explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2392: Cyber Cafe

2020-12-07T20:07:38Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2392
| date = November 30, 2020
| title = Cyber Cafe
| image = cyber_cafe.png
| titletext = Since we haven't really settled on a name for those online hangout/work spaces that try to recreate the experience of cafes, and I love confusion, I'm going to start calling them 'cyber cafes' or 'internet cafes.'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a DATED CYBER CAFE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

A {{w|Internet cafe|cybercafe, or Internet cafe}}, is a cafe or other restaurant with good munchies. Prior to widespread ownership of personal computers and cell phones, such cafes would host computers that clients could use, and nowadays, many fast-food restaurants and cafes provide free Wi-Fi to their customers, so that people can use their computers while at the cafe. "Cyber" is a prefix meaning something relating to computers (as in Cyber Monday, the day the comic was posted), but this comic suggests that it sounds dated, previously discussed in [[1573: Cyberintelligence]]. However, in 2020, he jokes that "cafe" actually sounds more dated. This is a result of lockdowns related to the {{w|COVID-19 pandemic}} preventing people from going to cafes, and like the preceding comic is a play on the sense that the lockdowns could shift economies and cultures to remove parts of the physical world permanently, depending on how long they last.

In the title text, Randall indulges his munchies of ambiguity by proposing that the term "cyber cafe" be re-used to refer to online hangout spaces that try to feel like cafes. This would change the meaning from "a cafe where computers are available for use by patrons" to "a setting or activity in cyberspace that feels like a cafe" (which would at least be inline with similar terms, like {{w|cyberbullying}}, {{w|cybersex}}, etc.).

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:Which word in the name "cyber cafe" sounds more dated?
----
:2015 - Cyber
:2016 - Cyber
:2017 - Cyber
:2018 - Cyber
:2019 - Cyber
:2020 - Cafe

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:COVID-19]]
[[Category:Internet]]

1413: Suddenly Popular

2014-08-27T10:13:30Z

141.101.99.235: /* Transcript */ Added Transcript

{{comic
| number = 1413
| date = August 27, 2014
| title = Suddenly Popular
| image = suddenly_popular.png
| titletext = Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page.}}

==Transcript==
Title: Obscure words and phrases everyone suddenly becomes very familiar with.

{|
|
| <-- World Wide Web
|-
|
| <-- DNA Evidence
|-
| 1995
|
|-
|
| <-- Militia Movement
|-
|
| <-- Supermax
|-
| 2000
|
|-
|
| <-- Butterfly Ballot
|-
|
| <-- Al-Qaeda
|-
|
| <-- Wi-Fi
|-
| 2005
|
|-
|
| <-- Tsunami
|-
|
| <-- Viral
|-
| 2010
|
|-
|
| <-- Radicalize
|-
|
|
|-
|
| <-- Metadata
|-
| 2015
|
|-
|
| <-- Lahar
|-
|
|
|-
|
| <-- Insect-Borne
|-
| 2020
|
|-
|
| <-- Earth-Crossing
|-
|
| <-- Thermoline
|-
|
|
|-
|
| <-- Snow-Blindness
|-
| 2025
|
|-
|
| <-- Amplexus
|-
|
|
|-
|
| <-- Controlled Hydroplaning
|-
| 2030
|
|-
|
| <-- Paradoxial Reaction
|-
|
| <-- Drone Dessertion
|-
|
| <-- Rapid Hair Growth
|-
| 2035
|
|-
|
|
|-
|
| <-- I Swear Allegiance To The God-Empress
|-
| 2040
|
|-
|}

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:1321: Cold

2014-01-28T09:00:30Z

141.101.99.235:

I really hate when articles on science get a POV tag. Science isn't politics (hint: evolution and gravity aren't POV either). Related to the comic, I just had a similar rant on Facebook in the last week or two where I linked to [http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=54 this article] when someone said it was too cold for Global Warming. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.64|108.162.237.64]] 12:24, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I really hate it when people think the global warming scam is science, when it really is nothing more than politics masquerading as science. The IPCC has been proven to be a bunch of liars, and really there's nothing left but a bunch of whining left-wing lunatics who are desperately clinging to their hope of continuing to use this lie to raise energy prices/taxes. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.17|108.162.219.17]] 12:55, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
:Well you're wrong, and apparently delusionally paranoid about what the political left wants, but the bigger question is why is this in a wiki discussion page? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.249.117|108.162.249.117]] 13:21, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
::No, ''you'' are wrong, and still buying into the AGW myth that has been proven false (IPCC and others were basically caught lying). Why is this in a wiki discussion page? Well, apparently Randall has decided to use his webcomic as a vehicle to promote a left-wing agenda, so discussion of it here is totally legit. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.17|108.162.219.17]] 14:03, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Although it doesn't directly mention it, this is partly related to people's confusion over the difference between 'weather' and 'climate' - the former being what the conditions are at a given moment in time, and the latter referring to long-term trends.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.228|141.101.98.228]] 14:52, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I think the one with whit wolly hat is whitehat [[User:Halfhat|Halfhat]] ([[User talk:Halfhat|talk]]) 16:10, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Can anyone provide an exact URL for (or procedure for finding) the data shown in the upper-right panel? --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.71|108.162.221.71]] 18:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Randall has cherry picked data for his conclusion and the graph in the comic. The full history is available from the NWS. The one for my home town can be found here http://www.erh.noaa.gov/iln/climo/below0.php The 1970's were unusually cold, which makes the present seem warmer by comparison. --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.210.254|108.162.210.254]] 16:33, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Apparently Randall hasn’t seen this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_palaeotemps.png

To quote Michael Z. Williamson:
29 years in the last century is not an "average" of the last 300 million years.

Any finding based on that "average" is complete bullshit. You may as well use 1300-1305 hours on Apr 23 as your "average." You'll be about as accurate, and save time over actual data collection. {{unsigned ip|173.245.55.67}}

The claim that 0 Fahrenheit / -17 Celsius is ''really fucking cold'' is supported by [[526: Converting to Metric]]. [[User:Fryhole|Fryhole]] ([[User talk:Fryhole|talk]]) 00:41, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
:We've been getting some ball-chilling winter with the cold fronts suddenly appearing in Florida, which is a drastic change from the sweaty weather just last week. I've added "fuckfuckfuckcold" to my personal lexicon. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.64|108.162.237.64]] 04:16, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Is that possibly WHITE HAT not CUEBALL (except for the last panel)? {{unsigned ip|108.162.240.18}}

The one in black is not black hat.
He sits around memorising weather data, and lack malice. [[User:Halfhat|Halfhat]] ([[User talk:Halfhat|talk]]) 18:29, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Can anyone provide an exact URL for (or procedure for finding) the data shown in the upper-right panel? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.71|108.162.221.71]] 18:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

;rcc-acis.org/climatecentral

The source [http://rcc-acis.org/climatecentral rcc-acis.org/climatecentral] provided by Randall doesn't work. What's wrong? --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:30, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
:The source quoted on [http://xkcd.com/1321/ xkcd] is no long a URL, but simply "'rcc-acis/climatecentral'" [[User:Boxy|Boxy]] ([[User talk:Boxy|talk]]) 03:07, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh Dear. I can't believe what I'm reading. Either you guys are being ironic or Randall needs to expand his comic to encompass some of you.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 09:00, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
I'm really surprised that so many people could love xkcd (apparently) but also hate science. {{unsigned ip|108.162.238.197}}

Talk:1321: Cold

2014-01-27T10:01:58Z

141.101.99.235:

Talk:1321: Cold

2014-01-27T10:01:12Z

141.101.99.235:

I really hate when articles on science get a POV tag. Science isn't politics (hint: evolution and gravity aren't POV either). Related to the comic, I just had a similar rant on Facebook in the last week or two where I linked to [http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=54 this article] when someone said it was too cold for Global Warming. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.64|108.162.237.64]] 12:24, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I really hate it when people think the global warming scam is science, when it really is nothing more than politics masquerading as science. The IPCC has been proven to be a bunch of liars, and really there's nothing left but a bunch of whining left-wing lunatics who are desperately clinging to their hope of continuing to use this lie to raise energy prices/taxes. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.17|108.162.219.17]] 12:55, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
:Well you're wrong, and apparently delusionally paranoid about what the political left wants, but the bigger question is why is this in a wiki discussion page? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.249.117|108.162.249.117]] 13:21, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
::No, ''you'' are wrong, and still buying into the AGW myth that has been proven false (IPCC and others were basically caught lying). Why is this in a wiki discussion page? Well, apparently Randall has decided to use his webcomic as a vehicle to promote a left-wing agenda, so discussion of it here is totally legit. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.17|108.162.219.17]] 14:03, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Although it doesn't directly mention it, this is partly related to people's confusion over the difference between 'weather' and 'climate' - the former being what the conditions are at a given moment in time, and the latter referring to long-term trends.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.228|141.101.98.228]] 14:52, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I think the one with whit wolly hat is whitehat [[User:Halfhat|Halfhat]] ([[User talk:Halfhat|talk]]) 16:10, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Can anyone provide an exact URL for (or procedure for finding) the data shown in the upper-right panel? --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.71|108.162.221.71]] 18:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Randall has cherry picked data for his conclusion and the graph in the comic. The full history is available from the NWS. The one for my home town can be found here http://www.erh.noaa.gov/iln/climo/below0.php The 1970's were unusually cold, which makes the present seem warmer by comparison. --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.210.254|108.162.210.254]] 16:33, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Apparently Randall hasn’t seen this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_palaeotemps.png

To quote Michael Z. Williamson:
29 years in the last century is not an "average" of the last 300 million years.

Any finding based on that "average" is complete bullshit. You may as well use 1300-1305 hours on Apr 23 as your "average." You'll be about as accurate, and save time over actual data collection. {{unsigned ip|173.245.55.67}}

The claim that 0 Fahrenheit / -17 Celsius is ''really fucking cold'' is supported by [[526: Converting to Metric]]. [[User:Fryhole|Fryhole]] ([[User talk:Fryhole|talk]]) 00:41, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
:We've been getting some ball-chilling winter with the cold fronts suddenly appearing in Florida, which is a drastic change from the sweaty weather just last week. I've added "fuckfuckfuckcold" to my personal lexicon. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.64|108.162.237.64]] 04:16, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Is that possibly WHITE HAT not CUEBALL (except for the last panel)? {{unsigned ip|108.162.240.18}}

The one in black is not black hat.
He sits around memorising weather data, and lack malice. [[User:Halfhat|Halfhat]] ([[User talk:Halfhat|talk]]) 18:29, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Can anyone provide an exact URL for (or procedure for finding) the data shown in the upper-right panel? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.71|108.162.221.71]] 18:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

;rcc-acis.org/climatecentral

The source [http://rcc-acis.org/climatecentral rcc-acis.org/climatecentral] provided by Randall doesn't work. What's wrong? --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:30, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
:The source quoted on [http://xkcd.com/1321/ xkcd] is no long a URL, but simply "'rcc-acis/climatecentral'" [[User:Boxy|Boxy]] ([[User talk:Boxy|talk]]) 03:07, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh Dear. I can't believe waht I'm reading. Either you guys are being ironic or Randall didn't expand his comic to encompass some of you.

1205: Is It Worth the Time?

2014-01-21T17:42:31Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1205
| date = April 29, 2013
| title = Is It Worth the Time?
| image = is it worth the time.png
| titletext = Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.
}}

==Explanation==
The comic is a straightforward chart showing the amount of work (time) one can dedicate to making a task more efficient, in order not to spend more time optimizing the task than the total time saved. This may illustrate the fact that computer scientists often try to optimize tasks they are likely to perform again in the future (since this is a common goal in their work), even though the work needed for that optimization can itself prove much longer than the time saved when doing the task again; this was previously referenced in [[974: The General Problem]].

E.g. if you do some task every week once, and you are able to save 1 minute of time by doing some preparatory work (e.g. build or buy a tool), you can spend 4 hours doing this preparatory work, and you will, across five-years time, come even. (Any less time spent doing the preparatory work, and you will profit from it.)

The calculation on which the chart is based, for this example:
: 5 years / 1 week = 260 occurrences of the task
: 260 occurrences × 1 saved minute = 260 saved minutes = 4.3 hours

Therefore, 1 minute saved every week would, across five years, save over 4 hours of your time.

Or, in algebraic form:
: Total time shaved off across 5 years = 5 × “How often you do the task every year” × “How much time you shave off”

The blacked out areas represent times which are impossible to save (e.g. it is impossible to shave 1 hour off a task if you perform 50 times a day – the total time shaved off per day would amount to 50 hours, far more than the 24 hours a day).

Of course, all these conclusions presume you are the only one that benefits. If the savings can be easily adapted by others - for example, computer code for a program that automates a task for hundreds of people - then the amount of time that can be spent increases. Indeed, in some cases, when optimising for others, spending far more time than they save can be worth it, if the people you're working for are paying you for the product and the time savings keep them happy and likely to keep paying you.

The comic derives humor from the absurd conclusions of hyper-efficiency, which have been examined in [http://what-if.xkcd.com/22/ ''What if?'' - Cost of Pennies]. The title text points out the time you spend studying this comic detracts from your overall efficiency, and concludes that maximizing efficiency would require optimal use of every second.

Actually the conclusion from this comic - is that you should not waste your time following [xkcd] (or any other comic). Of course you have to think that this is a wrong conclusion - since you are reading these pages as well...

One more comic devoted to insufficient economy is [[951: Working]], where the money saved is compared to the time wasted while looking for a bargain.

==Transcript==
{| class="wikitable"
! colspan="2" rowspan="2" |
! colspan="6" | How often you do the task
|-
! 50/day !! 5/day !! Daily !! Weekly !! Monthly !! Yearly
|-
!rowspan="9" width="10" | How much time you shave off
! 1 second
| 1 day || 2 hours || 30 minutes || 4 minutes || 1 minute || 5 seconds
|-
! 5 seconds
| 5 days || 12 hours || 2 hours || 21 minutes || 5 minutes || 25 seconds
|-
! 30 seconds
| 4 weeks || 3 days || 12 hours || 2 hours || 30 minutes || 2 minutes
|-
! 1 minute
| 8 weeks || 6 days || 1 day || 4 hours || 1 hour || 5 minutes
|-
! 5 minutes
| 9 months || 4 week || 6 days || 21 hours || 5 hour || 25 minutes
|-
! 30 minutes
| — || 6 months || 5 weeks || 5 days || 1 day || 2 hours
|-
! 1 hour
| — || 10 months || 2 months || 10 days || 2 days || 5 hours
|-
! 6 hours
| — || — || — || 2 months || 2 weeks || 1 day
|-
! 1 day
| — || — || — || — || 8 weeks || 5 days
|}

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Math]]

951: Working

2014-01-20T16:42:14Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 951
| date = September 14, 2011
| title = Working
| image = working.png
| imagesize =
| titletext = And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is a jab at price-gouging shoppers who spend large amounts of time checking multiple shopping outlets for the best deals. The minimum wage is the lowest possible wage that a person could legally be paid, usually only targeted at providing unskilled laborers with an equitable level of income. Using simple math, the caption states that a person is effectively working below the minimum wage when they spend their time looking to save a few cents on their purchases.

Of course if you are unemployed and cannot expect to get any wages - it could still be worth your time.

The title text, however, then goes on to talk about how the extra fuel consumption involved in finding cheaper gas leads to more extra money being spent on gas than is actually saved at the cheaper outlet.

This problem has also been examined in http://what-if.xkcd.com/22/

==Transcript==
:[Ponytail is standing next to Cueball filling his vehicle with petrol. Ponytail is pointing off-screen.]
:Ponytail: Why are you going here? Gas is ten cents a gallon cheaper at the station five minutes that way.
:Cueball: Because a penny saved is a penny earned.

:Caption: If you spend nine minutes of your time to save a dollar, you're working for less than minimum wage.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

159: Boombox

2014-01-19T07:26:24Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 159
| date = September 20, 2006
| title = Boombox
| image = Boombox.png
| titletext = And she's gonna feel like a jerk when she realizes it was actually Under Pressure.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Needs some cleanup, and probably some trimming down of the classical literature, given the movie is much, much closer.}}
We see [[Cueball]] declare his love for [[Megan]] in an oft-used setting, paying homage to similar events in classic literature, notably the "balcony scene" from {{w|William Shakespeare|William Shakespeare's}} play {{w|Romeo and Juliet}}, and a similar situation in {{w|Cyrano_de_Bergerac_(play)|Cyrano de Bergerac}}. In the former, Romeo, attempting to woo Juliet, stands beneath her balcony to profess his love for her. In the latter, an inarticulate cadet, Christian, professes his love for Roxanne by arranging to use the words of a fellow soldier, Cyrano, who secretly also loves Roxanne.

The 1989 movie "{{w|Say Anything...}}" contains a modern interpretation of this declaration of love, where {{w|John Cusack}} plays {{w|Peter Gabriel|Peter Gabriel's}} "{{w|In Your Eyes (Peter Gabriel song)#Say Anything...|In Your Eyes}}" on a boombox outside the house of the girl he likes.

Cueball is holding up a boombox (a self-contained semiportable stereo system, typically with cassette tape or CD player, and complete with integrated large speakers; extreme specimens could weigh up to 12 kg) which is playing music while Cueball declares his love for Megan. She first is startled, embarrassed, then eventually disgusted by the 1990 hit single {{w|Ice Ice Baby}} ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE&ob=av2e Video]) by {{w|Vanilla Ice}} playing on the boombox. Cueball then admits he "is not good at this," attempting to recreate the classic romantic scene, but utterly failing to play music suitable for such an event.

The "Under Pressure" reference in the title text refers to the fact that the music used in "Ice Ice Baby" is a sample of the bassline of "{{w|Under Pressure}}" by {{w|Queen (band)|Queen}} and {{w|David Bowie}}.

==Transcript==
[Megan is looking out a second story window at Cueball holding a boombox over his head.]
:Cueball: MEGAN!
:Woman: Oh my god, I can't believe this is happening.
:Cueball: I LOVE YOU!
:Woman: Okay, that's great. Wait a second. Is... is that... Ice Ice Baby? What the hell?
:Cueball: I'm not very good at this.
:[Musical Notes.]

==Trivia==
*Vanilla Ice was referenced also in [[112: Baring My Heart]].

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Music]]

108: M.C. Hammer Slide

2014-01-19T07:23:06Z

141.101.99.235: /* Transcript */ How on earth did the names get reversed in the transcript?

{{comic
| number = 108
| date = May 29, 2006
| title = M.C. Hammer Slide
| image = mc_hammer_slide.png
| titletext = Once, long ago, I saw this girl go by. I didn't stop and talk to her, and I've regretted it ever since.
}}

==Explanation==
The base part of the comic is self-explanatory: Girl attracts Boy, Boy notices Girl, Boy approaches Girl, Girl reacts positively, Boy falls in love, Girl decides to answer lovecall, happily ever after etc. The quirk in this comic is the way Girl catches attention of Boy in the comic: through the signature move of 1980's rapper {{w|MC Hammer}} (the slide). To watch MC Hammer doin' the slide, click [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIHAkqCls4A&t=1m47s here].

The title text indicates that [[Randall]] once saw a girl go by and regrets that he did not speak with her as Boy does in this comic. The title text is unclear whether Randall is stressing the word "this". It is possible that the girl Randall is referring to was actually doing the slide.

==Transcript==
:[Two guys stand next to each other talking.]
:Hairy: I just feel like somewhere out there is the girl for me.
:Cueball: Yeah.
:Hairy: Someone loving and caring.
:Cueball: I know what you mean.
:Hairy: A girl whose only mode of transportation is the M.C. Hammer Slide.
:Cueball: Yeah.
:Cueball: ...Wait, what?
:[Megan hammer slides past.]
:[Hairy sees Megan hammer slide and it's love at first sight.]
:[Megan hammer slides over into Hairy's waiting arms.]

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Romance]]

442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel

2014-01-19T07:18:11Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 442
| date = June 27, 2008
| title = xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel
| image = xkcd_loves_the_discovery_channel.png
| titletext = I love the title-text!
}}
==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Entangled sheets is '''not''' ''only'' a sexual position, that's the whole joke. I think we can explain "I put on my robe and wizard hat"; everything could probably be explained a little more besides just linking.}}
This comic is a parody of the {{w|Discovery Channel}} commercial showing various clips of people singing a song with the chorus line [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0 'Boom De Yada']. The comic is divided into a grid of 4 by 6 panels, each depicting a character or situation from a previous xkcd strip. In each panel is written a part of a song similar to the song from the Discovery Channel commercial."

The campaign from the {{w|Discovery Channel}} was not called "Boom De Yada", but {{w|I Love The World}}. The title "xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel" is in reference to this.

