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

6th March 2009

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

  1. [gravitar] tshirtman Submitted at 00:59:03 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... :/
  2. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 01:01:56 on 6 March 2009

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

    One-Sided..

  3. [gravitar] Randall Munroe Submitted at 01:04:40 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.
  4. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 01:07:38 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!

  5. [gravitar] klette Submitted at 01:17:32 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
  6. [gravitar] gnomon Submitted at 04:11:08 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.
  7. [gravitar] Ken Bloom Submitted at 18:09:33 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!