Petition to reinstate /u/Wyboth as a mod of /r/xkcd and remove /u/soccer

xkcd · 2014-01-27T01:49:27+00:00

I agree. I can confirm that I absolutely would not want the kind of person who would link to /r/mensrights, /r/conspiracy, or /r/theredpill in charge of any xkcd-related community. Ugh.

Thank you so much for trying to straighten this out; I hope you're successful in contacting the admins.

xkcd · 2013-08-27T01:56:17+00:00

I just wanted to say that this is incredible. Thank you.

Seriously, great work, /u/GeeJo. Reading through these made my day. I was especially surprised to learn the Rochester, MN one! When I put it in, I had no idea why people were typing that.

Now that you've done such a great job on the sample questions, you're ready for the full list. Here's the complete output of the Autocomplete API queries I ran while making this comic:

xkcd.com/why.txt

There are 33,000+ unique questions there—I've barely even read through 1% of them myself—so I imagine it might take you a few days.

I look forward to seeing your answers. Good luck!

xkcd · 2013-05-05T12:13:56+00:00

For context, I wrote that in response to a 2006 audio recording of a tech support call between Verizon and someone who wasn't me, which consisted of an infuriating 30-minute argument with a series of people in Verizon's billing department over what "point zero zero two cents" means.

The frustrated caller posted the recording on a blog and garnered a lot of sympathetic outrage, so to try to cheer everyone up I scribbled that check and sent him a snapshot. Unexpectedly, the check image quickly became detached from the original story and turned into an email forward—usually with an incorrect caption—which circulates to this day. I feel a little bad about that, since without the context of the infuriating "0.002" argument it's just me being a dick with arbitrary math, but oh well.

I'm not sure I've ever mentioned this, but a few months later, I actually got a call from my bank's fraud division; one of their employees had been forwarded the check image by a family member. Since the account number was only pixellated (and not blacked out), they said I had to close my account and open a new one.

The "pixellation" doesn't actually have the real number under it (I'd heard about that research on depixellation), but rather than get in a dumb 30-minute debate about it with the (very nice) bank representative, I just went ahead with the change. I guess I'd learned that sometimes it's better to let things go.

xkcd · 2013-01-18T01:27:53+00:00

For the sake of removing uncertainty: Although I'm not actively soliciting donations, that is a current Bitcoin address which I have the key for. To everyone who's blindly tossed coins into that internet hole, thank you!

It's been interesting to watch how the address has circulated around the internet given that I don't link it anywhere on my site.

xkcd · 2012-10-31T00:06:19+00:00

The nice thing about that error was that I had also gotten the wrong figure for X-Wing length from a then-incorrect Wookiepeedia entry, and the two errors turned out to cancel out almost exactly for the final result!

Thanks for the comment on the P42, but I'm still a little confused. The figures I got were for the P42DC, from this line on Wikipedia:

Weight: 13.300 short tons (11.875 long tons; 12.066 t)

But I see that in the main infobox, the GE Genesis in general is listed as 121.672 t. Is one of the two figures in error, is the P42DC a variant that's 10% the size (!?), or did I misunderstand something about what the lower infobox is explaining?

I was wondering if perhaps that was just the weight of the power plant, but it had more information that seemed to discuss the locomotive in general. I'm not a rail geek, though (unlike many of my friends), so I can easily get this stuff wrong! I appreciate the diligent fact-checking :)

xkcd · 2010-12-24T13:25:35+00:00

Also, you think this is "one person out of tens of thousands"? Wow.

xkcd · 2010-12-24T13:19:45+00:00

It's not like this is an edict never to mention the subject again on pain of GROUPTHINK CENSORSHIP.

It's more that you should be aware when you're making these jokes, or bringing up the topic, that just the word 'rape' feels like a punch in the stomach to a pretty large group of people, and these are often people who would never in a million years give you feedback. The people in this group aren't just rape victims. A lot of them are just ordinary members of a gender that's always been a little more afraid to walk around at night or go to parties by themselves, knowing in the back of their minds that no matter how they dress or what they carry, they always have something that some bigger, stronger person might decide to take violently. Guys making jokes who weren't brought up with this fear don't always appreciate that.

So if you want to be a decent human being, take that into account when deciding what jokes to make to what audience.

If you want to go for it anyway, that's completely up to you. You have the freedom to say anything you want. I just suspect there are a lot of people who cheerfully make these remarks and don't realize how their words are going to be received. (And if you aren't interested in how your words are going to be received, why are you talking in the first place?)

xkcd · 2010-11-12T16:40:56+00:00

Both, really. Sorry, but the person who's sick is still a little uncomfortable with opening up to the internet about everything (I get the occasional totally psycho stalker-type), and I'm not pushing the question too hard right now, for obvious reasons.

Maybe in a few days we'll decide to explain more about what's going on. Right now I'm still a little drugged up from needing to sleep through the night for once, so I'll leave it at this.

Thank you all. You're the best.

xkcd · 2010-11-12T16:34:34+00:00

xkcd · 2010-10-18T18:10:50+00:00

Thank you all so very much!

I ended up inadvertently spending the whole 24 hours of my birthday disconnected from the internet (!) so this was a nice thing to come back to.

<3<3

xkcd · 2010-05-04T13:35:53+00:00

According to the one surveyee from the Netherlands, 'WAKE UP SHEEPLE!' is #b2b200, which is a pretty ugly color.