Most of the panels are references to previous xkcd strips, but some are not.

;Panel 1 ''I love momentum.''
:A reference to [[162|comic 161]], where Megan spins in a circle to "rob the planet of angular momentum."
;Panel 2 ''I love to engineer.''
:A reference to [[413|comic 413]], where Megan and Cueball turn an EEE PC into a household pet.
;Panel 3 ''I love this bakery!''
:A reference to [[434|comic 434]], where Beret Guy shows his liking for bakeries in first panel.
;Panel 4 ''I love the blogosphere!''
:A reference to [[239|comic 239]], where someone from the far future believes many people blogged while flying and wearing red capes and goggles.
;Panel 5 ''I love the whole world.'' (Cueball running in large hamster ball.)
:Likely a reference to [[152|comic 152]], though there are multiple comics featuring human-sized hamster balls.
;Panel 6 ''And all its messed-up folks.''
:A reference to the /b/ ("Random") forum on {{w|4chan}}, which is in fact home to plenty of "messed-up folks".
;Panel 7 ''Boom de yada, Boom de yada'' (Cueball and Megan immersed in playpen balls.)
:A reference to [[150|comic 150]], where Megan decides that she has the ability to, and wants to, turn her house into a giant playpen.
;Panel 8 ''Boom de yada, Boom de yada'' (''I put on my robe and wizard hat'')
:A reference to [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/robe-and-wizard-hat this (nsfw)].
;Panel 9 ''I love your suffering.''
:[[Black Hat]] is just being his usual self. The shaking parcel probably references [[325: A-Minus-Minus]], in which he mails a bobcat.
;Panel 10 ''I love cryptography.''
:This is a subject that comes up often in the comic. Notably, in comics [[153]] and [[177]] before this one.
;Panel 11 ''I love entangled sheets.''
:Sexual reference. Also brought up in comic [[230]].
;Panel 12 ''And kite photography.''
:A reference to Randall Munroe's own hobby of [http://xkcd.com/kite/ kite photography] as well as [[235|comic 235]].
;Panel 13 ''I love the whole world'' (Map of the internet.)
:A reference to [[256|comic 256]], featuring a map of online communities at the time. There is, more directly, a pun on "internet", namely "outernet".
;Panel 14 ''And all its mysteries.''
:A reference to a series of comics on "red spiders:" [[8|8: Red Spiders]], [[43|43: Red Spiders 2]], [[47|47: Counter-Red Spiders]], [[126|126: Red Spiders Cometh]], and [[427|427: Bad Timing]].
;Panel 15 ''Boom de yada, Boom de yada'' (Two people sword-fighting on rolling office chairs.)
:A reference to [[303|comic 303]], where two coders battle with fake swords at work, with the excuse that their code is compiling.
;Panel 16 ''Boom de yada, Boom de yada'' (Classroom with two students and Mrs. Lenhart.)
:Nothing too special, but it does embrace the "everybody joins in" theme behind the commercials. Mrs. Lenhart first properly appeared in [[263|comic 263]] but may have made an appearance in #[[59]].
;Panel 17 ''I love elections'' (''Barack me Obamadeus!'')
:A pun on the song {{w|Rock Me Amadeus}} and US president {{w|Barack Obama}}.
;Panel 18 ''I love transistors.''
:This panel has Cueball's crotch replaced with the (similar-looking) icon used for a {{w|transistor}} in a circuit diagram.
;Panel 19 ''I love weird pillow talk.'' (''There ''must'' be Taft slash fiction.'')
:''[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pillow+talk Pillow talk]'' means intimate conversations between lovers, {{w|slash fiction}} is fan fiction with characters of the same sex, and "Taft" is {{w|William Howard Taft}}, a US President mostly remembered for his severe obesity. It appears they are invoking {{w|rule 34 of the internet}}. Weird pillow talk is also the subject of comic [[69]], while the Taft reference comes from [[214: The Problem with Wikipedia]].
;Panel 20 ''I love your sister.''
:A reference to xkcd's recurring joke of dating the female character's sister, which spans several comics including [[49|comic 49]], [[279|comic 279]], [[317|comic 317]], and [[408|comic 408]].
;Panel 21 ''I love the whole world'' (Roller coaster with Cueball holding chess board)
:A reference to [[249|comic 249]] which inspired an internet meme.
;Panel 22 ''The future's pretty cool!'' (Beret Guy in a forest.)
:Possible reference to [[167|comic 167]], where Cueball and Beret Guy make observations about the future while climbing a tree.
;Panel 23 ''Boom de yada, Boom de yada'' (Megan doing the MC Hammer slide towards Cueball.)
:A reference to [[108|comic 108]], where Hairy falls in love with "a girl whose only mode of transportation is the M.C. Hammer Slide."
;Panel 24 ''Boom de yada, Boom de yada'' (Cueball and Megan on an electric skateboard.)
:A reference to [[409|comic 409]], where Megan and Cueball go on an electric skateboard ride.

The title text just continues the song.

==Transcript==
:[The comic is in parody of the Discovery Channel commercial showing various clips of people singing a song with the chorus line "Boom De Yada."]
:[The comic is divided into a grid of 4 by 6 panels, each depicting a character or situation from a previous xkcd strip.]
:[In each panel is written a part of a song similar to the song from the Discovery Channel commercial.]

:Panel 1: (Reference Comic 162)
:[Megan spinning around.]
:I love momentum.

:Panel 2: (Reference Comic 413)
:[Megan laying on floor tinkering with EEE PC hamster ball robot.]
:I love to engineer.

:Panel 3: (Reference Comic 434)
:[Beret Guy standing in bakery holding a loaf of bread in each hand, sign with "PIE!" in background.]
:I love this bakery!

:Panel 4: (Reference Comic 239)
:[Cory Doctorow in goggles and red cape flying superman-style.]
:I love the blogosphere!

:Panel 5: (Reference Comic 152)
:[Cueball running in large hamster ball.]
:I love the whole world

:Panel 6:
:[Depiction of internet sludge (4chan b-Random)]
:And all its messed-up folks.

:Panel 7: (Reference Comic 150)
:[Cueball and Megan immersed in playpen balls.]
:Boom De Yada
:Boom De Yada

:Panel 8:
:[Mass of playpen balls with speech "I put on my robe and wizard hat" originating from it.]
:Boom De Yada
:Boom De Yada

:Panel 9: (Reference Comic 72)
:[Black Hat taking gift away from kid with party hat.]
:I love your suffering.

:Panel 10: (Reference Comic 153)
:[Diagram showing RSA fingerprint authentication between two people.]
:I love cryptography.

:Panel 11: (Reference Comic 230)
:[Cueball and Megan in bed covered by red sheet.]
:I love entangled sheets.

:Panel 12: (Blag)
:[Cueball hanging from kite string holding camera.]
:And kite photography.

:Panel 13: (Reference Comic 256)
:[Map of the internet.]
:I love the whole world

:Panel 14: (Reference Comic 8)
:[Cube with red spider on top.]
:And all its mysteries.

:Panel 15: (Reference Comic 303)
:[Two people sword-fighting on rolling office chairs.]
:Boom De Yada
:Boom De Yada

:Panel 16: (Reference Comic 263)
:[Classroom with two students and Mrs. Lenhart.]
:Boom De Yada
:Boom De Yada

:Panel 17:
:[Cueball saying "Barack me Obamadeus!" to another man speaking energetically at a podium.]
:I love elections.

:Panel 18:
:[Cueball holding schematic diagram of a transistor in front of his crotch.]
:I love transistors.

:Panel 19: (Reference Comic 69)
:[Cueball and Megan in bed, Cueball saying "There ''must'' be taft slash fiction."]
:I love weird pillow talk.

:Panel 20: (Reference Comic 49, 279, 317)
:[Cueball speaking to Megan.]
:I love your sister.

:Panel 21: (Reference Comic 249)
:[Roller coaster with Cueball in front car holding chess board and thinking about a move.]
:I love the whole world.

:Panel 22: (Reference Comic 167)
:[Beret Guy standing in the midst of leafless trees.]
:The future's pretty cool!

:Panel 23: (Reference Comic 108)
:[Megan doing the MC Hammer slide towards Cueball.]
:Boom De Yada
:Boom De Yada

:Panel 24: (Reference Comic 409)
:[Cueball and Megan on an electric skateboard.]
:Boom De Yada
:Boom De Yada

==Trivia==
*This comic was enacted by Olga Nunes and various famous people as [http://www.olganunes.com/xkcd ''We Love xkcd''].

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Miss Lenhart]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cory Doctorow]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Playpen balls]]
[[Category:Red Spiders]]
[[Category:Songs]]
[[Category:Electric skateboard]]

1040: Lakes and Oceans

2014-01-19T06:57:44Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */ Fix up English

{{comic
| number = 1040
| date = April 9, 2012
| title = Lakes and Oceans
| image = lakes and oceans.png
| titletext = James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.
}}

==Explanation==
[http://xkcd.com/1040/large Full size image (2.5MB - 2592×1728)]

This comic is a scale representation of our lakes and oceans, with an emphasis on how little we know about our oceans. It shows the depths and lengths to in relative scale. The {{w|Edmund Fitzgerald}} was a {{w|Great Lakes}} freighter which sank in 1975. The {{w|K-141 Kursk}} was a {{w|Russian}} nuclear submarine which sank in 2000 after an explosion. The {{w|RMS Lusitania}} was a {{w|British}} ocean liner which was famously sunk in 1915, eventually prompting the {{w|United States}} to enter {{w|World War I}}. All three of these ships were sunk in water that was shallower than they were long. The shortest was the K-141 Kursk, which was 154 metres long, and sunk in water only 100 metres deep.

Also on the diagram is the {{w|Titanic}}, which famously sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, and the {{w|Seawise Giant}}, which is the largest ship ever built, at 485 metres. It was scrapped in 2010. The {{w|Deepwater Horizon}} is an offshore oil well which made headlines after an explosion in 2010 caused the {{w|Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill|world's largest oil spill}}. The skyscraper the {{w|Burj Khalifa}} is also shown. The Burj Khalifa is the world tallest manmade structure, and is located in the city of {{w|Dubai}}, in the {{w|United Arab Emirates}}. The {{w|Chilean}} mine showed on the far right is the {{w|San José Mine}}, which suffered a {{w|2010 Copiapó mining accident|collapse}} in 2010, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground for 69 days. The {{w|Kola Superdeep Borehole}} also shown on the right was a {{w|Soviet}} (and later Russian) research project attempting to drill as deep into the {{w|earth's crust}} as possible. It was abandoned in 2005, after reaching a record of 12,262 metres deep.

Also shown are several notable bodies of water. There are the Great Lakes: {{w|Lake Superior}}, {{w|Lake Michigan}}, {{w|Lake Huron}}, {{w|Lake Erie}}, and {{w|Lake Ontario}}. {{w|Death Valley}} is a large, desert valley in {{w|California}}, named because the deadly climate and dry environment support very few life forms. {{w|Great Slave Lake}} is the deepest lake in {{w|North America}}, and is located in the {{w|North West Territories}}, in {{w|Canada}}. {{w|Crater Lake}} is located in {{w|Oregon}}, and is the deepest lake in the United States. {{w|Loch Ness}} is the {{w|Scotland|Scottish}} lake which is the location of the alleged "{{w|Loch Ness Monster}}". {{w|Lake Baikal}} is located in {{w|Russia}} and {{w|Mongolia}}, and is the world's deepest lake. On the far right side of the image is the {{w|Dead Sea}}, a lake near {{w|Jordon}} and {{w|Israel}} which is characterized for having such high salt levels that the waters cannot sustain life (and thus, it's literally a "dead" sea).

In the water, the {{w|Andrea Gail}} was a ship that sunk in a {{w|1991 Perfect Storm|storm}} in 1991, and was later eulogized with a {{w|The_Perfect_Storm_(book)|book}} and {{w|The_Perfect_Storm_(film)|film}}. Several depth limits are shown, including the {{w|free-diving}} record (273 metres), the {{w|scuba diving}} record (330 metres), the depth bike tires go flat (approximately 100 metres), the depth at which water rushes in instead of air rushing out (approximately 2000 metres), the pressure that would push a cork into a bottle (approximately 250 metres), the depth that would push water up a faucet (approximately 75 metres), the depth an {{w|emperor penguin}} can dive (535 metres), the depth limit of an {{w|Ohio-class submarine}} (240 metres), the depth limit of a {{w|Typhoon class submarine}} (400 metres), the depth limit of a {{w|blue whale}} (500 metres), and the depth a {{w|leatherback sea turtle}} can dive (1280 metres).

The comic also illustrates how {{w|sperm whales}} can dive as deep as 3000 metres (though don't frequently go deeper than 400 metres). It is presumed that they dive so deep to feed on {{w|giant squid}}, which can be found as deep as 3000 metres (but, to our knowledge, are more commonly found in depths of 300 to 1000 metres). The fact that sperm whales can dive so deep and come up battered emphasizes Randall's point that we know so little about our oceans. Also shown are the depth limit of the {{w|DSV Alvin}}, a deep-sea vessel, the {{w|mid-ocean ridge}}, an underwater mountain range which could be considered to be the largest mountain range in the world, the {{w|Puerto Rico Trench}} (and the included {{w|Milwaukee Deep}}), which is the deepest part of the {{w|Atlantic Ocean}}, at 8648 metres, and the {{w|Mariana Trench}}, the deepest point of the {{w|Pacific Ocean}} at 10,944 metres. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, pressure is as high as 1086 {{w|bar (unit)|bars}} and {{w|Xenophyophore|life forms}} have been found at depths as low as 10,641 metres.

The marked {{w|abyssal plains}} are a deep-sea plain believed to hold a very diverse array of life forms, but are largely unexplored. The stick figures of {{w|David Bowie}} and {{w|Freddie Mercury}} are a reference to Bowie's and Queen's songs "{{w|Under Pressure}}". The label "the abyss" with its sublabel of "it's rude to stare" is a reference to the {{w|Friedrich Nietzsche}} quote, "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back".

The door at the bottom of the {{w|Marianas Trench}} is a reference to {{w|James Cameron}}'s attempt to reach the bottom of the trench in his {{w|Deepsea Challenger}} vessel, which he filmed with 3D cameras in 2012.

The title text's allusion of music playing when Cameron opened this door may or may not be referencing anything. However, possibilities include:
*The door positioned as a hatch could reference the hatch in the {{w|Lost (TV series)|Lost}} television series, which characters spent several seasons trying to get into, and reaching it ultimately led to many deaths and calamities.
*It also could be a reference to {{w|H. P. Lovecraft}}: his stories often contain things locked away that shouldn't be released, such as {{w|Cthulhu}} and {{w|Azathoth}}, the latter of these is connected to music, but not to oceans, and the former of which to oceans, but not music.

==Transcript==
:[Map of lakes and oceans showing the depths of various lakes and ocean attributes.]

:Lakes and Oceans
:Depths and animal/ship/boat lengths are to scale; horizontal distance is not

:Fun Fact: The Edmund Fitzgerald, The Kursk, and The Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.

:Edmund Fitzgerald
:Lake Superior
:Lake Michigan
:Lake Huron
:Lake Erie
:Lake Ontario
:Death Valley
:Great Slave Lake
:Crater Lake
:Loch Ness
:Lake Baikal
:Burj Khalifa
:Kursk
:Lusitania
:Aircraft carrier
:Titanic
:Seawise Giant (largest ship ever)
:Free-diving depth record
:Andrea Gail (probably)
:Scuba record
:Bike tires go flat
:Pressure at this deapth would force water up a household faucet
:Emperor penguin
:Ohio-class nuclear sub depth limit
:Typhoon-class nuclear sub depth limit
:Blue whale
:Leahterback turtle
:Deepwater horizion
:Dead sea
:Kola borehole: Soviet project to try to drill through the Earth's crust to the mantle just to see what would happen. Russians are awesome.
:Chilean mine ''collapse''' miner refuge
:Sperm whales dive this deep (they come up covered in wounds and sucker marks, so presumably there are big squid down here? ... man, we know nothing about the ocean.)
:Mid-ocean ridge
:Titanic (sunk bow & stern)
:Abyssal plain
:Alvin depth limit
:David Bowie & Freddie Mercury
:Puerto Rico Trench
:Milwaukee Deep
:Marianas Trench
:Challenger Deep
:Mysterious door which James Cameron built his sub to reach and open. He will not say what he found within.
:Mauna Kea, Hawaii (accurate horizontal scale)
:Marianas trench
:OIL

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

1040: Lakes and Oceans

2014-01-19T06:55:03Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */ Harry Potter reference seems an exceptionally unlikely option. It doesn't sing, it doesn't contain anything; and its shrieks turn to comprehensible English underwater. A rather big jump.

{{comic
| number = 1040
| date = April 9, 2012
| title = Lakes and Oceans
| image = lakes and oceans.png
| titletext = James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.
}}

==Explanation==
[http://xkcd.com/1040/large Full size image (2.5MB - 2592×1728)]

This comic is a scale representation of our lakes and oceans, with an emphasis on how little we know about our oceans. It shows the depths and lengths to in relative scale. The {{w|Edmund Fitzgerald}} was a {{w|Great Lakes}} freighter which sank in 1975. The {{w|K-141 Kursk}} was a {{w|Russian}} nuclear submarine which sank in 2000 after an explosion. The {{w|RMS Lusitania}} was a {{w|British}} ocean liner which was famously sunk in 1915, eventually prompting the {{w|United States}} to enter {{w|World War I}}. All three of these ships were sunk in water that was shallower than they were long. The shortest was the K-141 Kursk, which was 154 metres long, and sunk in water only 100 metres deep.

Also on the diagram is the {{w|Titanic}}, which famously sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, and the {{w|Seawise Giant}}, which is the largest ship ever built, at 485 metres. It was scrapped in 2010. The {{w|Deepwater Horizon}} is an offshore oil well which made headlines after an explosion in 2010 caused the {{w|Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill|world's largest oil spill}}. The skyscraper the {{w|Burj Khalifa}} is also shown. The Burj Khalifa is the world tallest manmade structure, and is located in the city of {{w|Dubai}}, in the {{w|United Arab Emirates}}. The {{w|Chilean}} mine showed on the far right is the {{w|San José Mine}}, which suffered a {{w|2010 Copiapó mining accident|collapse}} in 2010, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground for 69 days. The {{w|Kola Superdeep Borehole}} also shown on the right was a {{w|Soviet}} (and later Russian) research project attempting to drill as deep into the {{w|earth's crust}} as possible. It was abandoned in 2005, after reaching a record of 12,262 metres deep.

Also shown are several notable bodies of water. There are the Great Lakes: {{w|Lake Superior}}, {{w|Lake Michigan}}, {{w|Lake Huron}}, {{w|Lake Erie}}, and {{w|Lake Ontario}}. {{w|Death Valley}} is a large, desert valley in {{w|California}}, named because the deadly climate and dry environment support very few life forms. {{w|Great Slave Lake}} is the deepest lake in {{w|North America}}, and is located in the {{w|North West Territories}}, in {{w|Canada}}. {{w|Crater Lake}} is located in {{w|Oregon}}, and is the deepest lake in the United States. {{w|Loch Ness}} is the {{w|Scotland|Scottish}} lake which is the location of the alleged "{{w|Loch Ness Monster}}". {{w|Lake Baikal}} is located in {{w|Russia}} and {{w|Mongolia}}, and is the world's deepest lake. On the far right side of the image is the {{w|Dead Sea}}, a lake near {{w|Jordon}} and {{w|Israel}} which is characterized for having such high salt levels that the waters cannot sustain life (and thus, it's literally a "dead" sea).

In the water, the {{w|Andrea Gail}} was a ship that sunk in a {{w|1991 Perfect Storm|storm}} in 1991, and was later eulogized with a {{w|The_Perfect_Storm_(book)|book}} and {{w|The_Perfect_Storm_(film)|film}}. Several depth limits are shown, including the {{w|free-diving}} record (273 metres), the {{w|scuba diving}} record (330 metres), the depth bike tires go flat (approximately 100 metres), the depth at which water rushes in instead of air rushing out (approximately 2000 metres), the pressure that would push a cork into a bottle (approximately 250 metres), the depth that would push water up a faucet (approximately 75 metres), the depth an {{w|emperor penguin}} can dive (535 metres), the depth limit of an {{w|Ohio-class submarine}} (240 metres), the depth limit of a {{w|Typhoon class submarine}} (400 metres), the depth limit of a {{w|blue whale}} (500 metres), and the depth a {{w|leatherback sea turtle}} can dive (1280 metres).

