Randall Munroe in 2007 Randall Munroe is the writer of the popular webcomic xkcd . The comic is known for its geeky humor and minimalist drawing style that generally uses stick figures. Munroe worked as a contractor for NASA before writing xkcd full time in 2006. Wikinews reporter Joshua Zelinsky interviewed Munroe at Vericon , Harvard's annual science fiction convention. RM: Well, the first thing is, it started off as a screename and an irc nick, where I’m very used to seeing it all lowercase. There are a lot of trendy things, from e.e. cummings , the poet, up through businesses that take that sort of thing. It is a big problem for starting sentences. If you want to start a sentence with “xkcd” it seems very wrong not to capitalize it. But I really grew to dislike capital X, lower case “kcd” because that made it seem like a word or a name more than a string of letters. The whole purpose is that it is a really abstract string. Capitalizing it is sort of saying something about it. If you’re used to treating abstract strings in programming, changing case is not a trivial thing. It's changing what the string is. So when it is in its canonical form, that’s the real xkcd, the other forms look wrong to me. So but on the other hand, I try not to make things too hard on people so I say “ok, all lower case is preferred if you want to capitalize, I prefer all caps. Mixed case is my third and least favorite choice” But to some extent that’s just style. Not for any particularly important reason. RM: When it first started out there was a brief flurry of people when Cory Doctorow linked to me with Boing Boing and it had only been up for a couple of weeks then, but “whoa there are lot of people reading this. This is a cool feeling. I like. It's neat seeing so many people respond and laughing and it makes me want to write more”. That was really the turning point so then I did it for a little while. I stopped for that winter, 2005-2006, and then started doing it again, and at that point I was picking up readers gradually. It was continual slow, sort of exponential climb. And from then on, it was just a matter of ok, we’ve hit a hundred readers a day, ok we’ve hit 500. and then a thousand. And at some I, you know, realized “whoa this is a lot of people.” But it sort of sneaks up on you. I should actually apologize slightly if there’s much overlap between these questions and questions you got during the panel. RM: There are some, ones where I feel like I got things right. I’ve always liked the ball-pit one. Hearing about how people like it and how people respond to it makes me like it even more. There have been a lot of new ones where it would be easier to name, but the ones that have been around long enough people have really responded to way back when the answer to this was the comic about the MC Hammer slide, and I liked that one. I feel that one worked out pretty well. There have been a lot in the last year or so, last 6th months that where I felt I got things right. The one with the internet map made it all over the place, and since then there have been a few where they’ve been so well-reviewed that I think of them as high points of the strip. But I don’t know; I have soft spot that’s sort for the silliness of some of them. You've had comics that have included actual people such as Richard Stallman . What has been your reaction to meeting people you’ve discussed or mentioned or made fun of, or gently poked in the comic?RM: It’s extremely surreal. And I mean just discovering that my, this is a normal person, and this is someone from my history books and I’m sitting here eating food with them. And that has not stopped being weird. And a lot of the time I feel like I should be having more substantial conversation than I am. I’m almost at a loss because it's such an enormous feeling. It makes me realize why people act so weird when they meet me, because I might be the same to them. So is there anyone you’ve put in the comics that you’d like to meet but haven’t?RM: Janeane Garofalo for a while now. My fans have been acting out my comics and I was making them weird and the fans were still acting them out. So I was just like, I’m going to make one that is impossible for you to make happen and then that can be the standing challenge. If someone can do that then I can start worrying about this again. And so I had Janeane Garofalo jumping a motorcycle off of a crashing space station towards a volcanic island with dinosaurs while she is armed with a tranquilizer gun. I figured that would be good. The reason I mentioned her was because I’ve been watching some of her movies and she’s just adorable. Somewhat on that topic, there was—I don’t know if you saw it—there was a website that had a fake news article about a hundred xkcders commit suicide by imitating one of your comics.RM: I read that, I forgot exactly what site it was maybe BBspot. Note it was BBspot. SeeSo that's the sort of thing you're thinking of in terms of people imitating things? RM: I generally don’t worry about you know, that people are going to do something deadly because I mention it. That would be bad but I don’t think that would be my responsibility if that happened. I do sort of wonder about is, people acting out something that has negative effects on the community. If I put some kind of prank that in real life that would be mean-spirited or hurtful and if someone does that to someone famous and would lead to tension and bad feelings, then I would feel bad.You did say on your blag at one point that “But remember, I am not advocating doing anything dangerous unless it’s really cool.”