

This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix. - ideas101
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/business/media/26link.html?ref=technology

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sanswork
"Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online
comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line
appeared."

I enjoy xkcd as much as the next guy, but sudo make me a sandwich has been
around as long as sudo itself.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Yeah, but it's still cool to see Randall and xkcd get some (glowing)
mainstream attention.

~~~
noonespecial
"Mainstream attention" kills most of the things I'm most fond of. Of course, I
knew this day would come and I'm happy for Randall but there's still this
small sense of a let-down now that the secret is out.

~~~
sanswork
The only thing mainstream attention kills in most things is the ability for
early adapters to consider themselves elite in knowing about said thing.

I see it in music all the time with core fans hating the band as soon as they
get popular even if they haven't changed at all just because they are no
longer unique for liking them.

I never thought I'd see it with a web comic.

~~~
noonespecial
I was actually worried that if a new demographic of readers (or the perception
thereof) found xkcd that Randall may tone down some of the geek humor in favor
of something more _universal_. I hope not.

 _mainstream attention kills in most things is the ability for early adapters
to consider themselves elite_.

Wow this sentiment has been cropping up quite a lot lately. Kind of like a
snobbish backlash to snobbish-looking elitism thing. Meta-snobbery?!

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euccastro
It's funny how the author spent quite a bit of e-ink _describing_ (as opposed
to commenting on) things that could be inlined or linked to.

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technoguyrob
(don't mod me up -- this is the full article if you hate NYT login nagging)

 _This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix_ __By NOAM COHEN __

FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well
be “Take my wife ... please.”

Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we
should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a
hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where
the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like
dissecting a frog — it can be done, but the frog dies.

Still, he plays along, explaining that “sudo” is a command in the Unix
operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: “The humor comes from
people who have encountered typing a command and having the computer say ‘No,’
and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, sudo says,’ and the computer does it. Kind of like
‘Simon says.’ ”

Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, “Make me a sandwich,” only
to be told, “No.” Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, “Sudo make me a
sandwich,” and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.

Mr. Munroe, a physics major and a programmer by trade, is good for jokes like
this three times a week, informed by computing and the Internet. By speaking
the language of geeks — many a strip hinges on crucial differences between the
C and Python programming languages — while dealing with relationships and the
meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for
techies across the world.

The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique
visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month. (Why “xkcd”? “It’s
just a word with no phonetic pronunciation,” his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.)

Mr. Munroe has become something of a cult hero. He counts himself as among the
fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web who make a living at
it.

At Google headquarters, a required stop on the geek-cult-hero speaking tour,
he recently addressed hundreds of engineers, some of whom dutifully waited for
him to sign their laptops. He said he had only wanted a tour of the place but
had instead been invited to speak. The real thrill, he said, was that a hero
of his, Donald Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and
a programming pioneer, was in the front row.

“It’s comparable to Bill Gates’s being in the front row,” he said. “I got to
have lunch with him. He’s in his 70s, but people he is in touch with must have
told him about it.”

While the comics play on the peculiarities of code, they are as much about
escaping the clear, orderly world of commands to engage a chaotic sphere known
as real life, or perhaps merely adulthood.

So one comic has a graph showing “my overall health” entering a steep decline
“the day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I wanted.” Or, in one of Mr.
Munroe’s favorites, a stick-figure couple revel in an apartment filled to the
brim with playpen balls, “because we are grownups now, and it’s our turn to
decide what that means.”

And, in a rare lapse from his plain-and-simple drawing style, a pair of stick
figures walk in an increasingly beautiful landscape after first declaring: “I
feel like I’m wasting my life on the Internet. Let’s walk around the world.”
At the foot of a gorgeous mountain, however, one turns to the other and says,
“And yet, all I can think is that this will make for a great LiveJournal
entry.”

Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to running a
business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the Web site out of their
Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they recently hired an employee to handle
e-mail.

“People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe
said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise
support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of
T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well
as posters.

“We’ve been getting a lot more efficient,” he said. “We were losing money on
every T-shirt sold overseas for a while.” (But you can make it up in volume, I
helpfully suggested. He moved on.)

A fan of newspaper comic strips since childhood, Mr. Munroe can simultaneously
call himself an heir to “Peanuts” while recognizing that his quirky and
technical humor would never have made it in newspapers.

On the Internet, he said, “You can draw something that appeals to 1 percent of
the audience — 1 percent of United States, that is three million people, that
is more readers than small cartoons can have.”

In that way, and many others, the Web has been a salvation. “People doing
comics on the Internet are free of all the baggage that goes with being with a
syndicate,” he said, “the editorial control, the space limits, the no control
over what can be done with your cartoon.”

The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that
is exceptional. They re-enact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in
his strip. A case in point was the strip called “Dream Girl.” It recounted a
dream in which a girl (stick figure with flowing hair) recites a bunch of
numbers into the narrator’s ear.

“The xkcd person is the kind of person who would take that and run with it,”
he said. The numbers were coordinates and a date months in the future.

The strip’s narrator says he went there and no one came. “It turns out that
wanting something doesn’t make it real,” the strip concludes.

But on that day in real life, hundreds of fans met in a park in Cambridge.

And then they all ordered sandwiches.

~~~
tlrobinson
<http://bugmenot.com>

However, NYT regularly blocks usernames that appear on bugmenot, so pretty
much every time I go to nyt.com I have to go to bugmetnot.

It would be much easier just to register for NYT, but I continue to use
bugmenot out of principle.

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yummyfajitas
Just in case you don't know, bugmenot is very easy to use. Even easier than
creating a login, in fact.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349>

