xkcd getting around; and not getting around

So a few weeks ago, Randall Munroe apparently added a sort of side project to his regular comic-ing - he wrote a comic for "Building a Smarter Planet", which appears to be a mind-numbingly boring website about, I dunno, stuff. Some exciting headlines currently on the frontpage include "June 24th Food Safety Forum on Capitol Hill was a huge success" (awesome!) and "Implementation of a livestock disease traceability system in the US" (woah! that one was written by super-celebrity Robert Fourdraine, PhD, COO Wisconsin Livestock Identification Consortium!! Awesome!)

Oh right this is an xkcd blog. Um yeah so Randall is apparently making comics for them now. He says that he will "occasionally produce a few extra comics" but so far there is only one:

You can see the blog post where they announce this new feature if you click on the comic.

I actually do like the comic a fair amount, even if it does fit into the xkcd trope of "I say crazy things when on stage." It also suffers from the usual extra-dialog-stuck-in-after-the-punchline. But that's ok, those are minor complaints. Given the context it's in, this is a pretty good effort for Randall, and I am curious to see what others he comes up with. I think the lack of a set timeline helps him - I've often said that one of xkcd's flaws is that Randy forces himself to make comics more frequently than he thinks of good ideas. That of course won't happen here (unless we suddenly see "Randy makes a new environmentalism comic every June, July and August WITHOUT FAIL.")

My bigger concerns are with the post itself, written by one "Tim Washer" [holy crap, you can just add an E and change the H to T and his name is Time Waster! oh my god.]. Our friend is described as "the genius behind the web-comic XKCD." This just makes me vomit a little. Genius? Please. There's no reason to think he's particularly smart, certianly not from his comics or his studies of math or whatever. Ew gross. And using the hyphenated "web-comic" is probably the most succint way to say "I'm Old!" without using that exact phrase. But anyway.

Oh hey so remember how there is supposed to be an xkcd book? First off, notice how I used the phrase "web-comic" in that post - that is a crazy coincidence. I had forgotten all about it until I went to get the link right now after the previous paragraph was already written. Anyway, yeah, there was supposed to be one, according to the New York Times it was supposed to be out "sometime around june." Well clearly June has ended and so we are going to see just how "around" it is. Hey, it's not around at all! The Internet has no news at all on it since that first flurry of excitement in late April - unless I'm bad at searching, that is. If anyone has new information on it, I'd love to know what the status is. Despite what you may think, I really do have high hopes for a book of xkcd comics: As I will be glad to admit, there are a lot of very good comics on the site - they are just very few and far between after comic 350 or so.

And of course, I still need my review copy of the book...