The comic also illustrates how {{w|sperm whales}} can dive as deep as 3000 metres (though don't frequently go deeper than 400 metres). It is presumed that they dive so deep to feed on {{w|giant squid}}, which can be found as deep as 3000 metres (but, to our knowledge, are more commonly found in depths of 300 to 1000 metres). The fact that sperm whales can dive so deep and come up battered emphasizes Randall's point that we know so little about our oceans. Also shown are the depth limit of the {{w|DSV Alvin}}, a deep-sea vessel, the {{w|mid-ocean ridge}}, an underwater mountain range which could be considered to be the largest mountain range in the world, the {{w|Puerto Rico Trench}} (and the included {{w|Milwaukee Deep}}), which is the deepest part of the {{w|Atlantic Ocean}}, at 8648 metres, and the {{w|Mariana Trench}}, the deepest point of the {{w|Pacific Ocean}} at 10,944 metres. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, pressure is as high as 1086 {{w|bar (unit)|bars}} and {{w|Xenophyophore|life forms}} have been found at depths as low as 10,641 metres.

The marked {{w|abyssal plains}} are a deep-sea plain believed to hold a very diverse array of life forms, but are largely unexplored. The stick figures of {{w|David Bowie}} and {{w|Freddie Mercury}} are a reference to Bowie's and Queen's songs "{{w|Under Pressure}}". The label "the abyss" with its sublabel of "it's rude to stare" is a reference to the {{w|Friedrich Nietzsche}} quote, "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back".

The door at the bottom of the {{w|Marianas Trench}} is a reference to {{w|James Cameron}}'s attempt to reach the bottom of the trench in his {{w|Deepsea Challenger}} vessel, which he filmed with 3D cameras in 2012.

The title text's allusion of music playing when Cameron opened this door is is unknown, it could be a reference to:
*The door positioned as a hatch could be a reference to the hatch in TV's {{w|Lost (TV series)|Lost}} series, which characters spent several seasons trying to get into, the accomplishment of that desire ultimately leading to many deaths and calamities.
*It also could be a reference to {{w|H. P. Lovecraft}}: his stories often contain things locked away that shouldn't be released, such as {{w|Cthulhu}} and {{w|Azathoth}}, the latter of these is connected to music, but not to oceans, and the former of which to oceans, but not music.

==Transcript==
:[Map of lakes and oceans showing the depths of various lakes and ocean attributes.]

:Lakes and Oceans
:Depths and animal/ship/boat lengths are to scale; horizontal distance is not

:Fun Fact: The Edmund Fitzgerald, The Kursk, and The Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.

:Edmund Fitzgerald
:Lake Superior
:Lake Michigan
:Lake Huron
:Lake Erie
:Lake Ontario
:Death Valley
:Great Slave Lake
:Crater Lake
:Loch Ness
:Lake Baikal
:Burj Khalifa
:Kursk
:Lusitania
:Aircraft carrier
:Titanic
:Seawise Giant (largest ship ever)
:Free-diving depth record
:Andrea Gail (probably)
:Scuba record
:Bike tires go flat
:Pressure at this deapth would force water up a household faucet
:Emperor penguin
:Ohio-class nuclear sub depth limit
:Typhoon-class nuclear sub depth limit
:Blue whale
:Leahterback turtle
:Deepwater horizion
:Dead sea
:Kola borehole: Soviet project to try to drill through the Earth's crust to the mantle just to see what would happen. Russians are awesome.
:Chilean mine ''collapse''' miner refuge
:Sperm whales dive this deep (they come up covered in wounds and sucker marks, so presumably there are big squid down here? ... man, we know nothing about the ocean.)
:Mid-ocean ridge
:Titanic (sunk bow & stern)
:Abyssal plain
:Alvin depth limit
:David Bowie & Freddie Mercury
:Puerto Rico Trench
:Milwaukee Deep
:Marianas Trench
:Challenger Deep
:Mysterious door which James Cameron built his sub to reach and open. He will not say what he found within.
:Mauna Kea, Hawaii (accurate horizontal scale)
:Marianas trench
:OIL

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

User talk:Dgbrt

2014-01-18T13:54:06Z

141.101.99.235: /* Cthulhu and Azathoth (1040) */

== [[1190: Time]] ==

It's fine that you're helping with updating [[1190: Time]]. I'm trying to write a script that automatically updates the hashes and uploads the images. In order to test the script, could you, at least for the next image, refrain from doing that? I can then test the script and if it works, you can continue if you want to, but least I know that my script does work.

Updating the transcript and anything else from the page is still absolutely fine, I cannot do this. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 15:56, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
: Ok, seems to work. If you want, you can continue updating, but my script should do this automatically within ~1 minute while I'm online. And if I'm not, it should catch up later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

:: GREAT, it's really working. My computer is online 24/7 (but not me). Since updates should be done in time maybe my computer is the better machine for your script. I am on Linux and a cron job is downloading at 00,05,20,35,50 each hour, just in case the update frequency will change again. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:31, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

::: Might be, but I have a folder full of scripting stuff, and I would have to tidy up all that to get the important lines. And I'm not really in the mood for that. ;-) Maybe I will come back to this later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:52, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. The reason I said "another" river is because "another" is referencing Megan's quote that "yes. there are other rivers" - implying they have arrived at "another" river, not the one they already knew about. I put quotes because as you point out, we haven't exactly seen them come across the first river. As to the water bottle, if you want to change it to "drinking bottle", I'm fine with that. The contents being water is an assumption based on what you might expect someone to do going on a long journey. [[User:TheHYPO|TheHYPO]] ([[User talk:TheHYPO|talk]]) 20:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

: I am not a native English speaker - so thanks for help - but I just want to be correct. And I did edit your edit...

I think a special page (i.e. "1190: Time: Pictures") with a table (description | thumb with link) or other form of separator might work. I seem to remember seeing something on using a different thumb file on a picture link. This is my first time editing wiki pages, but the thumbs and smaller images on the upload pages don't appear to be working. As a work around, I just used blind links without thumbs (e.g. :file:fname...). I can create and upload smaller pictures, but will need some help putting it all together. If this sounds good to you, give me a nod on my talk page and I'll start adding content and let the regulars help straighten it out. Also, am I doing something wrong on the uploads or is it just not working? [[User:Galois|Galois]] ([[User talk:Galois|talk]]) 23:52, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
: I'm also relatively new to wiki edits, but I'm a programmer, Linux expert (and more OS's) and also the admin for the wiki at my company. Thumbnails do not work because of a bug in the configuration or missing capabilities at the hoster. I will try to talk to the admins here, maybe I can help. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:33, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

== Redirections, and incomplete explanations ==

Hello there, and thank you for your work! :-)

One technical thing that you should note, when you create pages that should redirect directly to a newly created explanation page (for example [[332]] to redirect to [[332: Gyroscopes]]), use the redirection syntax which goes like this: <code><nowiki>#REDIRECT [[332: Gyroscopes]]</nowiki></code>

You've done it right for [[447]] / [[Too Old For This Shit]] or [[531]] / [[Friends]] for instance, so try to do it all the time, instead of leaving pages with only a link in it, like {{diff|39258|332}} / {{diff|39259|Gyroscopes}} or {{diff|39251|311}} / {{diff|39252|Action Movies}}. Thanks :-)

Another thing, not from me, and about content this time: [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] left you a couple of message in the changes he made to the pages you created, but it's fairly possible that you didn't get them, so here they are:
* (in response to your comment ''"I am still trying to give every comic a page here. Help me to complete it!"''): {{diff|39262|''"I'd really rather leave those links red for someone to write a proper explanation. With explanations that read like second transcripts, all we really do is take traffic away from xkcd.com without adding value."''}}
* {{diff|39263|''"Also, incomplete articles are harder to track than nonexistent articles, so I'd rather we just focus on making explanations well instead of making an unsatisfactory shell for every comic. Incomplete explanations make us look kinda bad too."''}}
* {{diff|39265|''"People on other sites often comment on how our explanations are a wildly mixed bag of quality. I'd rather you put your effort into making a few good substantial explanations instead of loads of summaries and rehashes of the transcript."''}}

Try to take that into account also...

Cheers, [[User:Cos|Cos]] ([[User talk:Cos|talk]]) 10:45, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

:Hello [[User:Cos|Cos]], here some comments by me:
::Redirections - I'm sorry for the missing #REDIRECT tag. I'm using often a text editor for my own copy and paste templates. I am sure I would have figured out that error today by myself. Thanks for your help!
::Incomplete explanations - I will stop on this even when I think it's good idea to have a page for each comic here and work afterwards on all those incomplete ones. The pages [[Help:How_to_add_a_new_comic_explanation]] and [[List_of_unexplained_comics]] should clarify this issue. Furthermore there are many more incomplete comics not marked as incomplete so you can't find them here: [[:Category:Incomplete explanations|Incomplete explanations]]. I will also send a message to [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] about this.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:35, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of incomplete explanations, do you think you could help add some text to [[266: Choices: Part 3]] and [[267: Choices: Part 4]]? To my knowledge, they are the only articles on the wiki without even a stub for an explanation. In addition, the other three choice articles could use some better explanations. --[[User:Oneforfortytwo|Oneforfortytwo]] ([[User talk:Oneforfortytwo|talk]]) 04:02, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

== Ach nee,... ==

...schau mal einer an, noch ein Deutscher! Wollte nur mal 'nen Gruß hinterlassen... ;-) --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 21:37, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
:Ich grüße zurück! I am greeting you too.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 14:20, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

== Congratulations! ==

You worked on the last unexplained comic of ''xkcd'' at very much the same time that the article was created! [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 23:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
:I was working at the same time to create that explanation. After trying to save I got a warning that it's already there. So I just did add my work there.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 10:40, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
::In that case, you also created the last explanation. You two worked on the comic at essentially the same time. [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 18:13, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

== 1190:Time frame renumbering ==

Apologies if I created confusion, I was under the impression that davidy22 had already made the final decision to renumber the frames. I didn't know there was someone else who made the decision. [[User:Patzer|Patzer]] ([[User talk:Patzer|talk]]) 01:11, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

== DgbrtBOT ==

It took a while for me to notice your request. I think you've been quite the active figure around the wiki, so I've added the bot to the bots group.

Keep up the work and don't burn out! [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 16:37, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

:Many thanks, my request was mainly for picture uploads to 1190 Time, but maybe I will use this feature in the future. I will be careful, first tests will be done at my local TestWiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:29, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

== The right place to add 'discussion' ==

I don't disagree with your comment to [[User:Anon]] (although I'd say "additions" instead of "adds"), or to a number of your edits to their additions, but some of what has been added is not worthy of Trivia sections being added. They should probably have been put into the talk page, or in some cases, left where they were. [[User:Markhurd|Mark Hurd]] ([[User talk:Markhurd|talk]]) 05:39, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
:You are right, I just did not want to delete the additions by this new user. Because I can't move a single line to the talk page by one edit I thought the Trivia section would be the best solution. I don't like links to other comics here when it doesn't explain anything to the actual one. But a sidestep to a similar joke could be worthy to the Trivia section.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 13:36, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

== Explained too much ==

Hello Dgbrt, I'm sorry I explained too much about comic 1255. I was under the impression that the purpose of this wiki was to explain XKCD comics for those who don't get the references, so I thought it would be helpful to explain the part about sailing in a line tangent to the surface, which wasn't previously touched on in the description. I understand now that what you guys actually do here is to describe and transcribe XKCD comics. That's not something I'm interested in so I'll leave now. Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding. [[User:Rombobjörn|Rombobjörn]] ([[User talk:Rombobjörn|talk]]) 12:47, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Hey, this site does not only "transcribe XKCD comics". The wrong stories about Columbus is the major joke here, Megan did use Tolkien's books, but she also could have used many others. The explain should point on the essentials of the comic, people should be able to read this easy in general.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:07, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Hello. Admin here. I don't comb through and look at every single edit that happens in this wiki, but some things flag up as significant and this scuffle qualifies. Reading the current explanation and your addition, there are a number of unexplained and unreferenced Tolkien-specific terms littered around the place. Valar and Ilúvatar will not be familiar to people who have not read the Silmarillion before. Megan appears to be drawing a direct parallel between Eärendil and Columbus here with the quote "A silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star." There is no apparent evidence to show that the reformation of the earth is referenced in this comic; no mention of Akallabêth, Ilúvatar or any hint of Columbus being of elvish descent. If you can link your reference directly to the comic, feel free to add it in.
::Also, Dgbrt, you only have to reply once to the original talk message. You don't have to leave disjointed messages in other people's talk pages. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 17:05, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Discussions with Quicksilver ==

Hello! I have noticed that "In this comic" is a pet peeve to you. As a gift, I have removed it from almost all of the 60 explanations that it started, but there remain some more places where it could be removed. If you wish, you can go ahead and remove the newlines that I left in their wake.

If you need a general copy-editor for grammar, punctuation, or usage, let me know. I consider myself adequate at it, being a decently educated native American English speaker. (I am not a professional editor, though, so stuff can always be made better.)

Also, as you definitely have noticed, I can get belligerent over some things, particularly whether a page deserves its "Incomplete" status. I expect some more sparring matches in the coming future. I do hope to work with you on cutting the number of such pages down.

Anyway, thanks for the intro to the wiki! --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 21:31, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Welcome Quicksilver! I did see that you must be an native American speaker but some of your edits are too offensive, I do reply on this, and we have to discuss until a final solution can be presented. Many updates by you are great, but please check all the links, etc. until removing the incomplete tag. This tag does not mean the explain is wrong. BTW: Please sign your discussions.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:22, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Now that I have your attention, we can begin discussing things. We have a brewing edit war over the following pages (so far): [[694: Retro Virus]], [[54: Science]], and [[10: Pi Equals]].

The first one I claim to be complete, while you dispute this. I cannot see how much further we can go into explanations of XP, viruses, Howard Dean, Friendster, or Kazaa. Apart from those, the comic really doesn't have anything else to explain, and its grammar and style are fair. I see no reason that the Incomplete tag should be there.

In the second one, we have different interpretations of the title text, "Bonus point if you can identify the science in question." You claim that this somehow means we should challenge science. While I understand that part of the spirit of science is questioning it, this sentence has a fairly straightforward meaning: if you can identify the science in question, you get a bonus point. In other words, if you know where this equation comes from, good for you. Randall is praising his readers who happen to know about the blackbody radiation curve, which would be a good number of them (I'd guess).

The third one is a simple issue of punctuation. You have argued, via explanations, that "one must close sentences." While I understand that it may look awkward for the quotation marks in question (those around the name of Mrs Roberts's daughter) to contain a period, not part of the name, and to have the sentence ended by a punctuation mark inside a pair of quotes, this is the English convention on quotation marks. Such a convention can be checked [http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/577/ here]. This usage clashes with that of French, German, and many other languages, but is standard in English.

As other pages turn into edit wars, I would prefer to discuss them in some central location (such as your wonderful talk page) rather than individual pages. Thank you for your consideration. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 22:40, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Every comic does have it's own discussion page. Here you can talk about my behave, especial on some few offensive edits I did not accept. And keep short or I will just reply {{w|Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read|tl;dr}}--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:09, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Very well. Our agenda begins with [[54: Science]]. The other two we will address at some point. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 23:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Allegations concerning [[User:Quicksilver]] ==

You have in the edit summary field claimed that Quicksilver's edits are offensive. After a quick glance through some of his recent edits, I don't find this to be the case. Do you care to explain yourself? [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 03:26, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
:200 or 300 edits within a few hours, no one can understand all that comics at this time range. I just did criticized two or three edits he did, but an edit to former content without any understandable explain I can't except. And than he reverts my criticism, that's all.

:I'm not a spam hunter here, but I like CLEAR and SHORT (meaning, people will be able read) explains here. Look at [[1256: Questions]], just an other hell (nobody will ever read all that masturbation orgasms writers must have - sorry, put this into the sex category.)--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

::One add: Understand sarcasm, xkcd, romance, math, and language. Randall did publish many sarcastic comics, I just do like to point this out.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:52, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

== Language and writing style ==
Please, please stop reverting and calling editors out on language and writing style. It is not your strong point. Focus on content. When we start work on our german translations, you can go jabbing editors in their talk pages over writing too much. Here, you're only reverting and deterring valuable edits. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 02:35, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
:You know I'm not native American, many viewers are too. American English is still strange sometimes, but you are right: It's not my "strong point". But nevertheless, I always did focus on content in the past, and I will do this in the future. I was just acting on mass updates nobody can review.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

== PyCon ==

The post saying that Randall was banned was a joke. There is no PyCon issue. See [[Talk:153: Cryptography]]. [[User:gijobarts|gijobarts]] ([[User Talk:gijobarts|talk]]) 20:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
:Sure it was joke, so maybe it should be explained, it belongs to this comic.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

== [[1270: Functional]] ==

Would you mind answering my actual concerns regarding [[1270]]? The things you answered are (in my eyes) very minor points, where I would not mind to compromise. However, currently the article does not explain what '''{{w|functional programming}}''' is at all! I wanted to change that which you mostly edited away. I am willing to make my explanations more understandable (preferably if you or anyone else has suggestions what is/might be unclear). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 16:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:Hi, I don't like edit wars. I just did try to simplify the explain for non programmer readers. And I think these facts should be mentioned:
:1. Functions return a value, unlike procedures do.
:2. Your wiki link says: "a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs, that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data." My sine(x) idea isn't bad according to this.
:3. The part "mutable data" means that each call of the function allocates its own memory, local variables are not viewable or changeable from the outside. Recursions just use this feature.
:4. Tail recursion just means that there is a clearly defined break at the end of the function. The most elegant code should be this (the else statement is removed, braces for a clear code):
factorial(n)
{
if n > 0
{
n * factorial(n-1)
}
return 1
}
:5. The wikipedia pages are a little bit confusing and inaccurate (I would mark them incomplete). But even the first reference at {{w|functional programming}} to this [http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~adamo/languages/books/p359-hudak.pdf PDF] is interesting. It's saying (Chapter 4): "Myth 1, that functional programming is the antithesis of conventional imperative programming,...".
:This programming paradigm definitions are still confusing, but here Randall just mentions a recursion with a break at the tail. I think we have to focus on this first. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::I replaced your bullet points by numbers, so I can refer to them, I hope you don't mind.
::ad 1) I agree, but I don't know why you need to introduce the (imperative) concept of a procedure at all? (There is no such thing in functional programming)
::ad 2) Yes, sine is a function, also in the functional programming sense. It is not really a function one would implement using a functional language (although it is possible). Also this function is not referred to later, so I don't see any benefit from introducing it. How about using the factorial function as example for a function?
::ad 3) There is no such thing as a "variable" in functional programming. Variables are mutable data, and mutable data is avoided.
::ad 4) What I learned is that tail recursion means that the only recursive call happens at the tail of the function ("call" in imperative programming, or substitution in functional programming). Maybe I'm wrong and should study again, and also did not understand what {{w|tail recursion}} wants to say, but I doubt that.
::ad 5) I agree that it is not very easy to understand, but I don't see any inaccuracy in that article. About the reference: Yes, but that does not mean imperative and functional programming is essentially the same. The section continues and describes that functional programming carries on the evolution from low-level (e.g. Assembler, allowing just simple operations) over high-level (imperative) programming which allows expressions to functional programming which says there are '''only''' expressions. (If and why and when this is useful is another story -- though actually that is essentially what White Hats wants to know from Cueball)
::And w.r.t your last point: So you would prefer not to explain (or have someone explain) the parts which are confusing to you? Wasn't explaining that the whole idea of this wiki? --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 20:44, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::I don't mind your edit but now I will reply in general. The most important paradigm is {{w|Structured programming|structured programming}} witch did lead to avoid statements like ''GOTO'', but this explain can not be a comprisal on computer since. It's just a small comic mentioning functional programming and tail recursion. But maybe we should try to enhance the English Wikipedia. ;) --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:04, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::Yes, the article you quoted also says (concluding the Myth 1-section) that functional programming goes further from avoiding [[goto]] to also avoiding assignments and control-flow structures. I'll mostly leave enhancing the English wikipedia to English native speakers, actually {{w|de:Funktionale Programmierung}} is not that badly written. (Sure it also gets complicated towards the end, but ''intuitive and clear'' does not equal ''easy'' ;) ) [[541|Damn you, Randall!]] --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 21:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::::The German Wiki is often just a bad translation from English, lacking references. But this part is interesting: {{w|de:Funktionale_Programmierung#Abgrenzung_von_imperativer_Programmierung}} explains the difference of imperative and functional implementations. My example above is functional, NOT imperative, and also includes the the ''tail'' part. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::::Ok, you are right, that it is '''also''' functional (at least when written using if ''and'' else and ignoring the syntactic noise of the ''return'' (without the else part, I would consider that control flow: The second return is called ''after'' the if statement)). '''Only''' functional I would call the formula which comes before the implementation (in the de:wiki article), but the implementation is also a valid imperative function.
::::::I still don't agree that this is tail recursive (I think our definitions of tail-recursion don't match so far). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 23:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

The explain is still not very helpful, and the reason is that {{w|Computer science}} isn't a science like physics or math, it's more like philosophy or something else. An author is defining some theories and statements with no prove as it is done in math. [[User:Chtz|Chtz]], we are both wrong and correct, but Randall is just joking about this ''science''.