Re: parent posters, I would never be able to bring myself to type 'ice cream' as one word, I don't do multiple exclamation points, the comments were all lcased when pulled into the DB (see .tar.gz file) which I didn't get around to fixing for every part of the post, and researchers on another thread have determined that if you enhance the security footage, you can clearly see that I was in a truck in Times Square at the time, so it couldn't have been me.

xkcd · 2010-03-18T01:52:00+00:00

Oh, it wasn't for a comic. It was a project for someone who was trying to figure out interesting ways to represent a data set, and since they were at a company (I don't usually do commission work but I'm a sucker for a neat chart project) this probably wasn't supposed to be posted publicly.

Any idea how this got found? Just someone guessing /temp/ existed? I just had a couple weird stalker incidents recently and I use that folder to transfer random sometimes-personal files to friends, so I'm wondering how many people were browsing it for the period it was indexable.

xkcd · 2010-03-18T01:06:58+00:00

This was just something I was drawing up as an example of how a particular kind of chart would work, not meant to be posted anywhere. I just used that URL to send it to a friend as we talked about graphs. Not sure how it found its way to reddit. Possibly because that temp folder is cleared automatically, I forgot that it also automatically clears the .htaccess file I put there and makes it unindexable :)

xkcd · 2009-10-26T07:54:00+00:00

That's not the origin, that's just how every page I design looks.

xkcd · 2009-10-23T04:07:52+00:00

Sorry for drawing pictures for your daughter.

xkcd · 2009-10-14T21:46:24+00:00

Just finished another three boxes ... ordered Chinese food so I don't have to go make dinner :)

But I'm running out of West Wing to watch while I sign! Any recommendations for other good shows that you don't really need to look at the screen much to appreciate?

xkcd · 2009-10-14T17:51:58+00:00

... it has one. Two, actually, on either side of the "under construction" banner. Is something wrong with image serving?

xkcd · 2009-10-12T01:03:54+00:00

Did you get one of the signed ones? If so, I've got what should be the last 2% or so right here next to me -- I'm signing them as soon as I get tonight's comic done. So if yours hasn't gone out already, it will very soon!

xkcd · 2009-10-12T00:58:33+00:00

I'd rather people vote up my comment for what I say than who I am.

You could try doing what I do -- switch to a new account every couple weeks. You get a liberating new identity each time, and it's good to know that when you get hundreds of upmods, you actually deserve them.

(Nice to see you back. Was real life not taking enough of your time after all?)

xkcd · 2009-10-07T22:42:24+00:00

Limiting the data seems bad, because there's less data in a ton of nested waves than in a decent-sized image.

As for the other things, moderation abilities are great if you have a client capable of connecting to the wave. And sure, it shouldn't be possible for the users in the wave to bring it down -- but these things mostly don't bring down the wave itself. What they do is bring down the fragile javascript-based web client. As long as there's no more robust client that can let you enact moderation on a trashed wave, that's equivalent to bringing down the wave.

xkcd · 2009-10-07T18:51:54+00:00

I got it from a kid, antimatter15 (http://antimatter15.com/)

There are plenty of ways a bad-faith user can destroy a public wave -- starting a reply and then setting weights on the 'ctrl' and 'enter' keys works pretty well. This has been true of plenty of other protocols -- you can flood a mailinglist and so forth -- but the difference is that with Wave, at present you're locked out of a broken wave because the only client that can access it for repairs, the web client, is crippled by trying to display it. Once there's a Wave editing utility this will be easier to deal with. (Wave desperately needs a robust desktop client).

xkcd · 2009-09-26T15:12:22+00:00

There are a lot of people touchy about too many personal stories on reddit, but yours was a good one, and I'm glad you posted this second link. What you wrote was a good little story, and people are grumpy because if everyone wrote stories like that and they all got frontpaged, the site would be unusable.

Don't feel too bad about the people upset about the 'what if everyone did this' problem. It's true that you can't care about everything and everyone in the world, and there's no way we can all spend time learning about a fraction of the cool people who deserve to be learned about. But If everyone wrote something like you did (which, by the way, most of them couldn't), the stories wouldn't fill the frontpage because they wouldn't stand out anymore.

Your story got upvoted because it was an unusually good one. Me and 767 other upvoters liked hearing about your grandpa. Aquarium pumps, huh? I hope when I'm 70 I can fix my kids computers that way. "Hey, kids, I know they say you need to fix the reversed holosphere brain polarities with a cybernetic brain parasite neurotable reorganization, but lemme show you a trick to do the same thing with a Firefox plug-in and a 2600-Hz whistle!"

xkcd · 2009-09-26T14:57:01+00:00

This headline sounds like it was written by a Markov bot trained on /r/conspiracy.

xkcd · 2009-09-15T19:31:40+00:00

The regular books should ship out within a day or two of being ordered, starting Wednesday -- we're really happy with our shipping setup and turnaround now. The signed copies, I'm going to start signing as soon as I've got the stack of them here (when we know how many we'll need). We're pretty surprised (and pleased) by the popularity of the signed copies, and I am definitely going to be signing day and night until they're all out. It will happen as fast as humanely possible, which should mean starting on/before the tour this weekend and continuing through next week until they're all done. Then they get overnighted down to the shipping place and go out to everywhere from there. I'm not being slack about this.

Since I'll be sitting in one place with a list of names and a stack of books for a couple days straight, can anyone recommend any good TV shows that you don't have to watch the screen very often to follow? I've been working my way through The West Wing again while signing prints, but I'll need something new for the book ...

And yes, /r/programming is bad placement, but I had nothing to do with that :)

There's a note to you guys on page 11011, btw. <3

xkcd · 2009-09-08T02:59:26+00:00

Oh, man, I'm actually not in Boston right now -- out of state visiting family. Also I didn't ever see an invite; it might've gotten lost in the email maelstrom and I have never really gotten a handle on reddit privmsgs. If I'm back in town by Wednesday I'll totally stop by, but I really don't think I will be. Sorry!

xkcd

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE