I posted a while back about a ball pit I’d installed in my room. Everything in that post was true, but the pictures were a little misleading. Looking at that, you don’t necessarily realize how cramped those people are. I framed the pictures to make it look larger than it actually was (THAT’S WHAT SHE …
Author Archives: Randall
Keeping Time
A big thanks to khmer for putting together the piano arrangement in today’s comic. Thanks also to the readers who tried playing it. I hope you didn’t realize what it was until too late.
FRUIT OPINIONS!
Holy crap. This strip’s been up for 800 seconds and it’s already the most controversial thing I’ve ever written, beating out comics about cunnilingus, the Obama endorsement, and my making 4chan tiny on the map of the internet. It turns out everyone and their mother has a fruit opinion, and every one of those opinions …
The Laser Elevator
Solar sails suck. In a 2002 paper, Laser Elevator: Momentum Transfer Using an Optical Resonator (available at your local school/library, possibly electronically — J. of Spacecraft and Rockets 2002), Thomas R. Meyer et. al. talk about a neat way to get a lot more speed out of light reflection than with a regular solar sail. …
Aliens?
Space has been a little disappointing for the last few decades. Since the moon, everything has turned out kind of barren. Every SETI-related result of the past 30 years has been disheartening — “there was once water on Mars” doesn’t really do it for me. There are two big exceptions. One is Jupiter and Saturn’s …
LimerickDB.com
Remember limericks? They were huge in the mid-20th century, but fell on hard times over the last couple decades. Now so many dirty limericks are a generation out-of-date, and the really clever ones lie neglected and un-retold. I want more limericks, and I want the cleverest ones collected somewhere. It strikes me that a certain …
Buttercup Festival
Good news, everyone1! After three years, David Troupes has restarted the comic Buttercup Festival. If you aren’t familiar with the strip, you may enjoy poking around the old archives at random. There are some delightful things there. 1 Protip: it’s helpful to imagine that every blog post everywhere is preceded by the Professor announcing this.
Politics
Okay, politics time. I’m a political junkie, but I’ve largely kept that out of xkcd (other than occasional cracks about science and net-related issues). So this will be a one-time thing — after this post, you’ll hear no more political advocacy on this site for the rest of the election. But I think we’re at …
ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the channel is full of new folks coming in and playing with the bot. This is …
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Ghost
Hello, all. The comic was posted a bit late last night. The comics are normally posted by the server automatically at midnight. However, I apparently typo’d when I last edited the queue, and I’m on vacation away from the net so davean had to fix it manually. My bad. Moving on: I’ve solved Ghost. I’m …
xkcd 