Bobby Tables - Inspired Activities

Inspired Activities

On several occasions, fans have been motivated by Munroe's comics to carry out, in real life, the subject of a particular drawing or sketch. Some examples include:

• Richard Stallman was sent a katana and was confronted by students dressed as ninjas before speaking at the Yale Political Union—inspired by "Open Source".
• On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people gathered at Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park, 42°23′44″N 71°07′50″W / 42.39561°N 71.13051°W / 42.39561; -71.13051, in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose coordinates were mentioned in strip #240. Munroe appeared, commenting, "Maybe wanting something does make it real," reversing the conclusion he drew in the last frame of the same strip.
• When Cory Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon – inspired by "Blagofaire".
• xkcd readers sneaking chess boards onto roller coasters – inspired by "Chess Photo".
• The game of "geohashing" has gained more than 1000 players, who travel to random coordinates calculated by the algorithm described in "Geohashing".
• In October 2007, a group of researchers at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute conducted a census of the Internet and presented their data using a Hilbert curve, which they claimed was inspired by an xkcd comic that used a similar technique.
• YouTube has placed a feature on comments that plays back the comment aloud on "Audio Preview", possibly based on the strip "Listen to Yourself".
• Running the following code is an easter egg in Python 3.0: import antigravity, inspired by the strip "Python". The module also contains a geohashing function.
• In the xkcd cartoon "Troll Slayer" (591) 4chan's /b/ boards are taken over by Twilight lovers. In response to this, /b/ was temporarily renamed "Twilight Appreciation Station", and included the text "We have met the enemy and he is us", which appears in the cartoon as a note added by Randall Munroe. In order to prevent /b/ from trolling the xkcd forums, registration was blocked for several days after the comic appeared.
• GNU Emacs 23.1 introduced M-x butterfly easter egg, in response to "Real Programmers.
• Drupal's command-line utility Drush has a make-me-a-sandwich command, which requires sudo access.
• RepRap/Makerbot operator Allan Ecker was inspired by xkcd "Infrastructures" to actually design a tiny open source violin, available on Thingiverse.
• Based on "Packages", programmers set up programs to automatically find an item for sale on the Internet for $1.00 every day.
• AAISP has implemented the code word "shibboleet" in their call centres in reference to the comic #806.
• Comic #305, Rule 34, has the characters commenting on the lack of pornography featuring women in the shower playing electric guitar. Randall Munroe subsequently created the website WetRiffs.com, which hosts submitted pictures of men and women in showers playing guitars.
• Dropbox, in response to Comic #936, shows two messages reading "lol" and "Whoa there, don't take advice from a webcomic too literally ;)" when attempting to register with the password "correcthorsebatterystaple".
  • ArenaNet recommended that Guild Wars 2 users create passwords following the guidelines of said comic.