xkcd readers made a mountain of themselves at a tiny Cambridge park. I wonder where they all parked (or peed). I also wonder how many local residents were really surprised today.
Tag Archive for 'xkcd'
That’s what many xkcd fans will be finding out later today. They’ve been organizing a meetup/flashmob/fun event/meeting inspired by a dream in a webcomic since early this year. Heck, googling “xkcd meetup cambridge” gets more than 30K hits.
I suppose even a moderately popular webcomic could easily inspire this much internet traffic if a certain meme happened to take off. But this one is cool for a number of reasons:
- Most discussion around it is polite, and for quite a while now very organized
- They appear to have a number of international travellers, several of whom have already blogged about their flights and what they’re doing before the meetup
- xkcd is actually pretty funny. Well, at least if you’re a geek, academic, or math person.
- I’m really trying to figure out how 1300? people are going to get to the park.
Plenty of people – attendees and lookers-on – have blogged about how that many people are going to fit into the small playground park that the meetup is happening at. That’s easy: most are going to walk over to Danehy park a few blocks away, which is plenty big enough.
No, I’m wondering how they’re going to get there. Obviously a lot are out of towners and will hopefully walk – good luck finding enough cabs! But all the locals or cartrippers – yow. I used to commute home past that neighborhood, and it’s not easy driving there any time of the day. And most of those side streets are pretty narrow, one way, and the whole neighborhood only has a few obvious driving entrances. Luckily it’s a Sunday here, but still. Wish I had a helicopter so I could watch.
Oh, and the weather looks perfect, a little hot if anything. Sounds nice.
This is priceless. [1]
Of course, arming the key figure behind the GPL is going to be of very differing values depending on your views about just how free – beer or speech? – information should be.
Personally, I salute RMS and the GPL crowd for their ideals, and especially for doing the due dilligence (if not always as organizedly as they could) to come up with good strong licenses that enforce those ideals. But give me the AL for code or the CC-By-NC for writings any old day for most things, since I believe in sharing just a little bit more, as long as credit is given.
Actually, it’s interesting how I feel about licensing code versus personal writings (this blog, stories, photos, etc.). I’m not sure if it’s how much I support the ASF either in their altruistic mission or their wonderful membership and committers, but I definitely appreciate that our code can be reused, even for commercial purposes. However for my personal writing, I find myself very strongly reserving commercial use for myself only. Not quite sure why; maybe I have a hidden writer streak in me that I’m planning to capitalize at some point.
Actually, I think it’s the personal creativity aspect that makes the difference. Coding is definitely creative, although it nearly always tends to creating something that does useful things. Writing (or photos) is creative, but it’s purpose is to amuse or enlighten, although admittedly the object of that amusement is not always clear (the reader or the writer?). But writings are much more personal, since they only true purpose they have to serve are mine and mine alone – and that’s the part I want to keep more of a stake in.
[1] Yes, the geeks are right, it’s not priceless, it probably cost them $20 for the katana, and at least $10 in shipping costs to Cambridge, along with $0.005 of bandwidth costs to read xkcd over the years to get the idea in the first place. Paying for all those items with cold hard cash so you can’t be traced sending weapons through the mail into MA – that’s priceless.
I’ve been swamped at work, and the weather has been on and off awful, but yikes. Welcome back, self. Even if this is just a lame link post to some very geeky humor – xkcd is actually quite entertaining, although the topics are almost as esoteric as Zippy.
Oh, and I posted preliminary survey results. Notice how I snuck that in under the radar? More details, um, in a week or so when I have time. Will I see anyone in Toronto?
