XKCD
It wouldn’t really be appropriate to discuss obscure nerdy gags without discussing XKCD.
XKCD (main site) (first strip) is in fact, a very geeky gag-a-day strip. There is no plot, no storyline, and no consistent characters save for the author’s avatar and occasional story threads (well, some of the other characters might be repeats throughout, but if so, I haven’t spotted them). The comic is generally done as stick figures, and there is occasional violence and bad language. There are a smattering of art strips where there is no gag (these were more frequent towards the beginning when he was using college sketches), and these still generally only have stick figures for the people although may have more complex scenery.
XKCD updates Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There’s 296 strips in the archive.
The sort of things you will need to know before enjoying all XKCD gags: A reasonable smattering of computer science knowledge, including various unix commands, perl, and a knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Video games, especially guitar hero, katamari damacy, first person shooters, and old NES games. Various memes, including All Your Base, Lolcats, and Your Mom jokes. Graph theory. Economic theory. Linear Algebra. Dadaism. Physics (electricity and magnetism, mostly). Ender’s Game. D+D. Snopes. The list goes on.
If you know everything in the above list (you geek you), I can almost guarantee that you will love XKCD. If you know most of them, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you don’t know any of them, I have no idea how you will like it because I haven’t tried recommending this strip to anybody who hasn’t known any of the above. I suspect you will be missing something. Unlike Irregular Webcomic, there are no footnotes explaining gags, and no help for missing references. This is a strip for the geek, by a geek. Although most of the topics are widespread enough that if you’re the kind of person that reads webcomics and you know of wikipedia, you can figure it out with a little work. And if you happen to fit into XKCD’s wavelength, you will be blown away by how AMAZINGLY good this strip is, and how well it captured your thoughts (which seems to be a good chunk of the internet’s population).
One of the other special bits about XKCD is his use of alt tag text in the comic strip. In most browsers, if you mouse-over the comic strip, a bit of text will pop up with an added comment about the strip, often a second punchline or an explanation about where it came from. Most geeks I know have shared a lot of the experiences in XKCD. There’s several strips about finding arbitrary patterns in life or putting arbitrary restrictions on oneself, the adult geek version of the “lava game” (where the ground is lava and you’re only allowed to move via furniture). For these people, the alt text is just another reminder of yes, somebody else has had this experience too. Some people don’t care for the alt text (some browsers don’t handle it well), and I’ll admit I’d prefer it as a footnote as well, but it’s perfectly enjoyable without it.
I mentioned earlier that often the strips won’t actually have a gag, and will be an art sketch. Early on these were just random things that came to mind, but more recently when random art sketches come around they’re often interesting things like a physical map of the internet communities, where he shows what the internet world might look like if land size roughly correlated with site popularity. These are the sorts of things that will cause you to look at them and go “Huh.” and think about it. The sorts of strips, that if you work at a geeky place, you can print out and stick on your door.
If you’re a geek, you may very well find yourself quoting XKCD frequently after reading through the archives, or referencing a strip, or repeating a joke. I’ve quoted the Bond parody strip word-for-word to people, and had people join in. It’s the sort of strip that inspires readers to sneak chess boards into roller coasters to take entertaining pictures, because it’s the perfect geeky thing to do, and let’s go do it! There’s a “random strip” feature (since there’s no continuity), and often I’ll see friends just click the button to see what amusing geek reference they can find.
XKCD is also home to some of the sites that I absolutely love- The Fairest, The Funniest (often not work safe), and The Cutest. Each of these three allow users to submit pictures of things that are pretty, funny, or cute, and then compare them to each other to get a ranking. Check the “top images” for each of them for some pretty impressive stuff.
XKCD- a wonderful geeky comic, if you’re a geek. Go geek.
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