.RM: Yeah well, that’s sort of my running thing. That was sort of a response to people who were really concerned about blame and always have disclaimers that say "by the way, we don’t endorse this". I’m like, do you mean that? Do you have to say that? Can you say that? If you say "I do endorse this" does this change things? What if I say I endorse it if it's really cool. And I don’t know. When I do something it's my responsibility; I’m deciding whether to take that risk and if someone gets an idea from me and goes and does something dangerous that’s up to them. I didn’t say well do dangerous things no matter what, so...The man in the black hat seems to at least many readers to be one of your favorite characters. Can you talk about him a bit?R. Well, I decided early on that I sometimes wanted to be an asshole and sometimes I wanted to be sappy and romantic. And unlike the nerdiness and the romance, the asshole seemed harder to reconcile in one character and make that believable. I started putting the man in the hat, when I just wanted to say the most absurd thing. A lot of the time, I’m in a real life situation and I think what’s the most hurtful thing, what’s the worst way this can go, and have someone do that gleefully. That’s just a recipe for comedy right there. Then I have the guy in the hat so I’d put all that on him and then say “but that’s not the main guy, he’s much nicer than that” and, and I took that, the black hat symbolizes that for me because Aram from the now ended webcomic Men in Hats also wore a hat. So it’s not Black-hat in the hacker sense?R. No, it’s actually a black hat because there are only so many articles of clothing you can draw on a stick figure. I realized that I associated a black hat with gleeful asshole and that was a character I liked a lot of a since ended strip. Specific comicsRegarding Comic 304, "Nightime Stories" - Speaker for the Dead or Ender's Game ?R. Speaker for the Dead is a much more grown up book. I felt much less of a connection to growing up so I would say Ender’s Game. I’ve read Speaker. I appreciate it some extent. I didn’t feel as personal as Ender’s game. And I didn’t respond to it the same way. I reread Ender’s Game every half a year or so for quite a while. Probably 12 or 15 times now where it just was such an engaging story and such an engaging set of characters. I went back to it over and over. And that’s something I haven’t done with any of the other books in that section of the Ender’s series.That comic made fun of Xenocide and didn’t mention the final book Children of the Mind at all. Do you have an opinion there? R. I have not read either of those books since high school, and for me that’s getting further and further away. So I haven’t read either of those books in 6 or 8 years. My memories of Children of the Mind are that at least had had the end of the story there and so at least playing out, and being “ok, that happened.” I don’t remember all the details but that there was something to it. All my memories of Xenocide are a girl with obsessive compulsive disorder and Chinese history for many pages. So I didn’t have very good feelings to Xenocide. But neither of those two did I feel were on the same levels as Ender’s Game or Speaker for the Dead. I just picked Xenocide as the most clear target of them.Have you seen Orson since this conference started?'( Orson Scott Card was the featured speaker at Vericon) I was thinking something almost Godelian like saying making a sentence that in some way depends on the way it's presented on Wikipedia and if you try to present it on Wikipedia with a neutral point of view by virtue of taking that action you are changing the point of view to do something. Now we’re going to move on to something fairly controversial, because just I can’t resist. Religion and politics. You criticized Young Earth creationism and in the same strip (Comic 258, Conspiracy Theories) make a bug report to God. It's not clear how much the strip represents your own religious views but how much does that one? How much do others? Note: Shortly after this conversation, Munroe endorsed Barack Obama, pointing to among other things Obama's consultation with Lawrence Lessig known for fighting for looser copyright restrictions and for making Creative Commons . Munroe said the following in a follow-up email:
