Ryan North is of course the creator of Dinosaur Comics, which has itself been referenced in xkcd. For those wondering, the Pivers project leads to unforeseen catastrophe, just as Randall would have wanted.

TLDR: ExplainXKCD is back at explainxkcd.com, and server/domain access has been transferred to new management. You can log in with your old account credentials now, unless you have already transferred your account on explainingxkcd.com.

What happened?

ExplainXKCD has been experiencing increasing instability for the past few years, with a major exacerbation in severity starting in early July. This metastasized into the site being entirely uneditable starting July 6th, after running out of disk space. Jeff, who had run the site since 2012, no longer had the time to continue maintaining it.

In response to the instability, the community created multiple read-only mirrors of the site on new infrastructure, such as u/Eunakria's mirror and explainingxkcd.com. After the original site became completely uneditable, ExplainingXKCD forked the site and editing continued there while the original site was stuck in read-only.

Rather than letting the original site die, Jeff transferred the user data, server access, and domain over to the ExplainingXKCD maintainers. Thank you, Jeff, for the many, many years you've spent managing the wiki.

Over the past few days, we merged everything back into one wiki, including user accounts and edits. We've done our best to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible.

What does this mean?

• The site is still at explainxkcd.com, and explainingxkcd.com now redirects to it.
• If you have an account at explainxkcd.com, you can still log into it.
• If you *transferred* your account at explainingxkcd.com, use your new credentials, not your old ones. We're contacting the ~10 people who did this. If you made a request but it wasn't fulfilled, just use your explainxkcd.com credentials.
• Editing is open now, and everything is back where it was.

Who's running it now?

Currently, Theusaf, 42.book.addict, and I are admins on the site. If older admins want to return to admining, just reach out! If you spot anything weird from the migration, tell us!

I'm running the server right now and currently paying for server costs out of pocket. If you'd like to help support us, please donate at https://ko-fi.com/explainxkcd

Yeah, the recent post about the Blue Eyes puzzle made me think of this. Randall called it the "Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World", but I've heard that same name used for a variation of Knights and Knaves.

You're speaking to three gods - let's call them A, B, and C - whose actual identities are True, False, and Random. Your goal is to figure out which one is which.

If you ask a yes-no question, True always tells the truth, False always lies, and Random picks a random answer each time. They all understand English, but will only ever answer questions in their own language. You know the words for "yes" and "no" are collectively "ja" and "da", but not which is which. And you are allowed to ask 3 yes-no questions to figure out their identities, each of which must be posed to a single god.

What do you ask?

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