The details about different implementations can be shown below this general classification on computer science. I think this would be the best solution for an explain, different meanings can be shown, just like computer science does. What do you think?--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

== Your name ==

I'm just a random stalker on the Internet reading XKCD, and I see your name alot. I've been reading it as "dogbert", like as in the Dilbert comics, but now I'm really curious. Where does your username come from?
[[Special:Contributions/173.245.55.215|173.245.55.215]] 02:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
:That's just my secret ;) . But you can be sure I was just looking for a unique name without any vowels, like xkcd. You also can find me at the German wiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

== 1297: oort cloud: comet nuclei, asteroids, etch ==

Thanks for your many contributions to explainxkcd! In [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1297:_Oort_Cloud&diff=next&oldid=53963] you changed back some of my edits on the oort cloud. I've commented in the talk page about my reasoning, and tried to come up with less arguable language. If you disagree, let's discuss it on the [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:1297:_Oort_Cloud talk page]. Cheers, [[User:Nealmcb|Nealmcb]] ([[User talk:Nealmcb|talk]]) 16:56, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
:Uhh, that's two days ago, many edits went on that page after this. If I see my major changes correctly I did remove something like "comet at the Oort Cloud" because an object is only a comet when it's encounter the sun; and the Milky Way itself does not influence the orbit of an possible Oort Cloud object. I'm not native English, so I'm still happy for help on this, but I do know physics and more since very well. And much more sad: It still seems ISON is dead. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:28, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

== 1246 ==
Hey Dgbrt,

we need to have a discussion about the latest edit on 1246. i believe that we should refrain from further edits until we have discussed this in the discussion page.

[[User:Mrarch|Mrarch]] ([[User talk:Mrarch|talk]]) 20:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
:I will reply soon. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

== X11 Title Text Explanation ==

In my absence was it finally decided forever and always how title text explanations would be handled? I can't find a discussion in the Community Portal, if you have a link I'd be interested to come up to speed on the current editing policies. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 22:44, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
:A BIG problem is here still that there are NO editing policies in general. I'm just following the main "feel and look". In standard explains the title text is just at the bottom of the explain, and trivia goes after transcript. You are an admin here and maybe you should talk to [[User:Davidy22]]. In general I think that X11 still needs a better layout. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

::Ok. I had wondered about that. My personal policy, when I was an active editor a year ago, was once a title text explanation is longer than 2 paragraphs it should get it's own subsection. I'll have to get a dialogue started with Davidy about it once more.

::So you know, the English phrase is "look and feel". I know English isn't your first language, I just wanted to correct you on that. If I tried typing in German, I'd probably embarrass myself, and you'd have to help me.

::[[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 23:25, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

:::I'm happy about your latest actions here! And of course I did mix it up, it's "look and feel" and a translation of my former mistake could lead into some problems. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 01:13, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

== [[1052]] ==

Think you may have marked this as complete a smidgen early - it needed a bit of cleanup, and a few more tweaks (the joke about theology wasn't explained, really). I've done it now, though. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 16:40, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:You are welcome to enhance this explain, but in general it's not incomplete any more. If you feel the explain is still incomplete just add the tag again and provide a reason. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:02, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
::Eh, I got it. It was just a couple little things - the Ontological Argument joke, and such. I suppose, though, that "I had intended to do more work on it" isn't really an argument against removing it, is it? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 18:26, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:::And I'm very happy if you still can enhance this explain. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

== Cthulhu and Azathoth ([[1040]]) ==

I can only presume you haven't read Lovecraft, but those are the best known sealed-away gods in modern literature. Cthulhu is supposed to live in the extreme depths, Azathoth beyond time, surrounded by insane pipers. They're a far better explanation than the Harry Potter one which is far, far more tangental - it sings in a bath, and contains nothing that could escape - but you're leaving in.

I doubt there's a precise reference being made to ''anything'' in the comic, but Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian Gods are the overwhelmingly likely inspiration. Unless someone has a better explanation. I suppose one could discuss The Abyss as well. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:27, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

:I disagree, this comic contains only REAL things. This is NO horror fiction. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:58, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
::The door at the bottom of the Marinas Trench is real now? James Cameron really released something on the world because he was distracted by its beautiful music? I think you've missed the actual context of the specific discussion. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:36, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

1061: EST

2014-01-18T12:15:55Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1061
| date = May 28, 2012
| title = EST
| image = est.png
| titletext = The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic pokes fun of attempts to "fix" the calendar by making it simpler or more rational, which inevitably result in a system just as complicated. This is an example of the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you often have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.

===Length of Year===

Because there are approximately 365.2422 days in a {{w|solar year}}, various calendars use different means to keep the calendar year in sync with the solar year and the seasons. The Julian Calendar, for example, has leap days every four years, giving it an average day length of 365.25 years. The most widely used system is the {{w|Gregorian Calendar|Gregorian Calendar}}, which also has leap days every four years, but skips leap days in years divisible by 100 unless the year is also divisible by 400. This gives it an average day length of 365.2425 days, which is very close to the length of a solar year.

{{w|Calendar reform|Other calendars}} have been proposed, such not counting leap days and special "festival days" as a day of the week, in order to make every date fall on the same day of the week every year.

[[Randall]] advertises his idea for an "Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet". He combines {{w|calendar#Calendars in use|calendar}} definitions with {{w|Time zone|time zone}} definitions. The abbreviation ''EST'' is a joke on the American {{w|Eastern Time Zone|Eastern Standard Time}}.

*At "24 hours 4 minutes", EST days are longer, though there are only 360 of them in the year. The extra 4 minutes over the course of 360 days adds up to one standard day, so Randall's EST calendar would at this point have a year that is 361 standard days long.

*Running the clock backwards for 4 hours after every full moon gives 8 additional hours at each full moon, twelve or thirteen times in a year. Because a thirteenth full moon will occur once every 2.7 solar years on average, this modification adds 4.1228 standard days to an EST year, bringing it to 365.1228 days.

*The doubling of the non-prime numbers of the first non-reversed hour after each solstice and equinox is a final, very complicated way to bring Randall's EST year in extremely close sync with the solar year. There are 17 prime numbers between 0 and 59 and 43 non-primes. There are 2 equinoxes and 2 solstices each year, so a total of 172 minutes will occur twice. This brings the average length of Randall's EST year to 365.2422 standard days, equal to the solar year to four decimal places.

===Claimed Benefits===
Many of the claimed benefits for the calendar are highly dubious:
*While it is fairly ''simple'' to describe, EST is far from simple to understand or put in practice. Clocks in particular would have to regularly undertake very complicated processes like running backwards or duplicating non-prime minutes.
*EST does appear to be fairly ''clearly defined''.
*EST fails completely to be ''unambiguous''. Following each full moon, four hours occur three times, twice forward and once backward. Several minutes are also duplicated, making times during those periods ambiguous.
*The only way EST is ''free of historical baggage'' is that it breaks free of any sensible bits of historical baggage; it keeps such things as the 30-day month and 12-month year, but adopts a different (and variable) length of day that would make it wildly out of sync with the Earth's day-night cycle.
*EST is ''compatible with old units'', as far as seconds, minutes, and hours are concerned, though not for days, months, or years.
*EST is indeed very ''precisely synced with the solar cycle''.
*EST is ''free of leap years'', though some EST years are 8 hours longer than others on account of having an extra full moon.
*A calendar ''amenable to date math'' makes it easy to find the length of time between two dates and times by having standardized periods of time. The complex variability of the length of EST years, days, and hours mean it is only ''intermittently'' amenable to date math, which is to say not at all.

===Other Features===

The features of the calendar get increasingly bizarre as the description proceeds:

*The {{w|Epoch (reference date)|Epoch}} for EST is set by reference to the {{w|Julian calendar}}, which was superseded by the {{w|Gregorian calendar}}. The Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.

*The different zone for the United Kingdom is a reference to 1 yard being equal to 0.9144 meters, a pun on using {{w|imperial units}} instead of the {{w|metric system}}.

*Randall does not like {{w|Daylight Savings Time}} very much, as mentioned later in [[1268: Alternate Universe]].

*{{w|Narnia (world)|Narnian time}} is a reference to the fictitious world of Narnia in CS Lewis's {{w|The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe}} and its sequels. In Narnia, time passes much more quickly than in the real world. You could be in Narnia for several days and only a few minutes would have passed in the real world. However, synchronizing this effect would be impossible because it is not a consistent rate; it fluctuates wildly based on the whims of drama and magic.

*The Gregorian calendar does not include the year "0", after "1" BC the next year is "1" AD. Randall's invention fixes this according to correct Mathematics... only to reintroduce the problem immediately by arbitrarily omitting the year 1958. The year 1958 is significant because January 1, 1958 is the epoch (time zero) in {{w|International Atomic Time}} (TAI), which is part of the basis for {{w|Coordinated Universal Time}} (UTC). (The main difference is that TAI doesn’t add leap seconds).

*The title text may be a reference to the ancient (Pre-Babylonian Exile) [http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm Jewish Calendar], which did not name the months, rather assigning them numbers from 1 to 12. The names used by Jews today are the names of the Babylonian months, derived from various Babylonian deities.

==Transcript==
:XKCD{{sic}} Presents
:'''EARTH STANDARD TIME'''
:(EST)
:A Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet
:EST is...
:Simple * Clearly Defined * Unambiguous
:Free of Historical Baggage * Compatible with Old Units
:Precisely Synced with the Solar Cycle * Free of Leap Years
:Intermittently Amenable to Date Math

:UNITS
:Second: 1 S.I. Second
:Minute: 60 seconds
:Hour: 60 minutes
:Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes)

:Month: 30 Days
:Year: 12 months

:RULES
:For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward.
:The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.

:[Epoch]
:00:00:00 EST, January 1, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970 (Julian calendar)
:[Time Zones]
:The two EST time zones are
:''EST'' and ''EST (United Kingdom)''. These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.

:Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there.
:Narnian Time: Synchronized.
:Year Zero: EST ''does'' have a year 0. (However, there is no 1958.)

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]

User talk:Dgbrt

2014-01-18T11:37:28Z

141.101.99.235: /* Cthulhu and Azathoth (1040) */

== [[1190: Time]] ==

It's fine that you're helping with updating [[1190: Time]]. I'm trying to write a script that automatically updates the hashes and uploads the images. In order to test the script, could you, at least for the next image, refrain from doing that? I can then test the script and if it works, you can continue if you want to, but least I know that my script does work.

Updating the transcript and anything else from the page is still absolutely fine, I cannot do this. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 15:56, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
: Ok, seems to work. If you want, you can continue updating, but my script should do this automatically within ~1 minute while I'm online. And if I'm not, it should catch up later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

:: GREAT, it's really working. My computer is online 24/7 (but not me). Since updates should be done in time maybe my computer is the better machine for your script. I am on Linux and a cron job is downloading at 00,05,20,35,50 each hour, just in case the update frequency will change again. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:31, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

::: Might be, but I have a folder full of scripting stuff, and I would have to tidy up all that to get the important lines. And I'm not really in the mood for that. ;-) Maybe I will come back to this later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:52, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. The reason I said "another" river is because "another" is referencing Megan's quote that "yes. there are other rivers" - implying they have arrived at "another" river, not the one they already knew about. I put quotes because as you point out, we haven't exactly seen them come across the first river. As to the water bottle, if you want to change it to "drinking bottle", I'm fine with that. The contents being water is an assumption based on what you might expect someone to do going on a long journey. [[User:TheHYPO|TheHYPO]] ([[User talk:TheHYPO|talk]]) 20:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

: I am not a native English speaker - so thanks for help - but I just want to be correct. And I did edit your edit...

I think a special page (i.e. "1190: Time: Pictures") with a table (description | thumb with link) or other form of separator might work. I seem to remember seeing something on using a different thumb file on a picture link. This is my first time editing wiki pages, but the thumbs and smaller images on the upload pages don't appear to be working. As a work around, I just used blind links without thumbs (e.g. :file:fname...). I can create and upload smaller pictures, but will need some help putting it all together. If this sounds good to you, give me a nod on my talk page and I'll start adding content and let the regulars help straighten it out. Also, am I doing something wrong on the uploads or is it just not working? [[User:Galois|Galois]] ([[User talk:Galois|talk]]) 23:52, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
: I'm also relatively new to wiki edits, but I'm a programmer, Linux expert (and more OS's) and also the admin for the wiki at my company. Thumbnails do not work because of a bug in the configuration or missing capabilities at the hoster. I will try to talk to the admins here, maybe I can help. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:33, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

== Redirections, and incomplete explanations ==

Hello there, and thank you for your work! :-)

One technical thing that you should note, when you create pages that should redirect directly to a newly created explanation page (for example [[332]] to redirect to [[332: Gyroscopes]]), use the redirection syntax which goes like this: <code><nowiki>#REDIRECT [[332: Gyroscopes]]</nowiki></code>

You've done it right for [[447]] / [[Too Old For This Shit]] or [[531]] / [[Friends]] for instance, so try to do it all the time, instead of leaving pages with only a link in it, like {{diff|39258|332}} / {{diff|39259|Gyroscopes}} or {{diff|39251|311}} / {{diff|39252|Action Movies}}. Thanks :-)

Another thing, not from me, and about content this time: [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] left you a couple of message in the changes he made to the pages you created, but it's fairly possible that you didn't get them, so here they are:
* (in response to your comment ''"I am still trying to give every comic a page here. Help me to complete it!"''): {{diff|39262|''"I'd really rather leave those links red for someone to write a proper explanation. With explanations that read like second transcripts, all we really do is take traffic away from xkcd.com without adding value."''}}
* {{diff|39263|''"Also, incomplete articles are harder to track than nonexistent articles, so I'd rather we just focus on making explanations well instead of making an unsatisfactory shell for every comic. Incomplete explanations make us look kinda bad too."''}}
* {{diff|39265|''"People on other sites often comment on how our explanations are a wildly mixed bag of quality. I'd rather you put your effort into making a few good substantial explanations instead of loads of summaries and rehashes of the transcript."''}}

Try to take that into account also...

Cheers, [[User:Cos|Cos]] ([[User talk:Cos|talk]]) 10:45, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

:Hello [[User:Cos|Cos]], here some comments by me:
::Redirections - I'm sorry for the missing #REDIRECT tag. I'm using often a text editor for my own copy and paste templates. I am sure I would have figured out that error today by myself. Thanks for your help!
::Incomplete explanations - I will stop on this even when I think it's good idea to have a page for each comic here and work afterwards on all those incomplete ones. The pages [[Help:How_to_add_a_new_comic_explanation]] and [[List_of_unexplained_comics]] should clarify this issue. Furthermore there are many more incomplete comics not marked as incomplete so you can't find them here: [[:Category:Incomplete explanations|Incomplete explanations]]. I will also send a message to [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] about this.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:35, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of incomplete explanations, do you think you could help add some text to [[266: Choices: Part 3]] and [[267: Choices: Part 4]]? To my knowledge, they are the only articles on the wiki without even a stub for an explanation. In addition, the other three choice articles could use some better explanations. --[[User:Oneforfortytwo|Oneforfortytwo]] ([[User talk:Oneforfortytwo|talk]]) 04:02, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

== Ach nee,... ==

...schau mal einer an, noch ein Deutscher! Wollte nur mal 'nen Gruß hinterlassen... ;-) --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 21:37, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
:Ich grüße zurück! I am greeting you too.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 14:20, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

== Congratulations! ==

You worked on the last unexplained comic of ''xkcd'' at very much the same time that the article was created! [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 23:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
:I was working at the same time to create that explanation. After trying to save I got a warning that it's already there. So I just did add my work there.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 10:40, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
::In that case, you also created the last explanation. You two worked on the comic at essentially the same time. [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 18:13, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

== 1190:Time frame renumbering ==

Apologies if I created confusion, I was under the impression that davidy22 had already made the final decision to renumber the frames. I didn't know there was someone else who made the decision. [[User:Patzer|Patzer]] ([[User talk:Patzer|talk]]) 01:11, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

== DgbrtBOT ==

It took a while for me to notice your request. I think you've been quite the active figure around the wiki, so I've added the bot to the bots group.

Keep up the work and don't burn out! [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 16:37, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

:Many thanks, my request was mainly for picture uploads to 1190 Time, but maybe I will use this feature in the future. I will be careful, first tests will be done at my local TestWiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:29, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

== The right place to add 'discussion' ==

I don't disagree with your comment to [[User:Anon]] (although I'd say "additions" instead of "adds"), or to a number of your edits to their additions, but some of what has been added is not worthy of Trivia sections being added. They should probably have been put into the talk page, or in some cases, left where they were. [[User:Markhurd|Mark Hurd]] ([[User talk:Markhurd|talk]]) 05:39, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
:You are right, I just did not want to delete the additions by this new user. Because I can't move a single line to the talk page by one edit I thought the Trivia section would be the best solution. I don't like links to other comics here when it doesn't explain anything to the actual one. But a sidestep to a similar joke could be worthy to the Trivia section.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 13:36, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

== Explained too much ==

Hello Dgbrt, I'm sorry I explained too much about comic 1255. I was under the impression that the purpose of this wiki was to explain XKCD comics for those who don't get the references, so I thought it would be helpful to explain the part about sailing in a line tangent to the surface, which wasn't previously touched on in the description. I understand now that what you guys actually do here is to describe and transcribe XKCD comics. That's not something I'm interested in so I'll leave now. Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding. [[User:Rombobjörn|Rombobjörn]] ([[User talk:Rombobjörn|talk]]) 12:47, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Hey, this site does not only "transcribe XKCD comics". The wrong stories about Columbus is the major joke here, Megan did use Tolkien's books, but she also could have used many others. The explain should point on the essentials of the comic, people should be able to read this easy in general.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:07, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Hello. Admin here. I don't comb through and look at every single edit that happens in this wiki, but some things flag up as significant and this scuffle qualifies. Reading the current explanation and your addition, there are a number of unexplained and unreferenced Tolkien-specific terms littered around the place. Valar and Ilúvatar will not be familiar to people who have not read the Silmarillion before. Megan appears to be drawing a direct parallel between Eärendil and Columbus here with the quote "A silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star." There is no apparent evidence to show that the reformation of the earth is referenced in this comic; no mention of Akallabêth, Ilúvatar or any hint of Columbus being of elvish descent. If you can link your reference directly to the comic, feel free to add it in.
::Also, Dgbrt, you only have to reply once to the original talk message. You don't have to leave disjointed messages in other people's talk pages. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 17:05, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Discussions with Quicksilver ==

Hello! I have noticed that "In this comic" is a pet peeve to you. As a gift, I have removed it from almost all of the 60 explanations that it started, but there remain some more places where it could be removed. If you wish, you can go ahead and remove the newlines that I left in their wake.

If you need a general copy-editor for grammar, punctuation, or usage, let me know. I consider myself adequate at it, being a decently educated native American English speaker. (I am not a professional editor, though, so stuff can always be made better.)

Also, as you definitely have noticed, I can get belligerent over some things, particularly whether a page deserves its "Incomplete" status. I expect some more sparring matches in the coming future. I do hope to work with you on cutting the number of such pages down.

Anyway, thanks for the intro to the wiki! --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 21:31, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Welcome Quicksilver! I did see that you must be an native American speaker but some of your edits are too offensive, I do reply on this, and we have to discuss until a final solution can be presented. Many updates by you are great, but please check all the links, etc. until removing the incomplete tag. This tag does not mean the explain is wrong. BTW: Please sign your discussions.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:22, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Now that I have your attention, we can begin discussing things. We have a brewing edit war over the following pages (so far): [[694: Retro Virus]], [[54: Science]], and [[10: Pi Equals]].

The first one I claim to be complete, while you dispute this. I cannot see how much further we can go into explanations of XP, viruses, Howard Dean, Friendster, or Kazaa. Apart from those, the comic really doesn't have anything else to explain, and its grammar and style are fair. I see no reason that the Incomplete tag should be there.

