I almost feel bad for the review that's about to happen (well, about to happen for me, it's already happened for you and you're about to read it hopefully), it had to be hard to program in a new comic format that could fail on IE, Chrome, and Firefox.
Oohhhhh, brb, I have to take a shower after that [sic] BURNNNN!~!
Okay, back. I didn't actually cool off much, it's been really hot out lately and my house has solar-heated water. Ugh. I hate being well-off.
If you're interested in seeing all the hidden panels, I recommend just going to the archive at explainxkcd, so you don't have to do deal with the interface that is alternately laggy and non-existant.
The original panel I used as a header is an allusion to the "turtles all the way down" idea, which I remember finding pretty interesting the first time I heard about it, at the end of
[SPOILER ALERT]
Tasty Planet 2, avaliable for Mac and PC at bigfishgames.com.
[END OF SPOILERS]
Tea loving readers may also remember it being mentioned on QI Series A, Episode 2, avaliable on YouTube here (about twenty-three minutes in) until it gets taken down by copyright again.The first thing that most people who've sacrificed enough cows to their computers to make this comic work properly will see is an incredibly disappointing "BOOK LANCH". Yes, we know your book's launched, Randy, you've had a banner ad up under the XKCD logo for the past few weeks and now it's been updated with this:
There is, irritatingly, a fairly well done joke as one panel about the book launch, where a person puts the book on a rocket and launches it into the atmosphere; he then slowly realizes that it was the only copy. However, the gimmicky format and unneeded detail ruins the pacing, even separating a line of dialogue into a separate set of scroll-ins, and depending on where you scroll in, you may not see it at all.
Next on the explainxkcd list of minigags is "Needs More Struts", a throwaway reference to Kerbal Space Program. It makes sense only to people in that gaming group, and as has been established recently, gamers are just the worst people, so we can safely ignore this joke.
Then we have another reference, this time to a thing by Douglas Hofstater where he wrote a word out of smaller words, made out of smaller words, made out of tiny renditions of the largest word. Again, no new commentary is given and no joke is added. It's just saying "Remember that thing? Yeah, haha. That thing was great.".
Fourth is a joke about the Time-Turners from Harry Potter. The joke is supposed to be "J.K.Rowling regrets bringing the time-travel element into the series. She probably wished she had a time-turner once she realized the mistake she'd made.". But the way it's phrased makes it come off more like "Time-turners were a terrible idea, J.K.Rowling should use one to stop herself from inventing them.", which is a much more pompus way of making a decent single panel joke.
Number five: "How do we know anyone really wants to live in Stockholm?" and "Well what would you expect to come out of a fire hydrant?". The former has been done before, although not to death. The same can't be said of the latter.
There's also a few assorted doodles, none of which are worth looking at.
And that's it. A big, laggy, complicated, hard to navigate, new format that I'm sure took a lot of effort to make, but without anything tying any of the jokes together in any way, it just feels like a larger version of the 'made in five minutes for a contest' series.
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