A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#1

Post by iamwil » Wed, Sep 26, 2012, 11:18 PM UTC

A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD
theatlantic.com

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#2

Post by dkokelley » Wed, Sep 26, 2012, 11:49 PM UTC

It's interesting to me the awareness Munroe has about creativity, inspiration, and working environment. He sees that some things are purely distractions (E.G. Reddit, cleaning the bathroom floor) while no distraction (E.G. a room with blank walls) is detrimental to his creative process.

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#3

Post by Swizec » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:03 AM UTC

dkokelley wrote: post #2

It's interesting to me the awareness Munroe has about creativity, inspiration, and working environment. He sees that some things are purely distractions (E.G. Reddit, cleaning the bathroom floor) while no distraction (E.G. a room with blank walls) is detrimental to his creative process.

Wonderful talk about where good ideas comes from says basically the same thing - where different minds meet (HN, Reddit etc.) there creativity happens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0ssmoXG1I

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#4

Post by tisme » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:07 AM UTC

Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#5

Post by adambratt » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:23 AM UTC

Really interesting article. Thanks for posting it!

Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful.

Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#6

Post by sciurus » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:23 AM UTC

tisme wrote: post #4

Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&st... shows 285 stories and 1,303 comments matching 'xkcd'.

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#7

Post by haberman » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:39 AM UTC

"I got email from a bunch of physicists at MIT saying, "Hey, I saw your relativist baseball scenario, and I simulated it out on our machine, and I've got some corrections for you." And I thought that was just the coolest thing. It showed there were some effects that I hadn't even thought about. I'm probably going to do a follow-up at some point using all the material they sent me."

God, that is just gold. Randall really has a gift -- he speaks to our imaginations so much that he can count on geeks around the world to participate in conversation with whatever he dreams up. Here's to hoping that we will get to see many more years of his creativity.

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#8

Post by grumpygremlin » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:43 AM UTC

He's pretty bad at drawing.

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#9

Post by brown9-2 » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:59 AM UTC

adambratt wrote: post #5

Really interesting article. Thanks for posting it! Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful. Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.

Yep:

Where did all this start?

I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time. It's immensely fun and I really appreciate y'all's support.

http://xkcd.com/about/

Re: A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD

#10

Post by epidemian » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 1:43 AM UTC

> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back."

Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if you go Back that'll just bring you to the previous list item, instead of the previous webpage; not very predictable IMO.