Wait for it.

[rowyn]

xkcd's strip 1190, "Time", has continued to update since it was first posted 118 days ago. Since you can't view the earlier versions of it from xkcd's site, I didn't know how often it was updating and I seldom remembered to check on it.

It turns out it has been updating hourly. It is on panel 2946 as of this posting.

You can view it xkcd 1190 here, in animated form, with the spacebar to play/pause and arrow keys to advance or rewind one panel at a time so you can read the word balloons.

I think what really amazes me is how inaccessible this is from xkcd's own site -- buried in the archive, with no archive of it's own, posted in a form that more-or-less guaranteed no viewer would see even half of it.

It's interesting in its own right, though.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

It is! There's a whole dang story that's unfolding in that thing... which i will probably forget about since I'm not going to come back and look unless someone mentions it.

[rowyn]

I may remember to go back to look at it now that I know a convenient way to view it. :D

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I tried watching the animated version but it stopped updating at a point nowhere near the end apparently, since the current frame had no relation.

[rowyn]

That's odd. When I look now, it looks like xkcd site 1190 is about a frame ahead of the animated site. When I checked this morning, it was variously in sync or a panel behind, too, so I they're not quite synchronized, but they're not far apart. If you arrow backwards on the animated site when you first open it, it'll wrap to the end, so you can scroll backwards through it and not just only play forwards.

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

What amazes me is that the guy had to draw all these things. Or, well, create them in some way. Now, the drawing style of xkcd is not particularly demanding, but still! Even at a couple of seconds per frame, it's still one heck of a lot of time to put in.

[rowyn]

Yeah, there's more frames in Time than there are comics in the entire rest of the archive. o_o

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Wow. I have no idea what's going on here, but it's fascinating! Thanks for the pointer! :D

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Annnnnd ... I just reached panel 2995. :D

[rowyn]

I keep going to look at it every time someone comments on this post, but it's a little more rewarding to allow additional time. :D I wonder if the author will publish it in book form some time?

I really liked the way he represented the accent of the one person who spoke their language in the mountain city. I wish I could get that effect in text-only. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

You've inspired me to go backwards through XKCD. I regret that many of the expressly math-related ones are a bit over my head, but there are some really great strips nonetheless. :)

I can really sympathize with this one (#1169), after I spent some time in Google Maps "exploring" possible paths for a cross-country trek in my zombie-apocalypse campaign.

[rowyn]

Heeheehee! Did you cheat with the scroll wheel? :D

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what was meant by that. I ended up wasting most of my time exploring Street View, once I got to a point where roads were actually covered by it. (For my initial zombie apocalypse campaign, the PCs were supposed to be on a cruise ship, and then make land-fall somewhere on the east coast. I followed the lead of another GM who'd been posting updates, and picked "Sealevel, NC" as the vicinity for landfall, though I fictionalized it in order to cram in certain locations dictated by the adventure installments. From there, the group headed westward toward Jacksonville, NC -- so I went to a lot of trouble printing road maps, pasting screen shot by screen shot into Photoshop in order to have sufficient resolution for the players to make some choices as to which routes to take -- once there actually WERE any choices to be made. Once the PCs headed out from there, I was forced to play "Schroedinger's Plot" to a certain degree by placing the adventure-specified location of "Dalesbury" in the path of whatever route the PCs took.

When the group split up, and I had to abandon "War of the Dead" to follow a more mercenary "Zombie Run" campaign instead (similar cross-country concept, but more episodic and less dependent upon the PCs to follow a "script"), I ended up scouting out locations in between sessions, trying to get the players to commit to which way they'd be driving at the end of any given session, so I could do a bit of research on what they might run into along the way. Not that my depictions of any of these locations were the LEAST BIT AUTHENTIC, but I just felt that I could have a bit more confidence as a GM and add more of an air of authenticity if I could find names of actual convenience store chains, car shops, diners, landmarks, etc., along the way -- and have the occasional Street View picture to give an idea of the terrain.

The Street View part is where I really got dragged in, though. I love "virtually" exploring in computer "sandbox" games ... and apparently Google Street View as well. This is in stark contrast to actually DRIVING somewhere, where I'm anxious about the cost of gasoline, which lane I should be in, I can't gawk at the things going by because I'm DRIVING, and I certainly can't stop in the middle of the road or backtrack on a whim. :D