In the second one, we have different interpretations of the title text, "Bonus point if you can identify the science in question." You claim that this somehow means we should challenge science. While I understand that part of the spirit of science is questioning it, this sentence has a fairly straightforward meaning: if you can identify the science in question, you get a bonus point. In other words, if you know where this equation comes from, good for you. Randall is praising his readers who happen to know about the blackbody radiation curve, which would be a good number of them (I'd guess).

The third one is a simple issue of punctuation. You have argued, via explanations, that "one must close sentences." While I understand that it may look awkward for the quotation marks in question (those around the name of Mrs Roberts's daughter) to contain a period, not part of the name, and to have the sentence ended by a punctuation mark inside a pair of quotes, this is the English convention on quotation marks. Such a convention can be checked [http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/577/ here]. This usage clashes with that of French, German, and many other languages, but is standard in English.

As other pages turn into edit wars, I would prefer to discuss them in some central location (such as your wonderful talk page) rather than individual pages. Thank you for your consideration. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 22:40, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Every comic does have it's own discussion page. Here you can talk about my behave, especial on some few offensive edits I did not accept. And keep short or I will just reply {{w|Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read|tl;dr}}--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:09, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Very well. Our agenda begins with [[54: Science]]. The other two we will address at some point. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 23:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Allegations concerning [[User:Quicksilver]] ==

You have in the edit summary field claimed that Quicksilver's edits are offensive. After a quick glance through some of his recent edits, I don't find this to be the case. Do you care to explain yourself? [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 03:26, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
:200 or 300 edits within a few hours, no one can understand all that comics at this time range. I just did criticized two or three edits he did, but an edit to former content without any understandable explain I can't except. And than he reverts my criticism, that's all.

:I'm not a spam hunter here, but I like CLEAR and SHORT (meaning, people will be able read) explains here. Look at [[1256: Questions]], just an other hell (nobody will ever read all that masturbation orgasms writers must have - sorry, put this into the sex category.)--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

::One add: Understand sarcasm, xkcd, romance, math, and language. Randall did publish many sarcastic comics, I just do like to point this out.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:52, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

== Language and writing style ==
Please, please stop reverting and calling editors out on language and writing style. It is not your strong point. Focus on content. When we start work on our german translations, you can go jabbing editors in their talk pages over writing too much. Here, you're only reverting and deterring valuable edits. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 02:35, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
:You know I'm not native American, many viewers are too. American English is still strange sometimes, but you are right: It's not my "strong point". But nevertheless, I always did focus on content in the past, and I will do this in the future. I was just acting on mass updates nobody can review.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

== PyCon ==

The post saying that Randall was banned was a joke. There is no PyCon issue. See [[Talk:153: Cryptography]]. [[User:gijobarts|gijobarts]] ([[User Talk:gijobarts|talk]]) 20:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
:Sure it was joke, so maybe it should be explained, it belongs to this comic.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

== [[1270: Functional]] ==

Would you mind answering my actual concerns regarding [[1270]]? The things you answered are (in my eyes) very minor points, where I would not mind to compromise. However, currently the article does not explain what '''{{w|functional programming}}''' is at all! I wanted to change that which you mostly edited away. I am willing to make my explanations more understandable (preferably if you or anyone else has suggestions what is/might be unclear). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 16:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:Hi, I don't like edit wars. I just did try to simplify the explain for non programmer readers. And I think these facts should be mentioned:
:1. Functions return a value, unlike procedures do.
:2. Your wiki link says: "a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs, that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data." My sine(x) idea isn't bad according to this.
:3. The part "mutable data" means that each call of the function allocates its own memory, local variables are not viewable or changeable from the outside. Recursions just use this feature.
:4. Tail recursion just means that there is a clearly defined break at the end of the function. The most elegant code should be this (the else statement is removed, braces for a clear code):
factorial(n)
{
if n > 0
{
n * factorial(n-1)
}
return 1
}
:5. The wikipedia pages are a little bit confusing and inaccurate (I would mark them incomplete). But even the first reference at {{w|functional programming}} to this [http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~adamo/languages/books/p359-hudak.pdf PDF] is interesting. It's saying (Chapter 4): "Myth 1, that functional programming is the antithesis of conventional imperative programming,...".
:This programming paradigm definitions are still confusing, but here Randall just mentions a recursion with a break at the tail. I think we have to focus on this first. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::I replaced your bullet points by numbers, so I can refer to them, I hope you don't mind.
::ad 1) I agree, but I don't know why you need to introduce the (imperative) concept of a procedure at all? (There is no such thing in functional programming)
::ad 2) Yes, sine is a function, also in the functional programming sense. It is not really a function one would implement using a functional language (although it is possible). Also this function is not referred to later, so I don't see any benefit from introducing it. How about using the factorial function as example for a function?
::ad 3) There is no such thing as a "variable" in functional programming. Variables are mutable data, and mutable data is avoided.
::ad 4) What I learned is that tail recursion means that the only recursive call happens at the tail of the function ("call" in imperative programming, or substitution in functional programming). Maybe I'm wrong and should study again, and also did not understand what {{w|tail recursion}} wants to say, but I doubt that.
::ad 5) I agree that it is not very easy to understand, but I don't see any inaccuracy in that article. About the reference: Yes, but that does not mean imperative and functional programming is essentially the same. The section continues and describes that functional programming carries on the evolution from low-level (e.g. Assembler, allowing just simple operations) over high-level (imperative) programming which allows expressions to functional programming which says there are '''only''' expressions. (If and why and when this is useful is another story -- though actually that is essentially what White Hats wants to know from Cueball)
::And w.r.t your last point: So you would prefer not to explain (or have someone explain) the parts which are confusing to you? Wasn't explaining that the whole idea of this wiki? --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 20:44, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::I don't mind your edit but now I will reply in general. The most important paradigm is {{w|Structured programming|structured programming}} witch did lead to avoid statements like ''GOTO'', but this explain can not be a comprisal on computer since. It's just a small comic mentioning functional programming and tail recursion. But maybe we should try to enhance the English Wikipedia. ;) --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:04, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::Yes, the article you quoted also says (concluding the Myth 1-section) that functional programming goes further from avoiding [[goto]] to also avoiding assignments and control-flow structures. I'll mostly leave enhancing the English wikipedia to English native speakers, actually {{w|de:Funktionale Programmierung}} is not that badly written. (Sure it also gets complicated towards the end, but ''intuitive and clear'' does not equal ''easy'' ;) ) [[541|Damn you, Randall!]] --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 21:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::::The German Wiki is often just a bad translation from English, lacking references. But this part is interesting: {{w|de:Funktionale_Programmierung#Abgrenzung_von_imperativer_Programmierung}} explains the difference of imperative and functional implementations. My example above is functional, NOT imperative, and also includes the the ''tail'' part. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::::Ok, you are right, that it is '''also''' functional (at least when written using if ''and'' else and ignoring the syntactic noise of the ''return'' (without the else part, I would consider that control flow: The second return is called ''after'' the if statement)). '''Only''' functional I would call the formula which comes before the implementation (in the de:wiki article), but the implementation is also a valid imperative function.
::::::I still don't agree that this is tail recursive (I think our definitions of tail-recursion don't match so far). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 23:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

The explain is still not very helpful, and the reason is that {{w|Computer science}} isn't a science like physics or math, it's more like philosophy or something else. An author is defining some theories and statements with no prove as it is done in math. [[User:Chtz|Chtz]], we are both wrong and correct, but Randall is just joking about this ''science''.

The details about different implementations can be shown below this general classification on computer science. I think this would be the best solution for an explain, different meanings can be shown, just like computer science does. What do you think?--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

== Your name ==

I'm just a random stalker on the Internet reading XKCD, and I see your name alot. I've been reading it as "dogbert", like as in the Dilbert comics, but now I'm really curious. Where does your username come from?
[[Special:Contributions/173.245.55.215|173.245.55.215]] 02:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
:That's just my secret ;) . But you can be sure I was just looking for a unique name without any vowels, like xkcd. You also can find me at the German wiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

== 1297: oort cloud: comet nuclei, asteroids, etch ==

Thanks for your many contributions to explainxkcd! In [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1297:_Oort_Cloud&diff=next&oldid=53963] you changed back some of my edits on the oort cloud. I've commented in the talk page about my reasoning, and tried to come up with less arguable language. If you disagree, let's discuss it on the [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:1297:_Oort_Cloud talk page]. Cheers, [[User:Nealmcb|Nealmcb]] ([[User talk:Nealmcb|talk]]) 16:56, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
:Uhh, that's two days ago, many edits went on that page after this. If I see my major changes correctly I did remove something like "comet at the Oort Cloud" because an object is only a comet when it's encounter the sun; and the Milky Way itself does not influence the orbit of an possible Oort Cloud object. I'm not native English, so I'm still happy for help on this, but I do know physics and more since very well. And much more sad: It still seems ISON is dead. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:28, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

== 1246 ==
Hey Dgbrt,

we need to have a discussion about the latest edit on 1246. i believe that we should refrain from further edits until we have discussed this in the discussion page.

[[User:Mrarch|Mrarch]] ([[User talk:Mrarch|talk]]) 20:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
:I will reply soon. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

== X11 Title Text Explanation ==

In my absence was it finally decided forever and always how title text explanations would be handled? I can't find a discussion in the Community Portal, if you have a link I'd be interested to come up to speed on the current editing policies. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 22:44, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
:A BIG problem is here still that there are NO editing policies in general. I'm just following the main "feel and look". In standard explains the title text is just at the bottom of the explain, and trivia goes after transcript. You are an admin here and maybe you should talk to [[User:Davidy22]]. In general I think that X11 still needs a better layout. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

::Ok. I had wondered about that. My personal policy, when I was an active editor a year ago, was once a title text explanation is longer than 2 paragraphs it should get it's own subsection. I'll have to get a dialogue started with Davidy about it once more.

::So you know, the English phrase is "look and feel". I know English isn't your first language, I just wanted to correct you on that. If I tried typing in German, I'd probably embarrass myself, and you'd have to help me.

::[[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 23:25, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

:::I'm happy about your latest actions here! And of course I did mix it up, it's "look and feel" and a translation of my former mistake could lead into some problems. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 01:13, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

== [[1052]] ==

Think you may have marked this as complete a smidgen early - it needed a bit of cleanup, and a few more tweaks (the joke about theology wasn't explained, really). I've done it now, though. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 16:40, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:You are welcome to enhance this explain, but in general it's not incomplete any more. If you feel the explain is still incomplete just add the tag again and provide a reason. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:02, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
::Eh, I got it. It was just a couple little things - the Ontological Argument joke, and such. I suppose, though, that "I had intended to do more work on it" isn't really an argument against removing it, is it? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 18:26, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:::And I'm very happy if you still can enhance this explain. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

== Cthulhu and Azathoth ([[1040]]) ==

I can only presume you haven't read Lovecraft, but those are the best known sealed-away gods in modern literature. Cthulhu is supposed to live in the extreme depths, Azathoth beyond time, surrounded by insane pipers. They're a far better explanation than the Harry Potter one which is far, far more tangental - it sings in a bath, and contains nothing that could escape - but you're leaving in.

I doubt there's a precise reference being made to ''anything'' in the comic, but Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian Gods are the overwhelmingly likely inspiration. Unless someone has a better explanation. I suppose one could discuss The Abyss as well. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:27, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

:I disagree, this comic contains only REAL things. This is NO horror fiction. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:58, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
::The door at the bottom of the Marinas Trench is real now? James Cameron really released something on the world because he was distracted by its beautiful music? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:36, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

User talk:Dgbrt

2014-01-18T11:37:03Z

141.101.99.235: /* Cthulhu and Azathoth (1040) */

== [[1190: Time]] ==

It's fine that you're helping with updating [[1190: Time]]. I'm trying to write a script that automatically updates the hashes and uploads the images. In order to test the script, could you, at least for the next image, refrain from doing that? I can then test the script and if it works, you can continue if you want to, but least I know that my script does work.

Updating the transcript and anything else from the page is still absolutely fine, I cannot do this. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 15:56, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
: Ok, seems to work. If you want, you can continue updating, but my script should do this automatically within ~1 minute while I'm online. And if I'm not, it should catch up later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

:: GREAT, it's really working. My computer is online 24/7 (but not me). Since updates should be done in time maybe my computer is the better machine for your script. I am on Linux and a cron job is downloading at 00,05,20,35,50 each hour, just in case the update frequency will change again. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:31, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

::: Might be, but I have a folder full of scripting stuff, and I would have to tidy up all that to get the important lines. And I'm not really in the mood for that. ;-) Maybe I will come back to this later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:52, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. The reason I said "another" river is because "another" is referencing Megan's quote that "yes. there are other rivers" - implying they have arrived at "another" river, not the one they already knew about. I put quotes because as you point out, we haven't exactly seen them come across the first river. As to the water bottle, if you want to change it to "drinking bottle", I'm fine with that. The contents being water is an assumption based on what you might expect someone to do going on a long journey. [[User:TheHYPO|TheHYPO]] ([[User talk:TheHYPO|talk]]) 20:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

: I am not a native English speaker - so thanks for help - but I just want to be correct. And I did edit your edit...

I think a special page (i.e. "1190: Time: Pictures") with a table (description | thumb with link) or other form of separator might work. I seem to remember seeing something on using a different thumb file on a picture link. This is my first time editing wiki pages, but the thumbs and smaller images on the upload pages don't appear to be working. As a work around, I just used blind links without thumbs (e.g. :file:fname...). I can create and upload smaller pictures, but will need some help putting it all together. If this sounds good to you, give me a nod on my talk page and I'll start adding content and let the regulars help straighten it out. Also, am I doing something wrong on the uploads or is it just not working? [[User:Galois|Galois]] ([[User talk:Galois|talk]]) 23:52, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
: I'm also relatively new to wiki edits, but I'm a programmer, Linux expert (and more OS's) and also the admin for the wiki at my company. Thumbnails do not work because of a bug in the configuration or missing capabilities at the hoster. I will try to talk to the admins here, maybe I can help. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:33, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

== Redirections, and incomplete explanations ==

Hello there, and thank you for your work! :-)

One technical thing that you should note, when you create pages that should redirect directly to a newly created explanation page (for example [[332]] to redirect to [[332: Gyroscopes]]), use the redirection syntax which goes like this: <code><nowiki>#REDIRECT [[332: Gyroscopes]]</nowiki></code>

You've done it right for [[447]] / [[Too Old For This Shit]] or [[531]] / [[Friends]] for instance, so try to do it all the time, instead of leaving pages with only a link in it, like {{diff|39258|332}} / {{diff|39259|Gyroscopes}} or {{diff|39251|311}} / {{diff|39252|Action Movies}}. Thanks :-)

Another thing, not from me, and about content this time: [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] left you a couple of message in the changes he made to the pages you created, but it's fairly possible that you didn't get them, so here they are:
* (in response to your comment ''"I am still trying to give every comic a page here. Help me to complete it!"''): {{diff|39262|''"I'd really rather leave those links red for someone to write a proper explanation. With explanations that read like second transcripts, all we really do is take traffic away from xkcd.com without adding value."''}}
* {{diff|39263|''"Also, incomplete articles are harder to track than nonexistent articles, so I'd rather we just focus on making explanations well instead of making an unsatisfactory shell for every comic. Incomplete explanations make us look kinda bad too."''}}
* {{diff|39265|''"People on other sites often comment on how our explanations are a wildly mixed bag of quality. I'd rather you put your effort into making a few good substantial explanations instead of loads of summaries and rehashes of the transcript."''}}

Try to take that into account also...

Cheers, [[User:Cos|Cos]] ([[User talk:Cos|talk]]) 10:45, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

:Hello [[User:Cos|Cos]], here some comments by me:
::Redirections - I'm sorry for the missing #REDIRECT tag. I'm using often a text editor for my own copy and paste templates. I am sure I would have figured out that error today by myself. Thanks for your help!
::Incomplete explanations - I will stop on this even when I think it's good idea to have a page for each comic here and work afterwards on all those incomplete ones. The pages [[Help:How_to_add_a_new_comic_explanation]] and [[List_of_unexplained_comics]] should clarify this issue. Furthermore there are many more incomplete comics not marked as incomplete so you can't find them here: [[:Category:Incomplete explanations|Incomplete explanations]]. I will also send a message to [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] about this.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:35, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of incomplete explanations, do you think you could help add some text to [[266: Choices: Part 3]] and [[267: Choices: Part 4]]? To my knowledge, they are the only articles on the wiki without even a stub for an explanation. In addition, the other three choice articles could use some better explanations. --[[User:Oneforfortytwo|Oneforfortytwo]] ([[User talk:Oneforfortytwo|talk]]) 04:02, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

== Ach nee,... ==

...schau mal einer an, noch ein Deutscher! Wollte nur mal 'nen Gruß hinterlassen... ;-) --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 21:37, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
:Ich grüße zurück! I am greeting you too.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 14:20, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

== Congratulations! ==

You worked on the last unexplained comic of ''xkcd'' at very much the same time that the article was created! [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 23:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
:I was working at the same time to create that explanation. After trying to save I got a warning that it's already there. So I just did add my work there.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 10:40, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
::In that case, you also created the last explanation. You two worked on the comic at essentially the same time. [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 18:13, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

== 1190:Time frame renumbering ==

Apologies if I created confusion, I was under the impression that davidy22 had already made the final decision to renumber the frames. I didn't know there was someone else who made the decision. [[User:Patzer|Patzer]] ([[User talk:Patzer|talk]]) 01:11, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

== DgbrtBOT ==

It took a while for me to notice your request. I think you've been quite the active figure around the wiki, so I've added the bot to the bots group.

Keep up the work and don't burn out! [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 16:37, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

:Many thanks, my request was mainly for picture uploads to 1190 Time, but maybe I will use this feature in the future. I will be careful, first tests will be done at my local TestWiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:29, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

== The right place to add 'discussion' ==

I don't disagree with your comment to [[User:Anon]] (although I'd say "additions" instead of "adds"), or to a number of your edits to their additions, but some of what has been added is not worthy of Trivia sections being added. They should probably have been put into the talk page, or in some cases, left where they were. [[User:Markhurd|Mark Hurd]] ([[User talk:Markhurd|talk]]) 05:39, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
:You are right, I just did not want to delete the additions by this new user. Because I can't move a single line to the talk page by one edit I thought the Trivia section would be the best solution. I don't like links to other comics here when it doesn't explain anything to the actual one. But a sidestep to a similar joke could be worthy to the Trivia section.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 13:36, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

== Explained too much ==

Hello Dgbrt, I'm sorry I explained too much about comic 1255. I was under the impression that the purpose of this wiki was to explain XKCD comics for those who don't get the references, so I thought it would be helpful to explain the part about sailing in a line tangent to the surface, which wasn't previously touched on in the description. I understand now that what you guys actually do here is to describe and transcribe XKCD comics. That's not something I'm interested in so I'll leave now. Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding. [[User:Rombobjörn|Rombobjörn]] ([[User talk:Rombobjörn|talk]]) 12:47, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Hey, this site does not only "transcribe XKCD comics". The wrong stories about Columbus is the major joke here, Megan did use Tolkien's books, but she also could have used many others. The explain should point on the essentials of the comic, people should be able to read this easy in general.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:07, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Hello. Admin here. I don't comb through and look at every single edit that happens in this wiki, but some things flag up as significant and this scuffle qualifies. Reading the current explanation and your addition, there are a number of unexplained and unreferenced Tolkien-specific terms littered around the place. Valar and Ilúvatar will not be familiar to people who have not read the Silmarillion before. Megan appears to be drawing a direct parallel between Eärendil and Columbus here with the quote "A silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star." There is no apparent evidence to show that the reformation of the earth is referenced in this comic; no mention of Akallabêth, Ilúvatar or any hint of Columbus being of elvish descent. If you can link your reference directly to the comic, feel free to add it in.
::Also, Dgbrt, you only have to reply once to the original talk message. You don't have to leave disjointed messages in other people's talk pages. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 17:05, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Discussions with Quicksilver ==

Hello! I have noticed that "In this comic" is a pet peeve to you. As a gift, I have removed it from almost all of the 60 explanations that it started, but there remain some more places where it could be removed. If you wish, you can go ahead and remove the newlines that I left in their wake.

If you need a general copy-editor for grammar, punctuation, or usage, let me know. I consider myself adequate at it, being a decently educated native American English speaker. (I am not a professional editor, though, so stuff can always be made better.)

Also, as you definitely have noticed, I can get belligerent over some things, particularly whether a page deserves its "Incomplete" status. I expect some more sparring matches in the coming future. I do hope to work with you on cutting the number of such pages down.

