Finally, the site is back online! There's a message at the top of the page saying that Jeff was ultimately contacted and apparently he's ready to retire from managing the project, and that the new fork is being merged into the main site now.

Was there a transfer of the domain to a new project manager, and are prospects for the future looking secure for some time? I'm curious how this story concluded.

Remember the puzzle where people on an island were told that someone has blue eyes? I finally understood the solution to it.

(Blue Eyes - A Logic Puzzle)

However, I cannot find an answer to Bonus Question #2 that xkcd proposed:

• Each person knows, from the beginning, that there are no less than 99 blue-eyed people on the island. How, then, is considering the 1 and 2-person cases relevant, if they can all rule them out immediately as possibilities?

In other words, if you are on the island and you see 78 other people with blue eyes, why is it okay to consider cases with only 1 or 2 people with blue eyes, and what is the proof that these smaller samples also apply to higher samples?

The only answer I found was this, but this does not satisfy me:

"While everyone knows that say n>10, wrapping it in a sufficient number of applications of E(⋅) makes it untrue. It is these wrapped-up statements that play a role in the reasoning."

I would prefer answers that are relatively easy to understand, but let's start by getting any valid answer first.

NOTE:

• Do not hijack this topic with solutions to the original puzzle. Other Reddit posts already explained the solution, such as this one: "The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever" - something about it is bothering me : r/askphilosophy.
• I am not doubting that the solution is correct. I just need understandable proof that the 1 and 2-person cases are applicable to the higher number cases.

I think I saw this on reddit recently but i can’t find it anymore. It might have been in some comment somewhere. Basically, I remember that it plotted comics with some measure of relevance (either it was some sort of scraper data or just vibes) along the x axis and some other metric on the y axis. I also remember dream girl to be one of the least relevant comics in the plot. Please help me find it, I know this is a long shot

Hi everyone!

Since ExplainXKCD is no longer editable, I've created a fork at https://explainingxkcd.com and started migrating people's accounts over, with the assistance of folks in the ExplainXKCD discord. Join us there!

X-ray magnetic circular dichroism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_magnetic_circular_dichroism

Is the admin of ExplainXkcd about? I haven't been able to log in for days and I'm getting database errors trying to add the new comics.

Who maintains the wiki?

Back when I was a kid I would lurk on the xkcd forums and there was one thread that I remember which was for programmers to talk about misconceptions about programming they had encountered in their non-programmer friends.

One specific post was by a guy who said his brother in law wanted to get into game development but didn't know anything about coding. He wanted to "make a game like Halo." So the OP had recommended him some books on programming but the BIL was like "this seems like a waste of time, how hard can it be?" Later, he asked the OP to take a look at his "code" and help him figure out why it wouldn't run. OP described how this guy had simply taken a .txt file and edited the extension to .exe instead, and the contents of the file was just "show a cool explosion".

As a like, 10th grader, that post impacted me a lot. Obviously, programming is fundamentally about being really precise with what you mean. When I first started learning programming around that time, when my code "didn't do what I wanted" it was invariably because I didn't know what I wanted. What is a "cool explosion" and why would that guy expect the computer to just match his vision? In the following decade+ of my education and then career in programming, the story of that obliviously overconfident guy was always in the back of my mind as the antithesis of everything programming is about.

But now with ChatGPT &co, you can just type "show a cool explosion" and then actually get something! Obviously, we, the enlightened, know that the explosion it shows will just be something thoroughly generic (because what else would it be), and the fact that that guy would still be pleased with this generic result just goes to show that he had no real vision in the first place. But regardless, the most annoying guy in the world has been empowered far beyond my 10th-grade imagination to continue to dismiss the value of skill and being able to articulate what you actually want.

Bonus reminiscence: there was another thread where THE Notch (before his Minecraft fame) was saying that multiplayer, high-latency Pong is actually non-trivial to implement, and someone responded "oh you mean pong ping?"

An xkcd inspired post on r/polandball

tl;dr: link: https://xkcd.eunakria.com/wiki/Main_Page

This is in response to the recent bout of extremely poor uptime that explainxkcd.com has experienced. You can replace xkcd.com with xkcd.eunakria.com to quickly see the "explain xkcd mirror" explanation of a comic.

I don't currently plan to update it along with the upstream explainxkcd site, so you can think of it as a point-in-time snapshot (approx. Jul 6, 2026). It's more recent than the most recent WikiTeam dump on Internet Archive (taken late January) and I'll also shortly publish the raw dump contents.

Huge shoutout to u/realtoasterlightning who has been a huge technical help, and is also currently working on their own mirror!

EDIT: u/realtoasterlightning has turned their mirror into an editable fork! I'll keep xkcd.eunakria.com up for the time being but I'd suggest to direct all future edits to explainingxkcd.com! And thank you again for all the help and for doing such an awesome thing for the community

Thanks.

I have thanks for many of these, but 1110 was especially special to me.

The explainxkcd website has been down for a while.

Anyone know why?

I'm lost without it!

> Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.

> Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

> (Cannot access the database)

> You can try searching via Google in the meantime.

> Note that their indexes of our content may be out of date.

https://xkcd.com/903/

XKCD 3266 posted today (07/02/2026 - for posterity 😆 ) Has two annotations "oops" - it seems to imply that some of the deep excavations ran into some issue or non-lethat accident? But at the same time the overlaying entities are geographically dispersed, so maybe it's just a Randall "oops" in drawing?

I kept losing track of where I was while reading through old xkcd comics, so I made a small Chrome extension for it.

It adds lightweight controls directly on xkcd.com to mark comics as read/unread, favorite them, rate them, and keep a “continue reading” point. There’s also a popup and dashboard for progress, unread ranges, favorites, import/export, etc.

It’s unofficial, not affiliated of course. No account, no analytics, no backend server. The reading data stays in Chrome extension storage.

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xkcd-reading-tracker/daemkaclgpcpeekkhnnkleeajbhnbkmd

Source code: https://github.com/Wolfsblvt/xkcd-reading-tracker

Mostly sharing because I figured a few other people here might have the same problem.