Awesome / xkcd

It Makes Sense in Context. Well, sort of.

• This happened to my friend...
• FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
• Black Hat Guy has an innumerable amount of these:
  • Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. I hope we've learned something today.
  • This one as seen below, which is a crowning moment for anyone with many female friends who actively engage in the use of the internet and sees the crap they put up with.
  • Black Hat gets his hat back.
    • Let us not forget that girl's crowning moment of awesome that started the whole thing off...
  • And then he declines the position of Internet Secretary... and how.
  • Anyone who doesn't wish they could do this is either not human or a liar.
• This strip regarding the male penis-size obsession.
• Linux users being elitists is also funny.
• "I think we've got something here..." "Something" being the best action movie ever.
  • The fact that such a movie now exists.
• HARK!
• You just WON the Game
• A Bunch Of Rocks. Even hits a good punchline.
• Party.
• The comic inspired a change in Youtube's user interface, in under two weeks.
  • Another one: Comic #195 inspired a project to make a map of the ENTIRE INTERNET.
• Stand aside! The original Windmill Crusader finally gets his moment.
  The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed — for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.
• Stephenie Meyer vs. 4chan in "Troll Slayer".
• For Randall for strip #687: the math checks out to be within the error bars of the equation given.
• #734, #735, and #736. All three are among the best strips Munroe has done, and even garnered praise from xkcd's primary hateblog. And all three appeared in the span of one week.
• The Showdown.
• Getting Bill Amend, the guy who does FoxTrot to do a guest strip for him.
• The reprise of Science: It works, bitches.
• It's a bird... it's a plane... it's Sagan-Man! On a serious note, eliminating crime and improving scientific research at the same time would be very awesome.
• #841. Burn.
• The World According to a Group of Americans ^note Who turned out to be unexpectedly good at geography, derailing our attempt to illustrate their country's attitude toward the rest of the world.
• I have just one tattoo. Doubles as a Tear Jerker, if one is familiar with the... events... in the author's life around the time.
• They just turned the science of passwords on its head.
  • When you reset your password in Guild Wars 2, they even link you to this strip first!
• Money. Holy... The hours of work!!!!!
  • In the same stream of thought, while not part of the main comic, the now famous radiation chart◊ is a fairly awesome moment for Randall.
  • Any time this guy makes a graph or chart you have to click to zoom in on in place of a comic is awesome. Here's another one.
• Negging: Make sure you know your victim before you try it.
• Umwelt. The image changes depending on what browser you are using, what OS you are running, how wide your screen is, the height of your screen, where you are coming from, and your geographical location. Known variants include (but are not limited to): Wikipedia, Reddit, the UK, Alaska, Florida, Illinois, Germany, the Google corporate network, MIT, a mobile browser, the Chrome browser, Netscape Navigator, Israel, the Armed Forces, and many, many more.^note This is very frustrating if your browser/OS doesn't support the code, and you never got to see it for yourself. (Explainxkcd and other archives of Umwelt exist, but are technically not quite as authentic as seeing Umwelt the normal way, on xkcd.com.)
• Every Major's Terrible, which bemoans the uselessness of liberal arts degrees while pointing out how the various science majors have their own deficiencies... all to the tune of "Modern Major General". Almost immediately, Youtube videos started popping up of people attempting to sing thedamn thing.
  • This rendition's pretty good though.
• A very exciting time indeed.
• Click and drag. No, really: click on the screen with your mouse, and, while holding the mouse button, drag the cursor. Then do it again. And again. Keep going. Then start again, and go the other way.
  • The surface doesn't begin to describe it. The caves give Moria a run for its money.
    • If you'd like to spare yourself the fun of discovery and just see the whole thing.
  • THERE ARE WHALES IN THE SKY
    • AND JELLYFISH IN THE EARTH
• Up Goer Five, or Saturn V in Simple English.
• The 2011 MIT mystery hunt included a puzzle (click "call in answer" for the solution) based on xkcd. So far, so normal. The solution was highly constrained by the round's meta. So Randall wrote a strip based on the answer the puzzle needed to have, and published it during hunt — shortly before the first team unlocked that puzzle.
• Time. The comic consists of a single panel that changes automatically every hour, with each change advancing the narrative. It ran for four months from March 25 to July 26, 2013, with a new frame every hour, and occasionally more frequently. Here's an auto-updating page with all the strips, in chronological order.
  • The evolution of the story is the "Holy Shit!" Quotient of Awesome in itself: what started with very little words as a simple construction of a sandcastle on a beach, proceeded to go increasingly elaborate, to the point of including a trebuchet. It took a month worth of updates for the couple to finish the castle and embark on a quest to find out how rivers and sea work, turning it into a Road Trip Plot story. They encountered a lot of strange stuff along the way and over two months of updates later finally met other people. They were treated to an Exposition Info Dump and a Reveal: all this time they've been on the bottom of what we know as the Mediterranean Sea after it dried up, and the story itself appears to be set After the End in the far future^note Supported by presence of small isolated groups of people with very varied level of the world knowledge and also via dating by the star map.. And then the Wham Episode followed: The Sea is about to refill again, bringing a Class Zero Apocalypse and resulting in The End of the World as We Know It for our main characters, who are now in a mad rush to save the rest of their people.
  • The supplemental phenomena of "Time" also deserve a mention. The official forum thread went over 40000 posts long ago, the wiki on "Time" has over 1200 pages and already the most avid readers have managed to start a Parody Religion... which after several schisms has splintered into several.
  • How awesome is it? The creator of xkcdsucks said that he couldn't bash it at all and even thought it was the best comic Randall had ever done.
  • Time won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story.
• Typing 'import antigravity' into Python (Python 3.3, at least), links you directly to this strip.
  • But it doesn't make you float.
    • Good. I prefer being an integer instead.
• Now. An image that stays in sync with the rotation of Earth.
• Galilean Moons, a bit of astronomical nerdity about Jupiter's Galilean moons. The joke hinges on the orbital resonances displayed between Ganymede, Europa, and Io.
• Pixels. How deep does the rabbit hole go?
• Landing: Tracking the landing of the Philae probe (first touchdown on a comet) in real time.
• The heroes of my field have slain one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. While the heroes of your field gathered in the desert to create a new one.
• Argument Victory.
• Hoverboard. Can you find all the coins?
  • F-ck that. Can you find the Star Destroyer? With the Crystal Gems in it?
  • Wait. There's a volcano?!
• Aang vs Dmitri Mendeleev!
• "Apollo retroreflectors."
• After several weeks of semi-depressing comics about the coronavirus, Pathogen Resistance is about how the coronavirus sees humanity.
  Alt Text: We're not locked in here with the coronavirus, the coronavirus is locked in here with us.
• ADD, which defines Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! beautifully.
• Free Speech, which makes clear that while you are free to say what you like, you are not necessarily immune to consequences.

---