What does xkcd mean today

The road I was driving on had two lanes on each side. The left lane was backed up a quarter mile and the right lane was empty, as across the next road, construction trucks blocked the right lane. I drove all the way down the right lane, took a right turn, and then proceeded to execute the maneuver depicted in the comic. Half a dozen other cars caught on and followed. Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb. Jump to: navigation , search. Explanation [ edit ] This comic purports to finally answer the question, "What does 'xkcd' mean?

Transcript [ edit ] [Caption above the panels:] What does xkcd mean? It then shifts back to the right lane and makes another right turn, continuing down the road past the traffic light. This is shown with a red arrow. In the panel itself, a second person is looking at a dog.

Next to the equal sign stands a mathematician, clutching his head. Mathematician: Aughhh [An approximately 8 by 8 square of floor tiles is shown; the first, fourth, and seventh across in the first, fourth, and seventh rows are black, and the rest are white. A guy and girl are shown next to it, walking on what is presumed to be the same pattern of floor tiles. It is clear that some of the drawings were drawn on checkered paper originally and the grid was scanned in, but it is unclear whether some had the grid added digitally to match the others.

But that would be weird given the five comics without this grid. In a few comics the grid is black and on some the grid was faint as if it was poorly scanned or Randall had attempted to erase it he noted having done this on Barrel - Part 2. The last comic by number to use the grid was Love , which was actually posted relatively early on the LiveJournal account but received a high number when the comics were renumbered. The last comic by date to use gridlines was Bowl , although even these comics may have been posted on LiveJournal out of order.

The faint remains of gridlines in comics Fourier and Meat Cereals suggest that Randall may have erased gridlines in these and other comics as well.

In , Randall revived the blue grid as a background image for what if? Similarly, the art process has evolved. The first comics appear to have been physical sketches pencil or ink which were scanned and directly posted; although some comics occasionally featured a digitally added caption.

The first comic that appears to have had digital inking and effects although it could also just be a different physical medium is T-shirts. The comics continued to be hand drawn, and hand lettered, with possibly a bit more digital polish.

The comic slowly evolved to apparently become entirely digitally inked and lettered. Although early comics included sentence-case text, beginning with comic Jacket , Randall began using all-caps although it took several strips for the all-caps to become the standard format.

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb. Jump to: navigation , search. It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation — a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings. Actually the domain name came after the instant messenging screen name, which I picked late one night. Five, six, maybe seven years ago, I was tired of having names that meant something.

That would just always mean me. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. Where were they? What did the story mean? Munroe offered no direct answers, instead seeding the panels with esoteric clues from botany, astronomy and geology. Soon, "Time" had developed a fanatical following that pored over every update pixel by pixel and gathered online to trade theories , decipher clues , and even write songs.

While they refer to Munroe simply as "OTA" the One True Author , a "newpic" plural: "newpix" is defined as the unit of time that elapses between updates, also known as "outsider minutes. After more than four months of hourly updates, the journey finally came to an end last week, and the final product is 3, panels long—so long that the Youtube video compiling them above runs more than 40 minutes from start to finish.

Even better, Munroe is finally talking about the elaborate backstory behind the minimalistic and seemingly ancient world of "Time," which he reveals was set not in the past, but 11, years in the future.

Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5, years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10, more," Munroe told WIRED. Although the comic takes place many millennia in the future, its setting is modeled on a geological event that took place more than 5 million years ago, when tectonic activity sealed off the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean, causing the sea to evaporate and leave a basin of dry land two miles below sea level.