XKCD Author's Unpublished Book Has Already Become a Best-Seller 129
destinyland writes "Wednesday the geeky cartoonist behind XKCD announced that he'd publish a new book answering hypothetical science questions in September. And within 24 hours, his as-yet-unpublished work had become Amazon's #2 best-selling book. 'Ironically, this book is titled What If?,' jokes one blogger, noting it resembles an XKCD comic where 'In our yet-to-happen future, this book decides to travel backwards through time, stopping off in March of 2014 to inform Amazon's best-seller list that yes, in our coming timeline this book will be widely read...' Randall Munroe's new book will be collecting his favorite 'What If...' questions, but will also contain his never-before published answers to some questions that he'd found 'particularly neat.'"
Re:importance of being popular (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:importance of being popular (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember kids, don't fail, or you'll have to spend your time complaining about people who didn't.
Re:Don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about anything good eventually becomes over-hyped.
Actually I don't think anything is described as exactly as good or as bad as it actually is. People either rain praise on something they like, or trash talk something they don't, and it's usually overdone.
Personally, I like xkcd. Yes, it's not consistently ground shattering. The average day to day comic tends to range somewhere from meh to mild chuckle. But for something you get 3 days a week, that's actually pretty damn good.
Then occasionally he goes all out and actually _does_ build something that lives up to hype, which then of course itself gets overhyped like everything else, so he really can't win.
Re:importance of being popular (Score:2, Insightful)
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.
Re:importance of being popular (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:More questions (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not science: it's uncontrolled historical data. Not xkcd's thing.
Re:Don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell - even I have my off-days when I don't manage to do any earth shattering. I am my biggest fan, but even so, I'm not always amazed at myself.
Re:Don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
That is some pretty wide open conjecture. I have personally been reading and commenting on slashdot for more than a decade and I have skipped or missed entire articles full of comments. Slashdot has contained comments on everything from Natalie Portman to Hot Grits.
Conjecture: Most everything said on slashdot today has already been said by someone on Slashdot prior to it.
Re:Don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
People with tiny heads tend to swear a lot.