
xkcd Time - at your own pace - Jeremy1026
http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/?frame=3094
======
jofer
Just in case any of you aren't already aware of it, there's extensive evidence
that the Mediterranean partially or completely "dried up" during the Miocene
(~6 million years ago) and then rapidly flooded again.

This is referred to as the Messinian salinity crisis:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis)

I'd assume that's a significant part of the inspiration for this storyline.

~~~
hussong
Here's a nice chart:
[http://i.imgur.com/oKBXjCT.png](http://i.imgur.com/oKBXjCT.png)

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phamilton
If you click on the image at [http://xkcd.com/1190](http://xkcd.com/1190) it
takes you to this page. Either a vote of "awesome" from Randall or a
collaborative work. Does anyone know which it is?

~~~
sesqu
Probably the former. There were a bunch of similar sites originally, this one
arguably the best, and the comic didn't always link to it.

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memset
Part of my daily internet routine, for the past 4 months, has been to check up
on Time. Well, I guess it's back to work now!

(I also feel like I've missed something in the story. The wikis say that the
story takes place far into the future. How do they know? Are there other
references I've missed? Is this... a larger allegory, or something, that I am
missing out on?)

~~~
brazzy
Well, the main story point is the flooding of the Mediterranean (revealed
recently when the protagonists are shown a map of the projected sea level). We
know that happened in the past and might happen again. People in the past had
no way to produce such accurate maps. Also, the sand castle built in the
beginning looks medieval, not prehistoric.

 _Update:_ the blurred dialog of the woman in the castle has been partially
deciphered and also places the story in the future pretty clearly:
[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time:_...](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time:_Translator)

~~~
cecilpl
We actually placed the story in April 13291 AD via astronomy. There's a
section that shows the night sky clearly and the stars have moved slightly
from their current positions.

Also interestingly enough Antares has gone supernova in the intervening 11278
years.

See [http://xkcd-
time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hyp...](http://xkcd-
time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hypothesis)

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h1fra
For people like me that wasn't aware of the story behind the comic
[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time)

~~~
Digit-Al
explainxkcd seems to be down at the moment

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Spidler
Of Epic scale, more individual frames than all the xkcd comics to date.

A grand and world-changing story for a people. Not spanning years, which a
traditional Epic would require, but still containing acts of heroism and tales
of adventure.

~~~
yread
well but some xkcds were pretty epic themselves - certainly bigger than this
frame

[http://xkcd.com/980/](http://xkcd.com/980/)

[http://xkcd.com/1110/](http://xkcd.com/1110/)

[http://xkcd.com/657/](http://xkcd.com/657/)

[http://xkcd.com/1037/](http://xkcd.com/1037/)

~~~
Spidler
Well, A traditional Epic is a (long!) story that arcs over years, With life-
changing events for a culture/nation. It should have a journey part, a hero
part and a homecoming (usually).

Traditional Epics would be Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Buddhacarita, Edda ( A
collection of Epics ) And so on.

What I'm inferring is that the work as a whole is a traditional Epic.

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clicks
I think it would be appropriate if someone just made a short video clip out of
that.

~~~
rpgmaker
I second this.

UPDATE: The gif here seems to be an animation of this comic but I don't know
how updated it is or if it's updated with the newest frames of the comic
automatically:
[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time)
and this one: [http://richardwestenra.com/xkcds-time-animated-time-
lapse/](http://richardwestenra.com/xkcds-time-animated-time-lapse/)

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Steuard
I had stopped in to catch up on Time occasionally, and it always seemed neat
but pretty low-key. But wow, near the end it got progressively more
interesting and fast-paced, and I was _really_ caught up in the finale. Well
done and my thanks, Randall Munroe!

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narcissus
Randall, if you're here... I would totally watch this movie!