 in 2007 is the writer of the popular webcomic . The comic is known for its geeky humor and minimalist drawing style that generally uses stick figures. Munroe worked as a contractor for before writing xkcd full time in 2006. Wikinews reporter Joshua Zelinsky interviewed Munroe at , Harvard's annual science fiction convention. RM: Well, the first thing is, it started off as a screename and an irc nick, where I’m very used to seeing it all lowercase. There are a lot of trendy things, from , the poet, up through businesses that take that sort of thing. It is a big problem for starting sentences. If you want to start a sentence with “xkcd” it seems very wrong not to capitalize it. But I really grew to dislike capital X, lower case “kcd” because that made it seem like a word or a name more than a string of letters. The whole purpose is that it is a really abstract string. Capitalizing it is sort of saying something about it. If you’re used to treating abstract strings in programming, changing case is not a trivial thing. It's changing what the string is. So when it is in its canonical form, that’s the real xkcd, the other forms look wrong to me. So but on the other hand, I try not to make things too hard on people so I say “ok, all lower case is preferred if you want to capitalize, I prefer all caps. Mixed case is my third and least favorite choice” But to some extent that’s just style. Not for any particularly important reason. RM: When it first started out there was a brief flurry of people when linked to me with Boing Boing and it had only been up for a couple of weeks then, but “whoa there are lot of people reading this. This is a cool feeling. I like. It's neat seeing so many people respond and laughing and it makes me want to write more”. That was really the turning point so then I did it for a little while. I stopped for that winter, 2005-2006, and then started doing it again, and at that point I was picking up readers gradually. It was continual slow, sort of exponential climb. And from then on, it was just a matter of ok, we’ve hit a hundred readers a day, ok we’ve hit 500. and then a thousand. And at some I, you know, realized “whoa this is a lot of people.” But it sort of sneaks up on you. I should actually apologize slightly if there’s much overlap between these questions and questions you got during the panel. RM: There are some, ones where I feel like I got things right. I’ve always liked the ball-pit one. Hearing about how people like it and how people respond to it makes me like it even more. There have been a lot of new ones where it would be easier to name, but the ones that have been around long enough people have really responded to way back when the answer to this was the comic about the MC Hammer slide, and I liked that one. I feel that one worked out pretty well. There have been a lot in the last year or so, last 6th months that where I felt I got things right. The one with the internet map made it all over the place, and since then there have been a few where they’ve been so well-reviewed that I think of them as high points of the strip. But I don’t know; I have soft spot that’s sort for the silliness of some of them. You've had comics that have included actual people such as . What has been your reaction to meeting people you’ve discussed or mentioned or made fun of, or gently poked in the comic?RM: It’s extremely surreal. And I mean just discovering that my, this is a normal person, and this is someone from my history books and I’m sitting here eating food with them. And that has not stopped being weird. And a lot of the time I feel like I should be having more substantial conversation than I am. I’m almost at a loss because it's such an enormous feeling. It makes me realize why people act so weird when they meet me, because I might be the same to them. So is there anyone you’ve put in the comics that you’d like to meet but haven’t?RM: for a while now. My fans have been acting out my comics and I was making them weird and the fans were still acting them out. So I was just like, I’m going to make one that is impossible for you to make happen and then that can be the standing challenge. If someone can do that then I can start worrying about this again. And so I had Janeane Garofalo jumping a motorcycle off of a crashing space station towards a volcanic island with dinosaurs while she is armed with a tranquilizer gun. I figured that would be good. The reason I mentioned her was because I’ve been watching some of her movies and she’s just adorable. Somewhat on that topic, there was—I don’t know if you saw it—there was a website that had a fake news article about a hundred xkcders commit suicide by imitating one of your comics.RM: I read that, I forgot exactly what site it was maybe BBspot. Note it was BBspot. SeeSo that's the sort of thing you're thinking of in terms of people imitating things? RM: I generally don’t worry about you know, that people are going to do something deadly because I mention it. That would be bad but I don’t think that would be my responsibility if that happened. I do sort of wonder about is, people acting out something that has negative effects on the community. If I put some kind of prank that in real life that would be mean-spirited or hurtful and if someone does that to someone famous and would lead to tension and bad feelings, then I would feel bad.You did say on your blag at one point that “But remember, I am not advocating doing anything dangerous unless it’s really cool.”