xkcd readers successfully overran a park in Cambridge a week ago, and it’s taken me this long to fully recover. But boy, was it fun. Here’s a wrap-up:
Back in the spring, when I lived in Virginia, I drew this comic. The date was in the future, the coordinates were a park in Cambridge. When the date came last weekend, hundreds of people showed up.
How it went:
People were camped out there starting the night before. Without any obvious organization, they brought altered signs for the park, raptor costumes, signs, red spiders, and a tent full of xkcd-related memorabilia. They climbed the octahedral structure in the middle of the park and did their best to collapse it. Afterward, at the nearby Danahey Park, there was a trebouchet.
I had made a point of staying quiet about my plans for the coordinates. I just directed people back to the comic, which suggested that no one showed up. And, indeed, when I have dreams like that and go to the place or look for the person, there’s no one there. Dreams don’t work like that. So if they’re just your own desires whispering to you, of what use are they? As Haroun would ask, what’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? The answer was obvious. Dreams are where messages start, not where they arrive.
I realized roughly what would happen if I drew up the coordinates in a comic. And people came. It couldn’t happen exactly like it did in the comic, obviously, but it was a gathering of lovely people all brought together by their shared interest in adventure, puzzles, and people, and dreams. And it was a wonderful party.
I hung out nearby, with some friends and relatives, and put together my contribution to the gathering. Since the comic had created a counter to its own conclusion, clearly it needed to be corrected. I got 40 feet of whiteboard in 4×8 segments. I drew up the Dream Girl comic on the first one, but left out the concluding line. Instead, I left the next 35 feet for people to fill in what had happened.
I said a few words explaining this, passed out Sharpies, and then was swept to the center of a crowd of autograph-seekers. For a couple hours, I signed every blank surface anyone showed to me. This included playpen balls, shirts, breasts, a mattress, a picture of two monkeys having sex, and, at one point, the side of a Mobius strip. Afterward, we went to a trebouchet demonstration, had food, and (in a complicated string of events) reenacted the couch affair from Dirk Gently. After hanging out with some folks from Kansas and having a lovely hour-long conversation about the Animorphs, I fell asleep at 6:00 AM and slept for a full day — 25 hours — waking up briefly to eat.
Here’s an article in the Phoenix about the meetup.
Click here for a page with high-res images of all five whiteboards:
A few selections:
There were far too many pictures taken for me to wade through them all, but here are a few I pulled from the Flickr pool:
Goodness, there were a lot of people.
All the park signs were helpfully rewritten.
There were several gallant protesters insisting that all assertions be fully backed-up.
There are no words that can improve this picture.
I have not forgotten about the red spiders, by the way. The final two episodes will appear eventually.
There’s a giant structure in the middle of the park — an octahedron with a network of ropes inside. It was covered with people for the entire day, and — for no clear reason — they crowd-surfed a mattress to the top.
The structure, enveloped in people.
Isn’t CD Cambodia?
There was a mighty trebouchet.
Buckles were swashed.
Love was sought.
And thank you to all the people who picked up trash.
This was fun. Let’s do it again next year. Keep an eye out for coordinates.
xkcd 
The affair was, indeed, very fun. It was like a county fair of my childhood, except without the funnel cake and with more talk about writing blag entries about the experience afterward.
Seriously, where in the physical world can you sit under a tree and indulge in a conversation which includes the line, “You haven’t made it as a science blagger until you’ve been criticized by Matt Nisbet”?
I also introduced a person I knew from the Internet to a person who works in my office. That was pretty freaky.
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I don’t CARE if next year I have other obligations like this year. I’m going. As long as it’s in the US. And not on the west coast. Aaaack.
Anyway, it looks beyond Amazing (yes, capitalized). And I mean Amazing + the highest number possible. Yay for your Amazing fandom!
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Wow…not much else to say. This sounds like it was a lot of fun, and I’m sure confusing to any non-xkcd fans.
So, where shall the raptors strike next? Canada, eh?
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what! i am so upset i missed this.
please do it in the GTA again next year!
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Thanks for posting all of this, especially the rewritten comic. I’d been planning to come, but I dislocated my patella the Friday before, and my knee was still to swollen for me to trust it to get me there, so it means a lot that I can still experience it vicariously through this blag (also through the “epsilon-theta” duck that my roommate brought back for me).
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it really was the best road trip ever!! i imagine we’ll totally be there next year… i guess we’ll have to start referencing comics now so we’ll have another tent full of inside jokes!! 😀
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Thank you Randall!
😀
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I once attempted to write a paper about Animorphs. To be fair, I was in fourth grade at the time….
oh well. the meet-up was incredible, and the four smartest people I know were there looking dumb (from Caltech, Bryn Mawr, Yale, and MIT).
Also, confession: I may have been the only liberal arts type in that park.
did anybody propose?
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The whole thing sounds awesome, and then seeing the picture of the DFAs written on one of the boards made me about cry last night when studying for an Automota test.
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Who’s already jumpy every time they see any numbers?
Each new comic, I realize I’m scouring for clues as to the location of the next meet.
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To see the most awesome comment on the whiteboards, go to the hi-def page, then scroll to the extreme bottom right.
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> What about an average coordinate beetween every place in the world, so it’s quite near everyone?
I like this idea! Western Egypt next time!
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Number=865562
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Man oh man am I sorry I missed this. I’ve read everything here about 5 times and I still didn’t think about it! Oh well, next time…next time.
