1/8: Randall Munroe of XKCD at Borderlands Books, San Francisco, 2009 09 23 Part 1

Randall Munroe on a book tour, with a surprise appearance at Borderlands. There were a few words before I got the camera on. Audio has weird overtones, regretfully.

The following is a summary of the talk, not a transcript.

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On designing the physical book: the front cover was charmingly plain, but doing the back plain would have been underkill; the montage was especially drawn. The guy on the laptop on the back is looking at the wikipedia page on red spiders.

The book has been a long time in coming; he decided this around comic 200. He was thinking 256 at first: 256, 512, etc. Unfortunately, the early comics were scanned in at low-resolution, so he had to go back and retrieve the paper version out of the folder he stores the originals in.

The early ones that had high-res versions mostly got lost in the shuffle in moving computers.

[cellphone interruption]

Reconstruction would have been a bear.

Cue the backup tale of woe. This was on a Linux laptop, using an ancient copy of Photoshop in WINE. Windows autobackup, heh. So he was putting it off, until such time as he built a proper tool for it. His sysadmin kept nagging him. He went to copy it from the Windows partition to the desktop; not enough room due to the huge Windows partition doing nothing. He decided to repartion; copy command was ready to go. Repartitioning took a while. He went to sleep; around 11am, while he was still asleep, someone broke through the window, stole the laptop and all the money from his wallet.

Since then, backups have been working properly.

The comic about breaking into Richard Stallman's house was one of the ones around that time. http://xkcd.com/225/

So was this: http://xkcd.com/224/

Simple concept, but the blue glow was a 4-hour job, and reconstruction was not really a good plan.

The concept of reconstruction was daunting; he kept putting it off until Alexis from Breadpig grabbed him by the ear.

He talked to publishers, but they had a sheen of "you come with me kid and I'll make you famous"; it did not appeal, and he was not sure what he needed the publishers for, as he already had an audience.

Basically, he really just needed to contact the printers.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• xkcd
• Randall
• Munroe
• Borderlands
• Books
• comics
• San
• Francisco
• publishing
• Breadpig

[2007ASpaceOdyssey]

I would like to watch these but the audio is just too bad.

Thanks for trying though

[Plutonar]

People don't realize what 8 kilobits per second sound quality means until they hear what they've recorded.