Life and Times of Randall Munroe

For a guy who mostly draws stick figures, Randall sure thinks a lot. Sometimes you run into folks like Randall, but it's pretty rare. The guy ponders stuff obsessive-compulsively. And, here's where it's really tough being a techie. There's an underground source of information, whether it be reddit, or lolcats, or what have you, and techies that are in the know, tap into this source of information, and to keep up with this audience you have to be just on top of the material as everyone else.

Indeed, after listening to Randall Munroe talk to Google about xkcd, his comic, I find a newer appreciation for the odd mind that is Randall Munroe.

He's perhaps one in a line of a bunch of tech celebrities. For some reason, geek types have a humor all their own, at a level of sophistication that would leave many a reader puzzled, wondering "why is that funny?". For example, I find the humor in Dinosaur Comics written by CS grad student, Ryan North, very much in line with a friend (that's you, Justin).

How long will Randall find what he does interesting? I mean, Scott Adams continues to produce Dilbert, and Dilbert used to be what geeks considered cool, until you realize that Dilbert was pretty mainstream, and that xkcd is still a bit too geek to widely appeal outside its demographics.

How many other communities out there have their own comics? Geek community thrives because the Internet and all things webbie are part of the means by which this content spreads out. What do firemen do? Or investment bankers? Or cat herders?

I follow stuff through the geek community, which seems to have developed its own stars, from folks like Randall and Ryan in the comic world, to folks like Matz or David Heinemeier Hansson in the Ruby community. There's Spolsky. There's Michael Arrington. Geek communities have their own celebrities, and it's rather egalitarian. People come out of nowhere and get some notice, and the crowd rushes this way and that way to find the stars of the day.

And so, as Warhol pointed out so long ago, soon everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, and while Warhol probably had no idea how that would happen, we are seeing it happen in front of us now.