Good interview
Love the comics. Now leave him alone!
There are a million easy ways to get famous on the internet - or perhaps they're all one way but it's been done a million times. Randall Munroe If you're a budding celeb in search of glory, all you need to do is shoot a sex tape, like Paris Hilton - or maybe do a Miley Cyrus and unleash a vast torrent of semi-clad selfies. …
Exactly. Someone who is famous for what they do, rather than who they are, is to be cherished and respected.
I get all I want from Randall via his comics and now his book, long may it continue. If I met him in the street and recognised him I wouldn't say hello, it would just be a nice thing to mention when I got home.
Not like when I saw Vic Reeves on the tube one evening. I made a deliberate effort to completely ignore him no matter what he did to try and attract some attention and recognition (as opposed to leaving him alone out of respect). That must have hurt :)
On the contrary, if I were to meet him (and recognise him), I would stop him, shake his hand and thank him very much for all that he has produced and to please keep on doing what he does so well. I would tell him that I am giving his books and posters to friends and family as presents.
Finally, I would tell him that he is one of the poets of our generation and that he should be proud of it.
Gushy sentimental stuff, I know, but if you can't gush as a fan, then who can you gush to?
"On the contrary, if I were to meet him (and recognise him), I would stop him, shake his hand and thank him very much for all that he has produced and to please keep on doing what he does so well."
Very much my reaction when I got to meet they fellow behind Ninite.
I don't know as I'll ever get the honour to repeat that experience (meeting one of me heroes), but should I ever meet Mr. Munroe, I will try to be less of a gibbering idiot than I was with Mr. Kuzins.
As with Mr. Kuzins, I expect that meeting Mr. Munroe would be an experience wherein the ancient axiom "never meet your heroes, you discover they have feet of clay" would not apply. I expect, from all that I have read, that Mr. Munroe would be humble and awkward, rapaciously curious and stunningly intelligent as he is reputed to be.
And that, if nothing else, he's accept my heartfelt gratitude. Not for the wit, or the feeling of belonging, or the unity across the globe with other nerds his works have provided. Not for the humour and wit, intelligence, or even for taking the time to let me thank him.
I expect he'd understand when I said that it is knowing that someone else in this world deals best with confusion, grief, fear, loneliness, anger and even despair through art, thought and seeking to help others. Knowing that Mr. Munroe - how may well be one of the brightest minds of our generation - has the same reaction as I do when confronted with these emotions makes me feel less alone.
He's a private guy. I respect that. He has, however, shared with us glimpses into the difficulties with which he struggles. That he can continue to be witty, humorous, helpful and kind through all of that is of itself amazing.
That he occasionally lets us see the humanity of the artist makes me feel less alone.
My apologies for an inability to express myself appropriately. Better to be mushy here where he's unlikely to read it than to gibber at the man in person.
He needs to sell out to the Cheezburger Network for monetization and stuff.
OK, well clearly he shouldn't - that would be hideous, but I do wonder how occasional T-Shirts, posters and maybe now book advances (still very low even for bestsellers) make living wage money. The fact that the strips are not surrounded with ads, deep linking is encouraged, etc., makes you wonder why other sites (*cough* reg *cough*) surround themselves with flash ads and stuff.
I recently took the family to his lecture at the Royal Institution in London; a sellout event of course, and great fun although the line to get the book signed afterwards was ridiculously long. When we had to leave early to get our train the RI offered to send us a signed copy in the post, which we received a couple of days later - generous of the RI but I don't like to think how long it took Randall to sign everyone's copies.
I went to his lecture at the Union Chapel, it was funny and insightful. The queue was insanely long too. People had brought posters, books, etc to get signed. I wish I'd brought my mug (with the chart of programming skill against blood alcohol content) and an indelible marker.
Not only did he sign everything, he also drew a stick figure on every one - I got cueball (I'm bald), my mate got black hat (he was wearing a beanie). I doubt it was a coincidence and it was an excellent touch.
way to tip-toe around the CC licensing... and what he does about scrappers making a living leeching off him...
or hitting Non-pc topics ( obama, (revenge is mine) Harper, muslims, quebec
gmos, vaccines, copyright trade treaties..
etc.
on the other hand... live casting the comet landing deserves a medal.
packrat
...but am I the only one to spot the (surely deliberate) error on page 4 (et seq.) of "What If?" ....?
The implications of the rotation ceasing and the resultant surge occur on the wrong coastline, methinks.
Be glad if other navigators on El Reg would check that out for posterity.
Nice if we were to win a prize....
I call dibs on a signed copy!
"He says every East facing shore will face a huge storm surge, but the preceding sentence mentions the waves traveling East to West."
Imagine a wave leaving England and headed for North America. It will be travelling from East to West, and when it gets here, it will hit the Atlantic coast, which "faces" East, if you define coasts as facing the water they abut.
Earth rotates from West towards East, which is why the Sun rises in the East. Thus on average water in the oceans (ignoring waves, currents) is moving from West to East at the same sort of speed as solid ground at the same radius from the earth's axis of rotation..
Not having seen the book out here in the colonies, and not being much enlightened by previous commenters, I have to take a guess here that the topic under discussion was "What would happen if the solid bits of the earth (continents, islands etc) stopped rotating about the earth's axis suddenly?" or similar. Clearly the liquid bits would try to continue in the West>East direction that they had inherited by friction and containment from the solid bits (an idea I picked up from a guy named Newton) resulting in a rush away from the East-facing coastlines towards the West-facing ditto, eg from North America to UK and Europe. Storm-surges anyone? Or tsunamis beyond imagining, dumping a large percentage of the oceans' contents onto the previously dryish conintental lands. It would take quite a while for gravity to refill the oceanic basins by draining the floodwaters back to where they belonged, and there would surely be quite a lot of back-and-forth sloshing, but nothing comparable (if any observers were left to compare such things, were the observers regarded in the question as immoveable or moveable matter?) to the primary devastation.
Good Read Suggestion: Flood by Stephen Baxter, 2008, from Gollancz
Randall Munroe is not the anti-Kardashian. He is the anti-Zuckerburg. xkcd is exemplary of what can be done on the Internet: entertain, communitize, inspire, all without any flash (or Flash), without blinking ads, without messing with people's heads, without creating networks of "friends" that hate each other.
The Internet (interblag, tubes, etc) needs more XKCD and less Faecesbook.
I wouldn't say he doesn't mess with people's heads, after all...
We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves. The algorithm is banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the algorithm. This is close.
... appears on every page.
Since when did it become "generational" to enjoy XKCD?
I think XKCD is great but I thought the interview was a bit lame.
I got the impression that given Randall didn't seem to want to talk about personal stuff and everyone reading here probably already knows about XKCD then there wasn't a lot to report back.
Apart from "Hey - I met Randall Munroe!! How cool is that?"
However really no need to go down the "Whole new generation" route as if only people the same age or younger can relate to XKCD.
Once upon a time, I whipped up a little editor plugin to invoke the xkcd search with a selected string and insert the url of the appropriate comic. Back when mail user agents allowed one to specify an editor for composing messages, and email services were able to be used by general purpose mail user agents, rather than having an app for each service, if not each address.