Anyway, thanks for the intro to the wiki! --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 21:31, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Welcome Quicksilver! I did see that you must be an native American speaker but some of your edits are too offensive, I do reply on this, and we have to discuss until a final solution can be presented. Many updates by you are great, but please check all the links, etc. until removing the incomplete tag. This tag does not mean the explain is wrong. BTW: Please sign your discussions.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:22, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Now that I have your attention, we can begin discussing things. We have a brewing edit war over the following pages (so far): [[694: Retro Virus]], [[54: Science]], and [[10: Pi Equals]].

The first one I claim to be complete, while you dispute this. I cannot see how much further we can go into explanations of XP, viruses, Howard Dean, Friendster, or Kazaa. Apart from those, the comic really doesn't have anything else to explain, and its grammar and style are fair. I see no reason that the Incomplete tag should be there.

In the second one, we have different interpretations of the title text, "Bonus point if you can identify the science in question." You claim that this somehow means we should challenge science. While I understand that part of the spirit of science is questioning it, this sentence has a fairly straightforward meaning: if you can identify the science in question, you get a bonus point. In other words, if you know where this equation comes from, good for you. Randall is praising his readers who happen to know about the blackbody radiation curve, which would be a good number of them (I'd guess).

The third one is a simple issue of punctuation. You have argued, via explanations, that "one must close sentences." While I understand that it may look awkward for the quotation marks in question (those around the name of Mrs Roberts's daughter) to contain a period, not part of the name, and to have the sentence ended by a punctuation mark inside a pair of quotes, this is the English convention on quotation marks. Such a convention can be checked [http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/577/ here]. This usage clashes with that of French, German, and many other languages, but is standard in English.

As other pages turn into edit wars, I would prefer to discuss them in some central location (such as your wonderful talk page) rather than individual pages. Thank you for your consideration. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 22:40, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Every comic does have it's own discussion page. Here you can talk about my behave, especial on some few offensive edits I did not accept. And keep short or I will just reply {{w|Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read|tl;dr}}--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:09, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Very well. Our agenda begins with [[54: Science]]. The other two we will address at some point. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 23:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Allegations concerning [[User:Quicksilver]] ==

You have in the edit summary field claimed that Quicksilver's edits are offensive. After a quick glance through some of his recent edits, I don't find this to be the case. Do you care to explain yourself? [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 03:26, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
:200 or 300 edits within a few hours, no one can understand all that comics at this time range. I just did criticized two or three edits he did, but an edit to former content without any understandable explain I can't except. And than he reverts my criticism, that's all.

:I'm not a spam hunter here, but I like CLEAR and SHORT (meaning, people will be able read) explains here. Look at [[1256: Questions]], just an other hell (nobody will ever read all that masturbation orgasms writers must have - sorry, put this into the sex category.)--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

::One add: Understand sarcasm, xkcd, romance, math, and language. Randall did publish many sarcastic comics, I just do like to point this out.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:52, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

== Language and writing style ==
Please, please stop reverting and calling editors out on language and writing style. It is not your strong point. Focus on content. When we start work on our german translations, you can go jabbing editors in their talk pages over writing too much. Here, you're only reverting and deterring valuable edits. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 02:35, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
:You know I'm not native American, many viewers are too. American English is still strange sometimes, but you are right: It's not my "strong point". But nevertheless, I always did focus on content in the past, and I will do this in the future. I was just acting on mass updates nobody can review.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

== PyCon ==

The post saying that Randall was banned was a joke. There is no PyCon issue. See [[Talk:153: Cryptography]]. [[User:gijobarts|gijobarts]] ([[User Talk:gijobarts|talk]]) 20:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
:Sure it was joke, so maybe it should be explained, it belongs to this comic.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

== [[1270: Functional]] ==

Would you mind answering my actual concerns regarding [[1270]]? The things you answered are (in my eyes) very minor points, where I would not mind to compromise. However, currently the article does not explain what '''{{w|functional programming}}''' is at all! I wanted to change that which you mostly edited away. I am willing to make my explanations more understandable (preferably if you or anyone else has suggestions what is/might be unclear). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 16:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:Hi, I don't like edit wars. I just did try to simplify the explain for non programmer readers. And I think these facts should be mentioned:
:1. Functions return a value, unlike procedures do.
:2. Your wiki link says: "a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs, that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data." My sine(x) idea isn't bad according to this.
:3. The part "mutable data" means that each call of the function allocates its own memory, local variables are not viewable or changeable from the outside. Recursions just use this feature.
:4. Tail recursion just means that there is a clearly defined break at the end of the function. The most elegant code should be this (the else statement is removed, braces for a clear code):
factorial(n)
{
if n > 0
{
n * factorial(n-1)
}
return 1
}
:5. The wikipedia pages are a little bit confusing and inaccurate (I would mark them incomplete). But even the first reference at {{w|functional programming}} to this [http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~adamo/languages/books/p359-hudak.pdf PDF] is interesting. It's saying (Chapter 4): "Myth 1, that functional programming is the antithesis of conventional imperative programming,...".
:This programming paradigm definitions are still confusing, but here Randall just mentions a recursion with a break at the tail. I think we have to focus on this first. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::I replaced your bullet points by numbers, so I can refer to them, I hope you don't mind.
::ad 1) I agree, but I don't know why you need to introduce the (imperative) concept of a procedure at all? (There is no such thing in functional programming)
::ad 2) Yes, sine is a function, also in the functional programming sense. It is not really a function one would implement using a functional language (although it is possible). Also this function is not referred to later, so I don't see any benefit from introducing it. How about using the factorial function as example for a function?
::ad 3) There is no such thing as a "variable" in functional programming. Variables are mutable data, and mutable data is avoided.
::ad 4) What I learned is that tail recursion means that the only recursive call happens at the tail of the function ("call" in imperative programming, or substitution in functional programming). Maybe I'm wrong and should study again, and also did not understand what {{w|tail recursion}} wants to say, but I doubt that.
::ad 5) I agree that it is not very easy to understand, but I don't see any inaccuracy in that article. About the reference: Yes, but that does not mean imperative and functional programming is essentially the same. The section continues and describes that functional programming carries on the evolution from low-level (e.g. Assembler, allowing just simple operations) over high-level (imperative) programming which allows expressions to functional programming which says there are '''only''' expressions. (If and why and when this is useful is another story -- though actually that is essentially what White Hats wants to know from Cueball)
::And w.r.t your last point: So you would prefer not to explain (or have someone explain) the parts which are confusing to you? Wasn't explaining that the whole idea of this wiki? --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 20:44, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::I don't mind your edit but now I will reply in general. The most important paradigm is {{w|Structured programming|structured programming}} witch did lead to avoid statements like ''GOTO'', but this explain can not be a comprisal on computer since. It's just a small comic mentioning functional programming and tail recursion. But maybe we should try to enhance the English Wikipedia. ;) --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:04, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::Yes, the article you quoted also says (concluding the Myth 1-section) that functional programming goes further from avoiding [[goto]] to also avoiding assignments and control-flow structures. I'll mostly leave enhancing the English wikipedia to English native speakers, actually {{w|de:Funktionale Programmierung}} is not that badly written. (Sure it also gets complicated towards the end, but ''intuitive and clear'' does not equal ''easy'' ;) ) [[541|Damn you, Randall!]] --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 21:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::::The German Wiki is often just a bad translation from English, lacking references. But this part is interesting: {{w|de:Funktionale_Programmierung#Abgrenzung_von_imperativer_Programmierung}} explains the difference of imperative and functional implementations. My example above is functional, NOT imperative, and also includes the the ''tail'' part. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::::Ok, you are right, that it is '''also''' functional (at least when written using if ''and'' else and ignoring the syntactic noise of the ''return'' (without the else part, I would consider that control flow: The second return is called ''after'' the if statement)). '''Only''' functional I would call the formula which comes before the implementation (in the de:wiki article), but the implementation is also a valid imperative function.
::::::I still don't agree that this is tail recursive (I think our definitions of tail-recursion don't match so far). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 23:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

The explain is still not very helpful, and the reason is that {{w|Computer science}} isn't a science like physics or math, it's more like philosophy or something else. An author is defining some theories and statements with no prove as it is done in math. [[User:Chtz|Chtz]], we are both wrong and correct, but Randall is just joking about this ''science''.

The details about different implementations can be shown below this general classification on computer science. I think this would be the best solution for an explain, different meanings can be shown, just like computer science does. What do you think?--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

== Your name ==

I'm just a random stalker on the Internet reading XKCD, and I see your name alot. I've been reading it as "dogbert", like as in the Dilbert comics, but now I'm really curious. Where does your username come from?
[[Special:Contributions/173.245.55.215|173.245.55.215]] 02:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
:That's just my secret ;) . But you can be sure I was just looking for a unique name without any vowels, like xkcd. You also can find me at the German wiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

== 1297: oort cloud: comet nuclei, asteroids, etch ==

Thanks for your many contributions to explainxkcd! In [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1297:_Oort_Cloud&diff=next&oldid=53963] you changed back some of my edits on the oort cloud. I've commented in the talk page about my reasoning, and tried to come up with less arguable language. If you disagree, let's discuss it on the [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:1297:_Oort_Cloud talk page]. Cheers, [[User:Nealmcb|Nealmcb]] ([[User talk:Nealmcb|talk]]) 16:56, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
:Uhh, that's two days ago, many edits went on that page after this. If I see my major changes correctly I did remove something like "comet at the Oort Cloud" because an object is only a comet when it's encounter the sun; and the Milky Way itself does not influence the orbit of an possible Oort Cloud object. I'm not native English, so I'm still happy for help on this, but I do know physics and more since very well. And much more sad: It still seems ISON is dead. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:28, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

== 1246 ==
Hey Dgbrt,

we need to have a discussion about the latest edit on 1246. i believe that we should refrain from further edits until we have discussed this in the discussion page.

[[User:Mrarch|Mrarch]] ([[User talk:Mrarch|talk]]) 20:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
:I will reply soon. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

== X11 Title Text Explanation ==

In my absence was it finally decided forever and always how title text explanations would be handled? I can't find a discussion in the Community Portal, if you have a link I'd be interested to come up to speed on the current editing policies. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 22:44, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
:A BIG problem is here still that there are NO editing policies in general. I'm just following the main "feel and look". In standard explains the title text is just at the bottom of the explain, and trivia goes after transcript. You are an admin here and maybe you should talk to [[User:Davidy22]]. In general I think that X11 still needs a better layout. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

::Ok. I had wondered about that. My personal policy, when I was an active editor a year ago, was once a title text explanation is longer than 2 paragraphs it should get it's own subsection. I'll have to get a dialogue started with Davidy about it once more.

::So you know, the English phrase is "look and feel". I know English isn't your first language, I just wanted to correct you on that. If I tried typing in German, I'd probably embarrass myself, and you'd have to help me.

::[[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 23:25, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

:::I'm happy about your latest actions here! And of course I did mix it up, it's "look and feel" and a translation of my former mistake could lead into some problems. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 01:13, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

== [[1052]] ==

Think you may have marked this as complete a smidgen early - it needed a bit of cleanup, and a few more tweaks (the joke about theology wasn't explained, really). I've done it now, though. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 16:40, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:You are welcome to enhance this explain, but in general it's not incomplete any more. If you feel the explain is still incomplete just add the tag again and provide a reason. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:02, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
::Eh, I got it. It was just a couple little things - the Ontological Argument joke, and such. I suppose, though, that "I had intended to do more work on it" isn't really an argument against removing it, is it? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 18:26, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:::And I'm very happy if you still can enhance this explain. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

== Cthulhu and Azathoth ([[1040]]) ==

I can only presume you haven't read Lovecraft, but those are the best known sealed-away gods in modern literature. Cthulhu is supposed to live in the extreme depths, Azathoth beyond time, surrounded by insane pipers. They're a far better explanation than the Harry Potter one which is far, far more tangental - it sings in a bath, and contains nothing that could escape - but you're leaving in.

I doubt there's a precise reference being made to ''anything'' in the comic, but Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian Gods are the overwhelmingly likely inspiration. Unless someone has a better explanation. I suppose one could discuss The Abyss as well. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:27, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

:I disagree, this comic contains only REAL things. This is NO horror fiction. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:58, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
::The door at the bottom of the Marinas Trench is real now? James Cameron really released something on the world because he was distracted by its beautiful singing? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:36, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

User talk:Dgbrt

2014-01-18T11:36:06Z

141.101.99.235: /* Cthulhu and Azathoth (1040) */

== [[1190: Time]] ==

It's fine that you're helping with updating [[1190: Time]]. I'm trying to write a script that automatically updates the hashes and uploads the images. In order to test the script, could you, at least for the next image, refrain from doing that? I can then test the script and if it works, you can continue if you want to, but least I know that my script does work.

Updating the transcript and anything else from the page is still absolutely fine, I cannot do this. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 15:56, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
: Ok, seems to work. If you want, you can continue updating, but my script should do this automatically within ~1 minute while I'm online. And if I'm not, it should catch up later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

:: GREAT, it's really working. My computer is online 24/7 (but not me). Since updates should be done in time maybe my computer is the better machine for your script. I am on Linux and a cron job is downloading at 00,05,20,35,50 each hour, just in case the update frequency will change again. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:31, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

::: Might be, but I have a folder full of scripting stuff, and I would have to tidy up all that to get the important lines. And I'm not really in the mood for that. ;-) Maybe I will come back to this later. --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 16:52, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. The reason I said "another" river is because "another" is referencing Megan's quote that "yes. there are other rivers" - implying they have arrived at "another" river, not the one they already knew about. I put quotes because as you point out, we haven't exactly seen them come across the first river. As to the water bottle, if you want to change it to "drinking bottle", I'm fine with that. The contents being water is an assumption based on what you might expect someone to do going on a long journey. [[User:TheHYPO|TheHYPO]] ([[User talk:TheHYPO|talk]]) 20:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

: I am not a native English speaker - so thanks for help - but I just want to be correct. And I did edit your edit...

I think a special page (i.e. "1190: Time: Pictures") with a table (description | thumb with link) or other form of separator might work. I seem to remember seeing something on using a different thumb file on a picture link. This is my first time editing wiki pages, but the thumbs and smaller images on the upload pages don't appear to be working. As a work around, I just used blind links without thumbs (e.g. :file:fname...). I can create and upload smaller pictures, but will need some help putting it all together. If this sounds good to you, give me a nod on my talk page and I'll start adding content and let the regulars help straighten it out. Also, am I doing something wrong on the uploads or is it just not working? [[User:Galois|Galois]] ([[User talk:Galois|talk]]) 23:52, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
: I'm also relatively new to wiki edits, but I'm a programmer, Linux expert (and more OS's) and also the admin for the wiki at my company. Thumbnails do not work because of a bug in the configuration or missing capabilities at the hoster. I will try to talk to the admins here, maybe I can help. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:33, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

== Redirections, and incomplete explanations ==

Hello there, and thank you for your work! :-)

One technical thing that you should note, when you create pages that should redirect directly to a newly created explanation page (for example [[332]] to redirect to [[332: Gyroscopes]]), use the redirection syntax which goes like this: <code><nowiki>#REDIRECT [[332: Gyroscopes]]</nowiki></code>

You've done it right for [[447]] / [[Too Old For This Shit]] or [[531]] / [[Friends]] for instance, so try to do it all the time, instead of leaving pages with only a link in it, like {{diff|39258|332}} / {{diff|39259|Gyroscopes}} or {{diff|39251|311}} / {{diff|39252|Action Movies}}. Thanks :-)

Another thing, not from me, and about content this time: [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] left you a couple of message in the changes he made to the pages you created, but it's fairly possible that you didn't get them, so here they are:
* (in response to your comment ''"I am still trying to give every comic a page here. Help me to complete it!"''): {{diff|39262|''"I'd really rather leave those links red for someone to write a proper explanation. With explanations that read like second transcripts, all we really do is take traffic away from xkcd.com without adding value."''}}
* {{diff|39263|''"Also, incomplete articles are harder to track than nonexistent articles, so I'd rather we just focus on making explanations well instead of making an unsatisfactory shell for every comic. Incomplete explanations make us look kinda bad too."''}}
* {{diff|39265|''"People on other sites often comment on how our explanations are a wildly mixed bag of quality. I'd rather you put your effort into making a few good substantial explanations instead of loads of summaries and rehashes of the transcript."''}}

Try to take that into account also...

Cheers, [[User:Cos|Cos]] ([[User talk:Cos|talk]]) 10:45, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

:Hello [[User:Cos|Cos]], here some comments by me:
::Redirections - I'm sorry for the missing #REDIRECT tag. I'm using often a text editor for my own copy and paste templates. I am sure I would have figured out that error today by myself. Thanks for your help!
::Incomplete explanations - I will stop on this even when I think it's good idea to have a page for each comic here and work afterwards on all those incomplete ones. The pages [[Help:How_to_add_a_new_comic_explanation]] and [[List_of_unexplained_comics]] should clarify this issue. Furthermore there are many more incomplete comics not marked as incomplete so you can't find them here: [[:Category:Incomplete explanations|Incomplete explanations]]. I will also send a message to [[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]] about this.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:35, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of incomplete explanations, do you think you could help add some text to [[266: Choices: Part 3]] and [[267: Choices: Part 4]]? To my knowledge, they are the only articles on the wiki without even a stub for an explanation. In addition, the other three choice articles could use some better explanations. --[[User:Oneforfortytwo|Oneforfortytwo]] ([[User talk:Oneforfortytwo|talk]]) 04:02, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

== Ach nee,... ==

...schau mal einer an, noch ein Deutscher! Wollte nur mal 'nen Gruß hinterlassen... ;-) --[[User:SlashMe|SlashMe]] ([[User talk:SlashMe|talk]]) 21:37, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
:Ich grüße zurück! I am greeting you too.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 14:20, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

== Congratulations! ==

You worked on the last unexplained comic of ''xkcd'' at very much the same time that the article was created! [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 23:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
:I was working at the same time to create that explanation. After trying to save I got a warning that it's already there. So I just did add my work there.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 10:40, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
::In that case, you also created the last explanation. You two worked on the comic at essentially the same time. [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 18:13, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

== 1190:Time frame renumbering ==

Apologies if I created confusion, I was under the impression that davidy22 had already made the final decision to renumber the frames. I didn't know there was someone else who made the decision. [[User:Patzer|Patzer]] ([[User talk:Patzer|talk]]) 01:11, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

== DgbrtBOT ==

It took a while for me to notice your request. I think you've been quite the active figure around the wiki, so I've added the bot to the bots group.

Keep up the work and don't burn out! [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 16:37, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

:Many thanks, my request was mainly for picture uploads to 1190 Time, but maybe I will use this feature in the future. I will be careful, first tests will be done at my local TestWiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:29, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

== The right place to add 'discussion' ==

I don't disagree with your comment to [[User:Anon]] (although I'd say "additions" instead of "adds"), or to a number of your edits to their additions, but some of what has been added is not worthy of Trivia sections being added. They should probably have been put into the talk page, or in some cases, left where they were. [[User:Markhurd|Mark Hurd]] ([[User talk:Markhurd|talk]]) 05:39, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
:You are right, I just did not want to delete the additions by this new user. Because I can't move a single line to the talk page by one edit I thought the Trivia section would be the best solution. I don't like links to other comics here when it doesn't explain anything to the actual one. But a sidestep to a similar joke could be worthy to the Trivia section.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 13:36, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

== Explained too much ==

Hello Dgbrt, I'm sorry I explained too much about comic 1255. I was under the impression that the purpose of this wiki was to explain XKCD comics for those who don't get the references, so I thought it would be helpful to explain the part about sailing in a line tangent to the surface, which wasn't previously touched on in the description. I understand now that what you guys actually do here is to describe and transcribe XKCD comics. That's not something I'm interested in so I'll leave now. Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding. [[User:Rombobjörn|Rombobjörn]] ([[User talk:Rombobjörn|talk]]) 12:47, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Hey, this site does not only "transcribe XKCD comics". The wrong stories about Columbus is the major joke here, Megan did use Tolkien's books, but she also could have used many others. The explain should point on the essentials of the comic, people should be able to read this easy in general.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:07, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Hello. Admin here. I don't comb through and look at every single edit that happens in this wiki, but some things flag up as significant and this scuffle qualifies. Reading the current explanation and your addition, there are a number of unexplained and unreferenced Tolkien-specific terms littered around the place. Valar and Ilúvatar will not be familiar to people who have not read the Silmarillion before. Megan appears to be drawing a direct parallel between Eärendil and Columbus here with the quote "A silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star." There is no apparent evidence to show that the reformation of the earth is referenced in this comic; no mention of Akallabêth, Ilúvatar or any hint of Columbus being of elvish descent. If you can link your reference directly to the comic, feel free to add it in.
::Also, Dgbrt, you only have to reply once to the original talk message. You don't have to leave disjointed messages in other people's talk pages. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 17:05, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Discussions with Quicksilver ==

Hello! I have noticed that "In this comic" is a pet peeve to you. As a gift, I have removed it from almost all of the 60 explanations that it started, but there remain some more places where it could be removed. If you wish, you can go ahead and remove the newlines that I left in their wake.