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cecilpl
For detailed discussion of this comic, see the following 51000 comment thread
on the XKCD fora:

[http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=101043](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=101043)

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riobard
I went through the comics and read the story plot on
[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190)
but I have to say as a non-native speaker, I don't think I “get it”. Could
anyone explain in a few paragraphs what the story tries to tell us? In
particular, why is the dialog of the woman in the big castle on the mountain
all blurred but still somehow readable?

~~~
MereInterest
The person in the castle is a non-native speaker of the valley-people
language. The dialog is blurred to give the impression of a mix between the
two different languages. Some phrases are translated into the valley-people's
language better, and so the non-native speaker's text is less garbled.

[http://readwrite.com/2013/07/26/xkcd-time-saga-comes-to-
the-...](http://readwrite.com/2013/07/26/xkcd-time-saga-comes-to-the-end)

This gives a better explanation of the plot, I feel. Essentially, it is a
possible future wherein the Mediterranean Sea has become landlocked and dries
up considerably, similar to the Dead Sea today.

~~~
riobard
Thanks very much! Now I feel I have even more questions…

If the story happens in the far future of year 13291, as mentioned by the link
above, I'd assume the people would understand the geography of their
surroundings pretty well, no? Well, unless this is a post-apocalyptic fiction…

Also, at the beginning of the comic there is a quite lengthy depiction of the
two main characters building sand castles, which appear at the end of comic.
What does it imply?

~~~
nknighthb
It probably is post-apocalyptic of a sort.

~11,278 years is an extraordinarily long time in human terms. That's about how
long it's been since the earliest stirrings of civilization. We've gone from
the discovery of electrons to present-day technology in ~1.2% of that time.

A lot could happen in that time to reverse society to near-subsistence levels.
Wars, climate change, major impact events.

It's also notable that we have only the faintest insight into anyone other
than the two main characters, who are of indeterminate age, education, and
experience. They might easily be teenagers. Go find a bunch of 16-year-olds of
average intelligence in 2013. What do they really know about the world around
them? If you ask them to name a sea which might be realistically drained and
refilled, what will they say?

Now imagine their lives having been spent in 40-person village effectively
knocked back a couple hundred years, focused on farming and fishing and just
generally getting by.

Humanity might be aware of a great deal. These two might be aware of
relatively little.

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gus_massa
Link to first frame:
[http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/](http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/)

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ngoldbaum
Except it's not the end, it's still updating...

~~~
Jeremy1026
Kind of, there were a few more frames added after the "The End" frame, but it
has been stuck at 3099 frames for about 2 hours. Considering that they were
updating hourly for the past few months, I'm betting that the last frames were
Randall's way of making sure that if you goto
[http://xkcd.com/1190](http://xkcd.com/1190) you wouldn't see "The End".

~~~
benjamincburns
The title text still reads "The end."

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jimmaswell
I'd really rather just have a zip full of the images so I could look through
them in my image viewer. This takes forever to load them if I go through them
any faster than a snail's pace. Edit: Just saw the button to preload them all.
That's better than the zip, then. Using the play button doesn't work without
preloading everything for me. I wonder why that's not done by default.

~~~
spacemanaki
I think you can preload them or just wait and it will preload them and then
you can play it around 10FPS which is as fast as you'd want to in order to
catch all the action, but doing this manually with images in a viewer would be
pretty tedious, I would think.

It's quite clever actually, and pauses on interesting frames with dialogue, as
voted by people previously? or something:
[https://github.com/deplicator/xkcdTime_atyourownpace/blob/ma...](https://github.com/deplicator/xkcdTime_atyourownpace/blob/master/readme.mediawiki)

~~~
makomk
The pause-on-interesting-frames feature doesn't work too well when there's
disagreement over whether a frame is interesting, unfortunately. If the number
of Yes and No votes both exceed some fixed threshold, then it marks the frame
as "debated" and only stops on it if you tell it to stop on debated frames -
which includes both frames with an overwhelming majority of Yes votes and ones
with an overwhelming majority of No votes.

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nazgulnarsil
I wish this were a game a la knytt stories.

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gpvos
How can I view the debate that apparently is being held about some frames on
that site? (It may be that a browser plugin is blocking it for me, but I could
not find out which or how.)

~~~
Jeremy1026
Debated frames are just frames that are close in Yes/No votes on wether or not
the frame is 'important'. From the GitHub repository for the project "Debated
Frames are frames that have recieved a number of both yes and no votes."

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hrish2006
Thank you so much for posting this!

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zdw
Has anyone decoded the "other language" that shows up around frame 2664?

~~~
skykooler
There's a translation of one word so far:
[http://translatebeanish.com](http://translatebeanish.com)

