Words matter. These are the best Randall Munroe Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I don’t feel bad about the fact that I notice if a lot of people laugh at a comic, and think, ‘That worked; I’ll do things like that more.’
I’m just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I’ve told it already.
Some of the first infographics I did started off as notes to myself: trying to plot out, for instance, how IP addresses are allocated. After a while, I thought, ‘This is a neat thing I can share with people, and they can follow me along in that process of understanding.’
Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn’t my house is mentally helpful: ‘This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,’ and ‘over there is the place where I do the dishes.’
I think the weirdest question I’ve ever gotten was, ‘If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?’
The nice thing about being on the Internet is that you’re not as recognisable as someone that’s been on TV.
I think that putting merchandising into the hands of the artist themselves is one of the best things for the artist.
There are definitely times – and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists – where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you’re like, ‘I give up.’ And then you go and take a shower or run an errand, and halfway there, you get an idea.
There is a danger of building an identity around the idea of being smart because it is very easy to become off-putting, to become exclusionary.
I think the comic that’s gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles – normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.
It’s amazing what’s buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor’s website.
Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature – which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I’m thinking that maybe we’ll have a future where Google is ‘xkcd.’
A lot of times, the idea of a comic will be, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you…’ But instead of doing it, I’ll draw a comic about it.
One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that’s just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.
I don’t have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble – it is almost insignificant.
I have always had trouble paying attention. When I was supposed to be at work, I’d be doodling. But then when I was home, trying to draw, I would be working on math problems. I never end up doing exactly what I should be doing at at any given time.
Lots of people in aggregate might know who I am, but they are spread around across the country and the world.
I’m sad that my childhood came just slightly before the lithium-ion-battery boom, because I would’ve killed for the cheap radio-controlled helicopters they have now.
It used to be if you wanted to do a newspaper comic, you had to appeal to a pretty big chunk of the newspaper’s readership for them to want to keep you around. ‘Dilbert’ would be office humor, but even that is pretty widely experienced.
A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.
People often say, ‘I like your comics, even though I don’t know enough math to get all of them,’ as if it’s some kind of club where they don’t belong. But there’s no club. There’s just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.
I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals – or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it’s not all that interesting.