If you need a general copy-editor for grammar, punctuation, or usage, let me know. I consider myself adequate at it, being a decently educated native American English speaker. (I am not a professional editor, though, so stuff can always be made better.)

Also, as you definitely have noticed, I can get belligerent over some things, particularly whether a page deserves its "Incomplete" status. I expect some more sparring matches in the coming future. I do hope to work with you on cutting the number of such pages down.

Anyway, thanks for the intro to the wiki! --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 21:31, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Welcome Quicksilver! I did see that you must be an native American speaker but some of your edits are too offensive, I do reply on this, and we have to discuss until a final solution can be presented. Many updates by you are great, but please check all the links, etc. until removing the incomplete tag. This tag does not mean the explain is wrong. BTW: Please sign your discussions.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:22, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Now that I have your attention, we can begin discussing things. We have a brewing edit war over the following pages (so far): [[694: Retro Virus]], [[54: Science]], and [[10: Pi Equals]].

The first one I claim to be complete, while you dispute this. I cannot see how much further we can go into explanations of XP, viruses, Howard Dean, Friendster, or Kazaa. Apart from those, the comic really doesn't have anything else to explain, and its grammar and style are fair. I see no reason that the Incomplete tag should be there.

In the second one, we have different interpretations of the title text, "Bonus point if you can identify the science in question." You claim that this somehow means we should challenge science. While I understand that part of the spirit of science is questioning it, this sentence has a fairly straightforward meaning: if you can identify the science in question, you get a bonus point. In other words, if you know where this equation comes from, good for you. Randall is praising his readers who happen to know about the blackbody radiation curve, which would be a good number of them (I'd guess).

The third one is a simple issue of punctuation. You have argued, via explanations, that "one must close sentences." While I understand that it may look awkward for the quotation marks in question (those around the name of Mrs Roberts's daughter) to contain a period, not part of the name, and to have the sentence ended by a punctuation mark inside a pair of quotes, this is the English convention on quotation marks. Such a convention can be checked [http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/577/ here]. This usage clashes with that of French, German, and many other languages, but is standard in English.

As other pages turn into edit wars, I would prefer to discuss them in some central location (such as your wonderful talk page) rather than individual pages. Thank you for your consideration. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 22:40, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
:Every comic does have it's own discussion page. Here you can talk about my behave, especial on some few offensive edits I did not accept. And keep short or I will just reply {{w|Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read|tl;dr}}--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:09, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
::Very well. Our agenda begins with [[54: Science]]. The other two we will address at some point. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 23:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

== Allegations concerning [[User:Quicksilver]] ==

You have in the edit summary field claimed that Quicksilver's edits are offensive. After a quick glance through some of his recent edits, I don't find this to be the case. Do you care to explain yourself? [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 03:26, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
:200 or 300 edits within a few hours, no one can understand all that comics at this time range. I just did criticized two or three edits he did, but an edit to former content without any understandable explain I can't except. And than he reverts my criticism, that's all.

:I'm not a spam hunter here, but I like CLEAR and SHORT (meaning, people will be able read) explains here. Look at [[1256: Questions]], just an other hell (nobody will ever read all that masturbation orgasms writers must have - sorry, put this into the sex category.)--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

::One add: Understand sarcasm, xkcd, romance, math, and language. Randall did publish many sarcastic comics, I just do like to point this out.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:52, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

== Language and writing style ==
Please, please stop reverting and calling editors out on language and writing style. It is not your strong point. Focus on content. When we start work on our german translations, you can go jabbing editors in their talk pages over writing too much. Here, you're only reverting and deterring valuable edits. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 02:35, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
:You know I'm not native American, many viewers are too. American English is still strange sometimes, but you are right: It's not my "strong point". But nevertheless, I always did focus on content in the past, and I will do this in the future. I was just acting on mass updates nobody can review.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

== PyCon ==

The post saying that Randall was banned was a joke. There is no PyCon issue. See [[Talk:153: Cryptography]]. [[User:gijobarts|gijobarts]] ([[User Talk:gijobarts|talk]]) 20:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
:Sure it was joke, so maybe it should be explained, it belongs to this comic.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:19, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

== [[1270: Functional]] ==

Would you mind answering my actual concerns regarding [[1270]]? The things you answered are (in my eyes) very minor points, where I would not mind to compromise. However, currently the article does not explain what '''{{w|functional programming}}''' is at all! I wanted to change that which you mostly edited away. I am willing to make my explanations more understandable (preferably if you or anyone else has suggestions what is/might be unclear). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 16:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:Hi, I don't like edit wars. I just did try to simplify the explain for non programmer readers. And I think these facts should be mentioned:
:1. Functions return a value, unlike procedures do.
:2. Your wiki link says: "a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs, that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data." My sine(x) idea isn't bad according to this.
:3. The part "mutable data" means that each call of the function allocates its own memory, local variables are not viewable or changeable from the outside. Recursions just use this feature.
:4. Tail recursion just means that there is a clearly defined break at the end of the function. The most elegant code should be this (the else statement is removed, braces for a clear code):
factorial(n)
{
if n > 0
{
n * factorial(n-1)
}
return 1
}
:5. The wikipedia pages are a little bit confusing and inaccurate (I would mark them incomplete). But even the first reference at {{w|functional programming}} to this [http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~adamo/languages/books/p359-hudak.pdf PDF] is interesting. It's saying (Chapter 4): "Myth 1, that functional programming is the antithesis of conventional imperative programming,...".
:This programming paradigm definitions are still confusing, but here Randall just mentions a recursion with a break at the tail. I think we have to focus on this first. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::I replaced your bullet points by numbers, so I can refer to them, I hope you don't mind.
::ad 1) I agree, but I don't know why you need to introduce the (imperative) concept of a procedure at all? (There is no such thing in functional programming)
::ad 2) Yes, sine is a function, also in the functional programming sense. It is not really a function one would implement using a functional language (although it is possible). Also this function is not referred to later, so I don't see any benefit from introducing it. How about using the factorial function as example for a function?
::ad 3) There is no such thing as a "variable" in functional programming. Variables are mutable data, and mutable data is avoided.
::ad 4) What I learned is that tail recursion means that the only recursive call happens at the tail of the function ("call" in imperative programming, or substitution in functional programming). Maybe I'm wrong and should study again, and also did not understand what {{w|tail recursion}} wants to say, but I doubt that.
::ad 5) I agree that it is not very easy to understand, but I don't see any inaccuracy in that article. About the reference: Yes, but that does not mean imperative and functional programming is essentially the same. The section continues and describes that functional programming carries on the evolution from low-level (e.g. Assembler, allowing just simple operations) over high-level (imperative) programming which allows expressions to functional programming which says there are '''only''' expressions. (If and why and when this is useful is another story -- though actually that is essentially what White Hats wants to know from Cueball)
::And w.r.t your last point: So you would prefer not to explain (or have someone explain) the parts which are confusing to you? Wasn't explaining that the whole idea of this wiki? --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 20:44, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::I don't mind your edit but now I will reply in general. The most important paradigm is {{w|Structured programming|structured programming}} witch did lead to avoid statements like ''GOTO'', but this explain can not be a comprisal on computer since. It's just a small comic mentioning functional programming and tail recursion. But maybe we should try to enhance the English Wikipedia. ;) --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:04, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::Yes, the article you quoted also says (concluding the Myth 1-section) that functional programming goes further from avoiding [[goto]] to also avoiding assignments and control-flow structures. I'll mostly leave enhancing the English wikipedia to English native speakers, actually {{w|de:Funktionale Programmierung}} is not that badly written. (Sure it also gets complicated towards the end, but ''intuitive and clear'' does not equal ''easy'' ;) ) [[541|Damn you, Randall!]] --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 21:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:::::The German Wiki is often just a bad translation from English, lacking references. But this part is interesting: {{w|de:Funktionale_Programmierung#Abgrenzung_von_imperativer_Programmierung}} explains the difference of imperative and functional implementations. My example above is functional, NOT imperative, and also includes the the ''tail'' part. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::::::Ok, you are right, that it is '''also''' functional (at least when written using if ''and'' else and ignoring the syntactic noise of the ''return'' (without the else part, I would consider that control flow: The second return is called ''after'' the if statement)). '''Only''' functional I would call the formula which comes before the implementation (in the de:wiki article), but the implementation is also a valid imperative function.
::::::I still don't agree that this is tail recursive (I think our definitions of tail-recursion don't match so far). --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 23:37, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

The explain is still not very helpful, and the reason is that {{w|Computer science}} isn't a science like physics or math, it's more like philosophy or something else. An author is defining some theories and statements with no prove as it is done in math. [[User:Chtz|Chtz]], we are both wrong and correct, but Randall is just joking about this ''science''.

The details about different implementations can be shown below this general classification on computer science. I think this would be the best solution for an explain, different meanings can be shown, just like computer science does. What do you think?--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

== Your name ==

I'm just a random stalker on the Internet reading XKCD, and I see your name alot. I've been reading it as "dogbert", like as in the Dilbert comics, but now I'm really curious. Where does your username come from?
[[Special:Contributions/173.245.55.215|173.245.55.215]] 02:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
:That's just my secret ;) . But you can be sure I was just looking for a unique name without any vowels, like xkcd. You also can find me at the German wiki.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

== 1297: oort cloud: comet nuclei, asteroids, etch ==

Thanks for your many contributions to explainxkcd! In [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1297:_Oort_Cloud&diff=next&oldid=53963] you changed back some of my edits on the oort cloud. I've commented in the talk page about my reasoning, and tried to come up with less arguable language. If you disagree, let's discuss it on the [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:1297:_Oort_Cloud talk page]. Cheers, [[User:Nealmcb|Nealmcb]] ([[User talk:Nealmcb|talk]]) 16:56, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
:Uhh, that's two days ago, many edits went on that page after this. If I see my major changes correctly I did remove something like "comet at the Oort Cloud" because an object is only a comet when it's encounter the sun; and the Milky Way itself does not influence the orbit of an possible Oort Cloud object. I'm not native English, so I'm still happy for help on this, but I do know physics and more since very well. And much more sad: It still seems ISON is dead. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:28, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

== 1246 ==
Hey Dgbrt,

we need to have a discussion about the latest edit on 1246. i believe that we should refrain from further edits until we have discussed this in the discussion page.

[[User:Mrarch|Mrarch]] ([[User talk:Mrarch|talk]]) 20:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
:I will reply soon. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

== X11 Title Text Explanation ==

In my absence was it finally decided forever and always how title text explanations would be handled? I can't find a discussion in the Community Portal, if you have a link I'd be interested to come up to speed on the current editing policies. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 22:44, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
:A BIG problem is here still that there are NO editing policies in general. I'm just following the main "feel and look". In standard explains the title text is just at the bottom of the explain, and trivia goes after transcript. You are an admin here and maybe you should talk to [[User:Davidy22]]. In general I think that X11 still needs a better layout. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 23:11, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

::Ok. I had wondered about that. My personal policy, when I was an active editor a year ago, was once a title text explanation is longer than 2 paragraphs it should get it's own subsection. I'll have to get a dialogue started with Davidy about it once more.

::So you know, the English phrase is "look and feel". I know English isn't your first language, I just wanted to correct you on that. If I tried typing in German, I'd probably embarrass myself, and you'd have to help me.

::[[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 23:25, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

:::I'm happy about your latest actions here! And of course I did mix it up, it's "look and feel" and a translation of my former mistake could lead into some problems. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 01:13, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

== [[1052]] ==

Think you may have marked this as complete a smidgen early - it needed a bit of cleanup, and a few more tweaks (the joke about theology wasn't explained, really). I've done it now, though. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 16:40, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:You are welcome to enhance this explain, but in general it's not incomplete any more. If you feel the explain is still incomplete just add the tag again and provide a reason. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:02, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
::Eh, I got it. It was just a couple little things - the Ontological Argument joke, and such. I suppose, though, that "I had intended to do more work on it" isn't really an argument against removing it, is it? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 18:26, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
:::And I'm very happy if you still can enhance this explain. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

== Cthulhu and Azathoth ([[1040]]) ==

I can only presume you haven't read Lovecraft, but those are the best known sealed-away gods in modern literature. Cthulhu is supposed to live in the extreme depths, Azathoth beyond time, surrounded by insane pipers. They're a far better explanation than the Harry Potter one which is far, far more tangental - it sings in a bath, and contains nothing that could escape - but you're leaving in.

I doubt there's a precise reference being made to ''anything'' in the comic, but Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian Gods are the overwhelmingly likely inspiration. Unless someone has a better explanation. I suppose one could discuss The Abyss as well. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:27, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

:I disagree, this comic contains only REAL things. This is NO horror fiction. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:58, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
::The door at the bottom of the Marinas Trench is real now? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 11:36, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

1061: EST

2014-01-17T19:37:43Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1061
| date = May 28, 2012
| title = EST
| image = est.png
| titletext = The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|The jokes in grey text after "EST is..." could use an explanation. I started it, but...}}
This comic pokes fun of attempts to "fix" or "rationalize" the calendar that primarily serve to replace the current modifications used to make the calendar fit the year with new ones, for example, some have "festival days" that are not counted as a day of the week, in order to make every date fall on the same day of the week every year. This is an example the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you often have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.

[[Randall]] advertises his idea for an "Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet". He combines {{w|calendar#Calendars in use|calendar}} definitions with {{w|Time zone|time zone}} definitions. The abbreviation ''EST'' is a joke on the American {{w|Eastern Time Zone|Eastern Standard Time}}.

*"24 hours 4 minutes" makes the days longer attempting to compensate the fact there are now only 360 in a year. This makes 360 of Randall's days equivalent to 361 standard days; four days are still missing in this calculation.

*Running the clock 4 hours backwards after every full moon, giving 8 additional hours at each full moon, twelve or thirteen times in a year. Because a thirteenth full moon will occur once every 2.7 years, on average, this modification adds 4.1228 days to an EST year, bringing it to 365.1228 of our days.

*The "non-prime numbers of the first" etc. etc. is a final, needlessly complex way to bring Randall's EST year in sync with the solar year. There are 17 prime numbers between 0 and 59 and 43 non-primes. There are 2 equinoxes and 2 solstices each year, so a total of 172 minutes will occur twice. This brings Randall's year to 365.2422 of our days, equal to the solar year to four decimal places.

While this does (sort of) work, every one of these changes causes it to become unsyncronised from the day-night cycle, making it impractical: Without actually doing the math, it would be very difficult to determine if a given time on a future day was in the middle of the night, in the middle of the daytime, or otherwise.

*The {{w|Epoch (reference date)|Epoch}} at EST matches the {{w|Julian calendar}} which was superseded by the actual {{w|Gregorian calendar}}. The Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.

*The different zone for the United Kingdom is because 1 yard is equal to 0.9144 meters. A pun on using {{w|imperial units}} instead of the {{w|metric system}}. At the United States the metric system is the official one, but the imperial units are still widely used.

*Randall does not like {{w|Daylight Savings Time}} very much, as mentioned later in [[1268:_Alternate_Universe]].

*The one obvious reference is to {{w|Narnia (world)|Narnian time}}, a fictitious world of Narnia in CS Lewis's {{w|The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe}} and its sequels. In Narnia, time passes much more quickly than in the real world. You could be in Narnia for several days and only a few minutes would have passed in the real world. However, synchronizing this effect would be impossible because it is not a consistent rate; it fluctuates wildly based on the whims of drama and magic.

*The year 1958 is relevant because January 1, 1958 is the epoch (time zero) in {{w|International Atomic Time}} (TAI), which is part of the basis for {{w|Coordinated Universal Time}} (UTC). (The main difference is that TAI doesn’t add leap seconds).

*The Gregorian calendar does not include the year "0", after "1" BC the next year is "1" AD. Randall's invention fixes this according to correct Mathematics... only to reintroduce the problem immediately by omitting the "epoch" year 1958 (see above).

It should probably be noted that the list of claims made for it after "EST is..." are jokes in themselves. It is not actually that simple; it is dubiously "clearly defined"; it actually fails to be "unambiguous" as the adjustment rules it repeats minutes or hours after full moons or solstices, making times during those periods ambiguous; the only ways it is "free of historical baggage" is that it breaks free of any sensible bits of historical baggage; it keeps such things as the 30-day month and 12-month year. '''Finish this up'''

*The title text may be a reference to the ancient (Pre-Babylonian Exile) [http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm Jewish Calendar], which did not name the months, rather assigning them numbers from 1 to 12. The names used by Jews today are the names of the Babylonian months, derived from various Babylonian deities.

==Transcript==
:XKCD{{sic}} Presents
:'''EARTH STANDARD TIME'''
:(EST)
:A Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet
:EST is...
:Simple * Clearly Defined * Unambiguous
:Free of Historical Baggage * Compatible with Old Units
:Precisely Synced with the Solar Cycle * Free of Leap Years
:Intermittently Amenable to Date Math

:UNITS
:Second: 1 S.I. Second
:Minute: 60 seconds
:Hour: 60 minutes
:Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes)

:Month: 30 Days
:Year: 12 months

:RULES
:For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward.
:The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.

:[Epoch]
:00:00:00 EST, January 1, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970 (Julian calendar)
:[Time Zones]
:The two EST time zones are
:''EST'' and ''EST (United Kingdom)''. These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.

:Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there.
:Narnian Time: Synchronized.
:Year Zero: EST ''does'' have a year 0. (However, there is no 1958.)

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]

1061: EST

2014-01-17T14:45:25Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1061
| date = May 28, 2012
| title = EST
| image = est.png
| titletext = The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{Incomplete|The "non-prime minutes happen twice" needs explaining. The full moon bit doesn't work: "This also makes the time between full moons close to 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days)." Quite simply, you can't change the time between full moons upwards by causing them to make time repeat; it's a fixed interval, and adding more '''uncounted''' time between the full moons ''decreases'' the amount of recorded time that passes.}}
This comic pokes fun of attempts to "fix" or "rationalize" the calendar that primarily serve to replace the current modifications used to make the calendar fit the year with new ones, for example, some have "festival days" that are not counted as a day of the week, in order to make every date fall on the same day of the week every year. This is an example the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you often have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.

[[Randall]] advertises his idea for an "Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet". He combines {{w|calendar#Calendars in use|calendar}} definitions with {{w|Time zone|time zone}} definitions. The abbreviation ''EST'' is a joke on the American {{w|Eastern Time Zone|Eastern Standard Time}}.

*"24 hours 4 minutes" makes the days longer attempting to compensate the fact there are now only 360 in a year. Four days are still missing in this calculation.

*Running the clock 4 hours backwards after every full moon, giving 8 additional hours at each full moon, twelve times in a year. This fills the gap from before. This also makes the time between full moons close to 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days).

*The "non-prime numbers of the first" etc. etc. is just needlessly complex, to drive the parody home. There are 18 prime numbers between 0 and 60, and thus 42 non-primes; in a 60-minute hour, there are 42 "non-prime minutes". To make things just a little more simplified: after a solstice/equinox, still observing the running-the-clocks-backward rule after a full moon (above), add 42 minutes to the fifth hour after said full moon. This complex rule would need to be done a total of four times a year, adding 168 minutes. (The number 42 may also be a reference to {{W|The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy}}. Finally Randall found a way to mention the fact, that there are 42 non-primes up to 60...)

*The {{w|Epoch (reference date)|Epoch}} at EST matches the {{w|Julian calendar}} which was superseded by the actual {{w|Gregorian calendar}}. The Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.

*The different zone for the United Kingdom is because 1 yard is equal to 0.9144 meters. A pun on using {{w|imperial units}} instead of the {{w|metric system}}. At the United States the metric system is the official one, but the imperial units are still widely used.

*Randall does not like {{w|Daylight Savings Time}} very much, as mentioned later in [[1268:_Alternate_Universe]].

*The one obvious reference is to {{w|Narnia (world)|Narnian time}}, a fictitious world of Narnia in CS Lewis's {{w|The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe}} and its sequels. In Narnia, time passes much more quickly than in the real world. You could be in Narnia for several days and only a few minutes would have passed in the real world. However, synchronizing this effect would be impossible because it is not a consistent rate; it fluctuates wildly based on the whims of drama and magic.

*The year 1958 is relevant because January 1, 1958 is the epoch (time zero) in {{w|International Atomic Time}} (TAI), which is part of the basis for {{w|Coordinated Universal Time}} (UTC). (The main difference is that TAI doesn’t add leap seconds).

