I’m Coming Out. As a nerd lover.

I am in love with a website. It’s name is XKCD. You may have noticed I talk about it quite a bit. There are various different reasons for this. One is that I fucking love nerds. Well at least I love the type of nerds that get tons of joy out of their chosen obsessions and are constantly trying to spread that joy to other people, a pretty thankless task when you’re talking about things like UNIX or suchlike. So less of the comic book guy from the simpsons and more..hmm…well Stephen Fry or someone like that. I am not quite intelligent enough to understand all of what they tend to talk about. This does not matter. I just tend to click with people who are as madly obsessive as I am about something, even if I have no interest in what they obsess about. Mix that with slight social awkwardness and a bit of idealism and we are definitely going to get on.

Enter Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD. If you have a spare hour or so, watch this lecture he gave at Google recently. If you’re not a techy you might not get some of the physics/python/random internet celebrity humour, but I think everyone can get something out of it.

Some of his best work:

Edited to add: You should click through and look at the ones on his website; they all have “tooltip” type extra bits when you mouse over them – often sums up the comic perfectly. Thanks to Le Catch for reminding me!

(There’s actually a story to the first one. It contains coordinates and a time. Scores of people actually turned up at this time and place and had a massive XKCD convention)

Heh

I could do this all day. Go look at the archives. Each one is brilliant in it’s own nerdy way.