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That bastard skater kid (the one who auctioned off any sharpie he came in contact with for people’s posessions and then had Randle sign his skateboard) erased what I wrote on the first whiteboard…and since I didn’t write anything else, now I only have my own pictures to prove that I said something witty. Alas. A slight sense of dismay for not being able to locate myself in any of the flickr pictures, either.
Ah well, the meet-up was fun.
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Animorphs. Ah, yes. I still maintain that my friends and I could have pwned the Yeerks as they acted in the book. It would have take a fraction of the time it took the Animorphs to pseudo-win.
Moral of the story: Show no mercy to Visser Three. I don’t care how much Ax has a conscience. He should have killed the guy back in Book Whatever (something before 15, I think).
Anywho, ’twas fun! Let’s all do it again sometime. ^_^
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West Coast Please! I’m in Oregon…
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back when that comic was published, i considered making a trip to the other side of the country… it would have been worth it just to talk nerd for a day. of course, i am breaking out in a cold sweat after seeing all the math on the whiteboards… it’s all still too recent. *gulp*
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Cambridge UK next time!
Or at least somewhere else in the UK or at least Europe 😀
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Penguin5201, you son of a bitch.
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My only reason for not going is because I’m 13. But that’s not a good reason! I live on the seacoast for New Hampshire. I think that a 2-hour drive is worth it if people from that part of the ocean on the exact other side of the world are there (Atlantis?)!
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Now I wanted to go just to ask people what the third word in the Enlgish language ends in -gr- AAH! GET THE CHAINSA- OW! NOOOOO!
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Isn’t it supposed to be spelled “Sweet Ass-Park”, with the space there, for clarity’s sake even if not for grammatical correctness?
I sort of wish I’d gone, but I was afraid it was going to be an awkward event with a bunch of people I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to take that long of a trip just to go and be awkward (I could accomplish the same by taking a much shorter trip to see my aunt. On the other hand, there would definitely not have been a trebuchet at my aunt’s place.) It does sound like it was fun, though.
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Nope, Mkat, there were at least two of us. I was there, and I’m a double-majoring in Political Science and English.
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I’ve never been so happy and sad in my life…
Happy for all the fellow fans that made it to this event.
And sad because I couldn’t make it.
Anyways, I just blagged about it all in my brand-new blag on blogspot (^click name).
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Warning: the blag which I’ve just unashamedly whored out is kept by a rabid xkcd fan and the degree of homage which I pay to Randall is almost sickening.
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I wish I could have made it… of course… even if I were in the area, I would have stupidly NOT gotten the hint in the comic and felt 10x worse.
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How about someplace down in Richmond? Represent your state, Monroe!
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“Dreams don’t work like that. So if they’re just your own desires whispering to you…”
edit: “desires or fears”
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I’m so jealous! … Gosh! I so wish i could be there and join the crowd!
still from my little corner here in a parallel universe (read opposite pole).
best wishes! … Long live stick figures! … and stuff
From Tehran with Love!
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damn the one who put the “you just lost the game again” comment on there 😦 Looks like you all had a lot of fun, wish i could’ve been there.
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I wanted to be there so bad. I was supposed to go with some friends of mine. They had a week’s vacation from the coffee shop where they work. It was actually a week before the meeting, but we were going to go anyway and leave a note…
Unfortunately, the driver was placed on probation, and was unable to leave the state. So we went to Tallahassee instead. Sorry Randall! Maybe next time.
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Here’s an idea for the next one:
http://www.spheremania.co.uk/res_website.asp?supplierCode=sph100&page=mobile_sphereing
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This is literally the most awesome thing I have ever seen. I vote for somewhere in Nevada next time. Then we can all go out for drinks and gambling afterward.
Also, I live in Nevada. 🙂
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Oh god, I wish I could have gone.
Personally, my favourite is the panel with ‘But apparently she had told other people too’ XD
Whoever wrote ‘Doctor Who fans love XKCD too’, you are not alone 😛
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Come somewhere in the UK next time ok?
Edinburgh’s nice, the meadows is big enough for a couple of hundred nerds. =]
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XKCD, can you please delete the post by Johnny Jizz. he just wrote “Wibble!” 8192 times, taking up 911 lines. and all this twice! it is very difficult to scroll properly now because it takes up about 2/3 of the height of this thread
btw,
“Whoever wrote ‘Doctor Who fans love XKCD too’, you are not alone :P” X2
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I would be consumed by the jealousy monster if the jealousy monster wasn’t being consumed by the “OH-MY-GOLDFISH-THAT’S-SO-AWESOME-IT-EVEN-HAPPENED” monster. Next time, I’m not going to allow the fact there’s a whole planet between me (Perth, Australia) and the next co-ordinate stop me from getting there.
I vote the moon next time, it’s closer to Perth 😀
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Anyone know who wrote “Dream Girl went home with a Wellesley woman”? Because it wasn’t me and I had no idea any of my classmates were there.
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I remember figuring out the comic but I forgot to write it down to go. 😮
Guess I’ll be more thorough next time.
Also, can someone explain the (BC)^2=Wellesley equation?
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This is awesome!
But a very important question remains unanswered in my mind, Randall: did you meet Dream Girl?
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Xkcdstock.
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When the Phoenix article came out, I got about six emails saying “Katherine I saw you in this article!” Talking to random strangers with notepads pays off sometimes.
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