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You'd better get yourself a garlic T-shirt, buddy, or it's your funeral

6 March 2009 21:50

There are times when I hate xkcd. Mostly these are:

1. When reading a discussion on /. and you just know a particular image will be posted.

2. When you spend hours searching for a specific comic that you're certain exists.

The latter is what bit me tonight - I'm certain there exists a cartoon which has a plot of:

Woman says hi.

Guy says hi.

Woman looks confused.

Guy realises she was talking to her phone, not him.

Cannot find the image for the life of me - only phone-related image I could find was tones.

I thought I might get lucky if I knocked up a quick hack to search the alt-text on all the images, but sadly not.

Still it was a fun project. To be uber-useful we'd need to persuade people to imput the text in each cartoon, along with the number.

Given that there are only 550ish cartoons published thus far creating a database would take a person a day, or a group of people a couple of hours.

Tempting .. very tempting ..

ObFilm: The Lost Boys. Yay!

Tags: hacks, random, xkcd | 7 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon tshirtman at 00:59 on 6 March 2009
I think I read all xkcd's, I happen to regulary be in situation 2, but not for hours, in general it take a few seconds to several minutes...
... but I can't remember the one you speak about... :/
icon Steve Kemp at 01:01 on 6 March 2009

I was a little mistaken. I found it just after pushing this entry to be live:

One-Sided..

icon Randall Munroe at 01:04 on 6 March 2009
The comic you're thinking of might be http://xkcd.com/476/ (I had to search for it too).
But more importantly:
> Still it was a fun project. To be uber-useful we'd need to persuade people to imput the text in each cartoon, along with the number.
Which they already do :) Ryan North implemented just this system. See the search box below the comic on the main page.
icon Steve Kemp at 01:07 on 6 March 2009

I have absolutely no idea how I could possibly have missed that huge search box!

To add insult to injury I search for "phone" and the very cartoon I wanted popped up in first place.

The only thing I can do now is go sleep. Argh!

icon klette at 01:17 on 6 March 2009
Well, if searching doesnt work, browsing by month speeds up the process a bit. I use http://comics.jodal.no/c/xkcd/2009/3/ for all my comic needs :-) quite nice
icon gnomon at 04:11 on 6 March 2009
There's also OhNoRobot over at http://www.ohnorobot.com, which uses this same fan transcription effort to index just shy of 10e5 individual comics across almost 1500 comic series.
Serieses.
Whatever.
icon Ken Bloom at 18:09 on 6 March 2009
XKCD's search engine (right on the front page) doesn't do it for you? They've transcribed all of the comics too!

 

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