.RM: Yeah well, that’s sort of my running thing. That was sort of a response to people who were really concerned about blame and always have disclaimers that say "by the way, we don’t endorse this". I’m like, do you mean that? Do you have to say that? Can you say that? If you say "I do endorse this" does this change things? What if I say I endorse it if it's really cool. And I don’t know. When I do something it's my responsibility; I’m deciding whether to take that risk and if someone gets an idea from me and goes and does something dangerous that’s up to them. I didn’t say well do dangerous things no matter what, so...The man in the black hat seems to at least many readers to be one of your favorite characters. Can you talk about him a bit?R. Well, I decided early on that I sometimes wanted to be an asshole and sometimes I wanted to be sappy and romantic. And unlike the nerdiness and the romance, the asshole seemed harder to reconcile in one character and make that believable. I started putting the man in the hat, when I just wanted to say the most absurd thing. A lot of the time, I’m in a real life situation and I think what’s the most hurtful thing, what’s the worst way this can go, and have someone do that gleefully. That’s just a recipe for comedy right there. Then I have the guy in the hat so I’d put all that on him and then say “but that’s not the main guy, he’s much nicer than that” and, and I took that, the black hat symbolizes that for me because Aram from the now ended webcomic also wore a hat. So it’s not in the hacker sense?R. No, it’s actually a black hat because there are only so many articles of clothing you can draw on a stick figure. I realized that I associated a black hat with gleeful asshole and that was a character I liked a lot of a since ended strip. Specific comicsRegarding Comic 304, "Nightime Stories" - or ?R. Speaker for the Dead is a much more grown up book. I felt much less of a connection to growing up so I would say Ender’s Game. I’ve read Speaker. I appreciate it some extent. I didn’t feel as personal as Ender’s game. And I didn’t respond to it the same way. I reread Ender’s Game every half a year or so for quite a while. Probably 12 or 15 times now where it just was such an engaging story and such an engaging set of characters. I went back to it over and over. And that’s something I haven’t done with any of the other books in that section of the Ender’s series.That comic made fun of and didn’t mention the final book at all. Do you have an opinion there? R. I have not read either of those books since high school, and for me that’s getting further and further away. So I haven’t read either of those books in 6 or 8 years. My memories of Children of the Mind are that at least had had the end of the story there and so at least playing out, and being “ok, that happened.” I don’t remember all the details but that there was something to it. All my memories of Xenocide are a girl with obsessive compulsive disorder and Chinese history for many pages. So I didn’t have very good feelings to Xenocide. But neither of those two did I feel were on the same levels as Ender’s Game or Speaker for the Dead. I just picked Xenocide as the most clear target of them.Have you seen Orson since this conference started?'( was the featured speaker at Vericon) I was thinking something almost like saying making a sentence that in some way depends on the way it's presented on Wikipedia and if you try to present it on Wikipedia with a neutral point of view by virtue of taking that action you are changing the point of view to do something. Now we’re going to move on to something fairly controversial, because just I can’t resist. Religion and politics. You criticized and in the same strip (Comic 258, Conspiracy Theories) make a bug report to God. It's not clear how much the strip represents your own religious views but how much does that one? How much do others? Note: Shortly after this conversation, Munroe endorsed Barack Obama, pointing to among other things Obama's consultation with known for fighting for looser copyright restrictions and for making . Munroe said the following in a follow-up email:
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