine rather than the hypercompetent valet. The algorithm is Banned In China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the algorithm. This is close.
The story behind that is as follows: In 2007, some billboards popped up in New York with those sentences on them, as part of an apparent viral marketing campaign by ask.com. However, they apparently didn't finish it; the phrases didn't return anything relevant on Google. Randall decided to exploit this by having the many bloggers in his fanbase post the sentences as links to xkcd.com. He added them to the site itself so that the effort wouldn't be misinterpreted as an attempted Googlebomb. It worked; if you Google the phrases, the top results are all references to xkcd.
"Perhaps this could change your mind?" It's like something straight out of The Twilight Zone.
Mood Whiplash: Too many to fully enumerate. Some examples:
Then we have #521. Start with trying to one-up some christmas light displays on Youtube. End up fighting raptors with lightsabers, Bill Gates killing Santa, and finally cutting down the Yggdrasil as a Christmas tree.
Expect to burst out laughing several times during #1110. Not from the little tidbits in it, but from scrolling through it and finding you're still scrolling but it's not ending!
That or simply stare in awe with mouth agape while thinking about how long that had to have taken to make...
Alt Text: Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.
Planet of Steves: The Alt Text for Hurricane Names reveals that with the English and Greek alphabets and the Oxford English Dictionary exhausted, and the subsequent storms proving to be uncountably infinite, the NOAA gives up and names all the remaining hurricanes "Steve".
Pluto Is Expendable: "It's been two years. I thought those wounds had healed. But I stand by what I said. Pluto never should have been a planet."
Reference Overdosed: Many comics require the reader to know the reference to get the joke.
Remix Comic: the forum-produced Making XKCD Slightly Worse. Notable is the fact that the spin-off comic has more than three times the number of strips than the original.
Retirony: This strip shows an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defy the trope, with an officer dying the day before his last day on the job, when the department locks retiring officers into a heavily protected room for that day.
Mentioned several times. This strip actually includes the opening score, making for what has to be the most subtle Rickroll ever (unless you can read music).
Self-Imposed Challenge: A rare non-video game example: This strip inspired an actual Flash implementation of the game. It's pretty unplayable (that's kind of the point) with the usual Tetris goals, but a MeFite pointed out the game is actually interesting and reasonably challenging if you try to end the game with as few pieces as you can.
Serial Escalation: There are poster sized comics. There's one or two wall sized comics. But #1110 is so big it probably wouldn't fit on the floor of a passenger jet hangar. It's 165888 pixels wide by 79872 pixels high (roughly 46'/12m wide by 22'/6m tall at 300DPI). The stick figures are about half an inch tall in a world that is to them 5 miles across. Trying to find everything in it is likely to take at least half an hour.
Sexy Shirt Switch: At the bottom of #819, that girl in biology class wearing one of your shirts rates 4 (out of 4) stars on the hotness meter. That girl in biology class wearing one of your mother's shirts rates a Flat "What.".
In the first "1337" comic, one character poses the question, "How does she type with oven mitts on?" This is a reference to a frequently asked question on Homestar Runner's Strong Bad emails, and possibly also a reference to his "training gloves" in the site's "In Search of the Yello Dello" toon.
He has also declared war on chemists, though that's more a grudging rivalry than a belittlement.
With some exceptions, like the one against homeopathy, the Take Thats are usually intended to be in jest. Occasionally the comic doesn't make this entirely clear; notably, the one against anthropology majors was so widely seen as a serious insult to the field that the author later issued an apology for it, as noted above under Incredibly Lame Pun.
"Remember last week when we dug up all those indian bones and made puppets out of them? It turns out they were buried over an ancient indian burial ground!"
"Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link]."
Truth in Television: The "Get out of my head Randall!" meme where many of the comics are applicable to the everyday lives of the readers.
Unholy Matrimony: Black Hat Guy acquires a girlfriend in a mini-arc who shares similar interests and is more than a match for him. She comes up again, but slightly more rarely than he does.
One guy tries to fool people by getting a vanity plate consisting of 1's and I's, thinking he can commit crimes with impudence as no one will be able to correctly record his plate number. This backfires on him in that he's the only one with a license plate like this, so the cops can find him easily; and the Alt Text suggests his girlfriend gets a similar plate so that she can commit crimes that he'll get blamed for.
Viewers Are Geniuses: One of the biggest practitioners. The strip often bases comics on obscure math, physics, or computer jokes. This has gotten less common over time, and the forums are very useful. You may need to be knowledgeable in several possibly obscure or complicated fields to completely get some of the earlier ones. For example, computer programing, meteorology, cosmic rays, and tao philosophy. Really.
Another example: Hand this to an electronics technician, and just sit back and watch the laughter.
Viewers Are Morons: This directly goes against the above assertion, sometimes twining the two. While many of the jokes in the strip are aimed towards those in specialized fields or hobbies, Randall has a tendency to explain these references and jokes within the comic.
We All Live in America: The old World According To Americans "map of ignorance/prejudice" gag is subverted when the Americans asked turn out to be "unexpectedly good at geography" and also aware of the holes in their knowledge.
Wham Episode: Randall reveals that due to illness in the family, the next few weeks are going to be filler. Normal updates resume. Then five months later, he gives us a Tear Jerker with a heart-breaking Ironic Echo. (His now-wife is doing just fine, though.)
Zerg Rush: Due to the popularity of xkcd, it's common to click on links and watch counts skyrocket. This is more apparent on "What if?", which has at least one outside link and a couple of PDFs per post. One of the most common comments in any of them is "xkcd army reporting in!"
◊note .Numerologists take note: adding up the numerical values of the title's letters yields a sum of 42. Coincidence? ...Yes.Reached one thousand comics in January 2012. As the above-mentioned main character says, "Wow — just 24 to go until a big round-number milestone!"In June 2012, xkcd added a section called What If? to its website, where Randall tackles hypothetical questions with physics and silly drawings. Has a lot of snark.Finally, be sure not to miss the Alt Text possessed by each and every comic which contain additional jokes and context.Completely unrelated, but some fan had the bright idea to create mathematics in XKCD style
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