*The Gregorian calendar does not include the year "0", after "1" BC the next year is "1" AD. Randall's invention fixes this according to correct Mathematics... only to reintroduce the problem immediately by omitting the "epoch" year 1958 (see above).

*The title text may be a reference to the ancient (Pre-Babylonian Exile) [http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm Jewish Calendar], which did not name the months, rather assigning them numbers from 1 to 12. The names used by Jews today are the names of the Babylonian months, derived from various Babylonian deities.

==Transcript==
:XKCD{{sic}} Presents
:'''EARTH STANDARD TIME'''
:(EST)
:A Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet
:EST is...
:Simple * Clearly Defined * Unambiguous
:Free of Historical Baggage * Compatible with Old Units
:Precisely Synced with the Solar Cycle * Free of Leap Years
:Intermittently Amenable to Date Math

:UNITS
:Second: 1 S.I. Second
:Minute: 60 seconds
:Hour: 60 minutes
:Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes)

:Month: 30 Days
:Year: 12 months

:RULES
:For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward.
:The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.

:[Epoch]
:00:00:00 EST, January 1, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970 (Julian calendar)
:[Time Zones]
:The two EST time zones are
:''EST'' and ''EST (United Kingdom)''. These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.

:Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there.
:Narnian Time: Synchronized.
:Year Zero: EST ''does'' have a year 0. (However, there is no 1958.)

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]

1061: EST

2014-01-17T14:33:29Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1061
| date = May 28, 2012
| title = EST
| image = est.png
| titletext = The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{Incomplete|The "non-prime minutes happen twice" needs explaining. The full moon bit doesn't work: "This also makes the time between full moons close to 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days)." Quite simply, you can't change the time between full moons upwards by causing them to make time repeat; it's a fixed interval, and adding more '''uncounted''' time between the full moons ''decreases'' the amount of recorded time that passes.}}
This comic is a reference to the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.

[[Randall]] advertises his idea for an "Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet". He combines {{w|calendar#Calendars in use|calendar}} definitions with {{w|Time zone|time zone}} definitions. The abbreviation ''EST'' is a joke on the American {{w|Eastern Time Zone|Eastern Standard Time}}.

*"24 hours 4 minutes" makes the days longer attempting to compensate the fact there are now only 360 in a year. Four days are still missing in this calculation.

*Running the clock 4 hours backwards after every full moon, giving 8 additional hours at each full moon, twelve times in a year. This fills the gap from before. This also makes the time between full moons close to 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days).

*The "non-prime numbers of the first" etc. etc. is just needlessly complex, to drive the parody home. There are 18 prime numbers between 0 and 60, and thus 42 non-primes; in a 60-minute hour, there are 42 "non-prime minutes". To make things just a little more simplified: after a solstice/equinox, still observing the running-the-clocks-backward rule after a full moon (above), add 42 minutes to the fifth hour after said full moon. This complex rule would need to be done a total of four times a year, adding 168 minutes. (The number 42 may also be a reference to {{W|The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy}}. Finally Randall found a way to mention the fact, that there are 42 non-primes up to 60...)

*The {{w|Epoch (reference date)|Epoch}} at EST matches the {{w|Julian calendar}} which was superseded by the actual {{w|Gregorian calendar}}. The Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.

*The different zone for the United Kingdom is because 1 yard is equal to 0.9144 meters. A pun on using {{w|imperial units}} instead of the {{w|metric system}}. At the United States the metric system is the official one, but the imperial units are still widely used.

*Randall does not like {{w|Daylight Savings Time}} very much, as mentioned later in [[1268:_Alternate_Universe]].

*The one obvious reference is to {{w|Narnia (world)|Narnian time}}, a fictitious world of Narnia in CS Lewis's {{w|The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe}} and its sequels. In Narnia, time passes much more quickly than in the real world. You could be in Narnia for several days and only a few minutes would have passed in the real world. However, synchronizing this effect would be impossible because it is not a consistent rate; it fluctuates wildly based on the whims of drama and magic.

*The year 1958 is relevant because January 1, 1958 is the epoch (time zero) in {{w|International Atomic Time}} (TAI), which is part of the basis for {{w|Coordinated Universal Time}} (UTC). (The main difference is that TAI doesn’t add leap seconds).

*The Gregorian calendar does not include the year "0", after "1" BC the next year is "1" AD. Randall's invention fixes this according to correct Mathematics... only to reintroduce the problem immediately by omitting the "epoch" year 1958 (see above).

*The title text may be a reference to the ancient (Pre-Babylonian Exile) [http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm Jewish Calendar], which did not name the months, rather assigning them numbers from 1 to 12. The names used by Jews today are the names of the Babylonian months, derived from various Babylonian deities.

==Transcript==
:XKCD{{sic}} Presents
:'''EARTH STANDARD TIME'''
:(EST)
:A Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet
:EST is...
:Simple * Clearly Defined * Unambiguous
:Free of Historical Baggage * Compatible with Old Units
:Precisely Synced with the Solar Cycle * Free of Leap Years
:Intermittently Amenable to Date Math

:UNITS
:Second: 1 S.I. Second
:Minute: 60 seconds
:Hour: 60 minutes
:Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes)

:Month: 30 Days
:Year: 12 months

:RULES
:For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward.
:The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.

:[Epoch]
:00:00:00 EST, January 1, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970 (Julian calendar)
:[Time Zones]
:The two EST time zones are
:''EST'' and ''EST (United Kingdom)''. These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.

:Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there.
:Narnian Time: Synchronized.
:Year Zero: EST ''does'' have a year 0. (However, there is no 1958.)

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]

53: Hobby

2014-01-17T12:49:11Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */ + a little

{{comic
| number = 53
| date = January 25, 2006
| title = Hobby
| image = hobby.jpg
| titletext = The only one of these games I really played was Area 51
}}

==Explanation==
This is the second in the "[[My Hobby]]" series of ''[[xkcd]]'' comics. In this comic, [[Randall Munroe|Randall]] describes a rather silly "hobby" which references a common video game mechanism. In some video games that involved the player harming enemies (whether the player is a police officer or some other character), there is sometimes a penalty for harming "good guys" or innocent bystanders. In score-based games, this is usually in the form of a deduction from the player's score. In some games, these innocent bystanders have a tendency to leap out suicidally, as the game is trying to encourage the player to shoot them and thus lose points.

Randall suggests that his hobby is going to drug busts (where police officers surprise suspects in the midst of drug usage or drug deals in order to catch them in the act and arrest them). Drug busts are usually depicted as a large number of police officers with weapons drawn barging into a room or speeding up to an alley or a parked car. If the police witnessed a person jumping out, they might be startled and accidentally react by reflex and shoot that person (although in theory police officers are not supposed to open fire until they have identified the target as a potential threat). The comic image suggests the police would lose 100 points for such an act. Obviously, doing this in real life would be a really bad idea, as the hobbyist would quickly be killed.

The title text refers to the game "{{w|Area 51 (1995 video game)|Area 51}}" which was a popular shooter arcade game from 1995 (although a console/PC game {{w|Area 51 (2005 video game)|of the same name}} was released in 2005) which was one of many cabinet arcade games which featured a light gun which allowed players to aim at the screen and shoot in a realistic control mechanic. The title text suggests that the comic may be referring to these light gun cabinet games specifically in the comic, although the premise applies equally to first person shooters of any type (and even other game genres).

==Transcript==
:My hobby:
:When the police bust drug hideouts, I sneak in and hide. Then I jump out and startle them into shooting me so they lose points.
:[A dead body on the ground in a pool of blood, with "-100" over it.]

==Trivia==
*The original title on livejournal was "My Hobby"
*This is the fifty-first comic originally posted to livejournal. The previous comic was [[52: Secret Worlds]], the next is [[55: Useless]].

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics posted on livejournal]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Video games]]
[[Category:My Hobby]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T12:11:19Z

141.101.99.235:

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''[http://technorati.com Technorati]'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* [http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet. It also predates the standard web architecture to some extent - there's no standard weblink for it, for instance. See {{w|Usenet}} on Wikipedia for more.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* [http://sourceforge.net SourceForge]: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}. Has become less respectable since this comic was created in 2007, due to [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/gimp_dumps_sourceforge_over_dodgy_ads_and_installer/ allowing misleading advertisements intended to trick people into installing questionable software.]
* [http://mit.edu MIT]: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* [http://www.engadget.com/‎ Engadget]: A blog/online magazine, in multiple languages, reviewing tech products and commenting on technology news.
* [http://gizmodo.com/‎ Gizmodo]: A blog about technology and design.
* [http://makezine.com/blog/ MakeBlog]: A blog highlighting bizarre and interesting do-it-yourself projects, often with a geeky theme.
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* [http://games.yahoo.com Yahoo Games]: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames).
* [http://uo.com UO] (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* [http://www.everquest.com/‎ EQ] (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* [http://www.warcraft.com/‎ WoW] (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* [http://www.runescape.com/‎ Runescape]: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* [http://www.finalfantasyxi.com/ FFXI] (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* [http://www.lineage.com/‎ Lineage]: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* [http://secondlife.com Second Life]: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

explain xkcd talk:Explanation Completion Project

2014-01-17T12:06:22Z

141.101.99.235:

:"That's twice this thing has failed now. Do we just not have a big enough following for this to work, or is this not a good idea? If it fails again, I'll probably discontinue this" 
No, it's totally working, we just need a judge to check each page at midnight to actually remove the incomplete tag, because NONE of us are comfortable doing it ourselves [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.66|199.27.128.66]] 21:18, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
:I can totally do that. I'm checking all these anyways at the changeover. It'll just take a wee bit longer to read them. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 00:24, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Um, it's been stuck on 503: Terminology for three days. Is something wrong? [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.66|199.27.128.66]] 18:51, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
:Yeah, I had final exams and this slipped my mind. My bad, switch'd. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 23:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

::Can we do 256 soon? I've nearly got it done, but there's a few bits, like "The Lonely Island", "The Wet Sea" and "Chasm" which I'm really not sure if I'm missing something obvious. I can probably have the framework fully in place soon. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.149|141.101.98.149]] 05:13, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
:::I'm loath to do it so soon after chucking Online Communities 2 at people. I'll do it in a few days. '''[[User:Davidy22|{{Color|#707|David}}y²²]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 15:36, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
::::<s>When ready, it's actually just a small bit more work to be completely done, which would be a rather good thing for one of the large images. =) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 05:42, 9 January 2014 (UTC)</s>
::::Finished it today. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.235|141.101.99.235]] 12:06, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T12:05:22Z

141.101.99.235: /* User-created content and discussions (Southeast) */ Missed one

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''[http://technorati.com Technorati]'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* [http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet. It also predates the standard web architecture to some extent - there's no standard weblink for it, for instance. See {{w|Usenet}} on Wikipedia for more.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* [http://sourceforge.net SourceForge]: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* [http://mit.edu MIT]: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* [http://www.engadget.com/‎ Engadget]: A blog/online magazine, in multiple languages, reviewing tech products and commenting on technology news.
* [http://gizmodo.com/‎ Gizmodo]: A blog about technology and design.
* [http://makezine.com/blog/ MakeBlog]: A blog highlighting bizarre and interesting do-it-yourself projects, often with a geeky theme.
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* [http://games.yahoo.com Yahoo Games]: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames).
* [http://uo.com UO] (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* [http://www.everquest.com/‎ EQ] (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* [http://www.warcraft.com/‎ WoW] (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* [http://www.runescape.com/‎ Runescape]: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* [http://www.finalfantasyxi.com/ FFXI] (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* [http://www.lineage.com/‎ Lineage]: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* [http://secondlife.com Second Life]: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T12:04:18Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */ Remove incomplete.

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''[http://technorati.com Technorati]'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* [http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet. It also predates the standard web architecture to some extent - there's no standard weblink for it, for instance. See {{w|Usenet}} on Wikipedia for more.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* [http:// SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* [http://mit.edu MIT]: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* [http://www.engadget.com/‎ Engadget]: A blog/online magazine, in multiple languages, reviewing tech products and commenting on technology news.
* [http://gizmodo.com/‎ Gizmodo]: A blog about technology and design.
* [http://makezine.com/blog/ MakeBlog]: A blog highlighting bizarre and interesting do-it-yourself projects, often with a geeky theme.
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* [http://games.yahoo.com Yahoo Games]: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames).
* [http://uo.com UO] (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* [http://www.everquest.com/‎ EQ] (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* [http://www.warcraft.com/‎ WoW] (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* [http://www.runescape.com/‎ Runescape]: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* [http://www.finalfantasyxi.com/ FFXI] (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* [http://www.lineage.com/‎ Lineage]: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* [http://secondlife.com Second Life]: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T12:03:44Z

141.101.99.235: /* User-created content and discussions (Southeast) */ Finish

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Entries with '''Placeholder''' as a description need that replaced with an actual explanation. Ideally, links should be given for each (still active) site listed, this is about half-done.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''[http://technorati.com Technorati]'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* [http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet. It also predates the standard web architecture to some extent - there's no standard weblink for it, for instance. See {{w|Usenet}} on Wikipedia for more.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* [http:// SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* [http://mit.edu MIT]: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* [http://www.engadget.com/‎ Engadget]: A blog/online magazine, in multiple languages, reviewing tech products and commenting on technology news.
* [http://gizmodo.com/‎ Gizmodo]: A blog about technology and design.
* [http://makezine.com/blog/ MakeBlog]: A blog highlighting bizarre and interesting do-it-yourself projects, often with a geeky theme.
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* [http://games.yahoo.com Yahoo Games]: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames).
* [http://uo.com UO] (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* [http://www.everquest.com/‎ EQ] (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* [http://www.warcraft.com/‎ WoW] (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* [http://www.runescape.com/‎ Runescape]: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* [http://www.finalfantasyxi.com/ FFXI] (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* [http://www.lineage.com/‎ Lineage]: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* [http://secondlife.com Second Life]: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T11:52:28Z

141.101.99.235: /* MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East) */ Links

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Entries with '''Placeholder''' as a description need that replaced with an actual explanation. Ideally, links should be given for each (still active) site listed, this is about half-done.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''[http://technorati.com Technorati]'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* [http://games.yahoo.com Yahoo Games]: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames).
* [http://uo.com UO] (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* [http://www.everquest.com/‎ EQ] (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* [http://www.warcraft.com/‎ WoW] (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* [http://www.runescape.com/‎ Runescape]: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* [http://www.finalfantasyxi.com/ FFXI] (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* [http://www.lineage.com/‎ Lineage]: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* [http://secondlife.com Second Life]: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T11:46:13Z

141.101.99.235: /* The Blogipelago (Southwest) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Entries with '''Placeholder''' as a description need that replaced with an actual explanation. Ideally, links should be given for each (still active) site listed, this is about half-done.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''[http://technorati.com Technorati]'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-17T11:44:37Z

141.101.99.235: /* Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East) */ finish

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Entries with '''Placeholder''' as a description need that replaced with an actual explanation. Ideally, links should be given for each (still active) site listed, this is about half-done.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''[http://www.huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post]'': ''The Huffington Post'' is a web-only news site, named after its founder, Arianna Huffington. It's noted for attracting notable people to do very good writeups of politics and news, generally with a liberal slant, but also for having a medicine section that supports every sort of quackery and nonsense, including a regular column by {{w|Dana Ullman}} promoting {{w|homeopathy}} (see [[765: Dilution]]).
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''[http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]]'': An occasional trend is for a smallish magazine to get a website, have the website become vastly more popular than its print edition, and become a successful website. Examples include [http://cracked.com Cracked.com], [http://theonion.com The Onion] (which only stopped being a print publication ''December 2013''), and, the subject of this label, [http://boingboing.net Boing Boing]. Boing Boing is not easy to define - it's a group blog, with focuses including futurism, intellectual property, science fiction, technology, and cyberpunk - the latter of which it was rather influential in developing.
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs.
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''[http://postsecret.com/ PostSecret]'': A website which people send postcards to, describing their secrets. Some are little secrets - swigging milk, say; some are old, deep-seated traumas; and some are just things that they could never admit to anyone publicly. Worth a look.
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of YouTube'': [http://youtube.com YouTube] is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''[http://flickr.com Flickr]'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''[http://lastfm.com LastFM]'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''[http://deviantart.com DeviantArt]'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.
* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it. It's labelled as "The Wikipedia Project" (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}), since Wikipedia has generalised to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia (Excepting, possibly, Wikimedia Commons, the image repository for Wikipedia), perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''[http://www.2ch.net/‎ 2Channel]'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''[http://4chan.org 4Chan]'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''[http://reddit.com Reddit]'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''[http://digg.com Digg]'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''[http://fark.com Fark]'': A website that writes humorous commentary on various news reports, especially the strange, bizarre, or things from the political far-left and far-right.
* ''[http://somethingawful.com Something Awful]'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' ([http://slashdot.org Slashdot]): '''Placeholder'''
* ''[http://ytmnd.com YTMND]'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''[http://StumbleUpon.com Stumble Upon]'': A website that attempts to develop a profile for users in order to recommend which websites they might enjoy.
* ''[http://delicious.com/ Del.icio.us]'': Another image and website aggregator, linking to various things of interest. It uses tags to let people find specific types of content. ('''Note''': Since this comic, this website was renamed as "Delicious".)

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL,
::Chat Rooms
:Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Friendster,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:Qwghlm,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
::Practicals (Noob)
::Focus on Real Life (IRL)
::Focus on Web (.com)
::Intellectuals (π)
:Broadcaster,
:The Bit Torrent,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Something Awful,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:/. [Slashdot],
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huffington Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

2014-01-16T06:37:34Z

141.101.99.235: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Entries with '''Placeholder''' as a description need that replaced with an actual explanation. Ideally, links should be given for each (still active) site listed.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Reddit'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''Digg'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''Fark'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Something Awful'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' (Slashdot): '''Placeholder'''
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Del.icio.us'': '''Placeholder'''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-16T06:09:16Z

141.101.99.235: /* Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. Ideally, links should be given for each site listed.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Reddit'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''Digg'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''Fark'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Something Awful'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' (Slashdot): '''Placeholder'''
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Del.icio.us'': '''Placeholder'''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2014-01-16T06:08:59Z

141.101.99.235: /* Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. Ideally, links should be given for each site listed.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time. A larger version of the image is available [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png here].''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''[http://yahoo.com Yahoo!]'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. Once a more-or-less ubiquitous branding, now used much less. https://home.live.com/‎ is one remnant.
* ''[http://aol.com AOL]'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''[http://classmates.com Classmates.com]'' and ''[http://reunion.com Reunion.com]'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites. Classmates.com is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"
* ''[http://friendster.com Friendster]'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)

===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''[http://eharmony.com E-Harmony]'' and ''[[http://okcupid.com OkCupid]'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''[http://faceparty.com Faceparty]'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''[http://myspace.com Myspace]'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''[http://facebook.com Facebook]'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''[http://orkut.com Orkut]'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''[http://xanga.com Xanga]'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''[http://livejournal.com LJ]'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''[http://www.blurty.com/ Blurty]'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is, according to Wikipedia, an 18+ general community using this software.
* ''[http://cyworld.com Cyworld]'': A South Korean social media site featuring avatars and "mini-rooms".

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?
* ''TWB'' or ''JWB'' or possibly even ''TMZ''?: A very-hard-to-read label, south of Technorati. If it's meant to relate to Wikipedia, to the east of it, it ''might'' read TWB, short for "{{w|Translators Without Borders}}", a charitable project that tries to translate necessary texts into the languages of the people who need them for free. None of the other apparent readings connect to any major blogs. However, [http://TMZ.com TMZ], while a less obvious reading, is a incredibly major gossip blog, rated 15 in the "[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs World's 50 most powerful blogs]" by ''The Guardian'', and, at time of writing, rating 10 in the [http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ Technorati top 100].

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'': Teen-oriented website that allowed one to make a profile and put up pictures. The site has been dead since late 2012, due to the rise of Facebook. See {{w|Piczo}}.
* ''Broadcaster'': Another dead site, almost lost to the web. Only a few scraps of information remain on the web. [http://www.seomastering.com/wiki/Broadcaster.com One of the rare scraps of remaining information] indicates it was a webcam broadcasting service that also allowed youtube-like sharing of videos.
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Reddit'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''Digg'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''Fark'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Something Awful'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' (Slashdot): '''Placeholder'''
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon'': '''Placeholder'''
* ''Del.icio.us'': '''Placeholder'''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest
:Geographic area represents estimated size of membership

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Hard to read label: Probably JWB, TWB, or TMZ]
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

:(Not a complete survey. Sizes based on the best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.)
:Spring 2007

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]