On Friday, xkcd #1190—Time—came to an end.

It was a huge project, but since it was all concealed within a single comic panel, I thought I’d end with this short post to explain what was going on. If you want to see the story yourself before I spoil anything, you can use one of the many excellent third-party Time explorers, like the Geekwagon viewer, or one of the others listed here.

When the comic first went up, it just showed two people sitting on a beach. Every half hour (and later every hour), a new version of the comic appeared, showing the figures in different positions. Eventually, the pair started building a sand castle.

There was a flurry of attention early on, as people caught on to the gimmick. Readers watched for a while, and then, when nothing seemed to be happening, many wandered away—perhaps confused, or perhaps satisfied that they’d found a nice easter-egg story about castles.

But Time kept going, and hints started appearing that there was more to the story than just sand castles. A few dedicated readers obsessively cataloged every detail, watching every frame for clues and every changing pixel for new information. The xkcd forum thread on Time grew terrifyingly fast, developing a subculture with its own vocabulary, songs, inside jokes, and even a religion or two.

And as Time unfolded, readers gradually figured out that it was a story, set far in the future, about one of the strangest phenomena in our world: The Mediterranean Sea sometimes evaporates, leaving dry land miles below the old sea level … and then fills back up in a single massive flood.

(A special thank you to Phil Plait for his advice on the far-future night sky sequence, and to Dan, Emad, and everyone else for your help on various details of the Time world.)

Time was a bigger project than I planned. All told, I drew 3,099 panels. I animated a starfield, pored over maps and research papers, talked with biologists and botanists, and created a plausible future language for readers to try to decode.

I wrote the whole story before I drew the first frame, and had almost a thousand panels already drawn before I posted the first one. But as the story progressed, the later panels took longer to draw than I expected, and Time began—ironically—eating more and more of my time. Frames that went up every hour were sometimes taking more than an hour to make, and I spent the final months doing practically nothing but drawing.

To the intrepid, clever, sometimes crazy readers who followed it the whole way through, watching every pixel change and catching every detail: Thank you. This was for you. It’s been quite a journey; I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did!

P.S. A lot of people have asked if I can sell some kind of Time print collection (or a series of 3,099 t-shirts, where you run to the bathroom and change into a new one every hour). I’m afraid I don’t have anything like that in the works right now. I just made this because I thought it would be neat, and now that it’s done, my only plan is to spend the next eleven thousand years catching up on sleep. If you liked the project, you’re always welcome to donate via PayPal (xkcd@xkcd.com) or buy something from the xkcd store. Thank you.

An emotional journey of nearly 30 years has come to an end for those in the U.S. intelligence community, many of whom have been pursuing Carmen Sandiego for most of their careers.

During a worldwide hunt for National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, the United States has accidentally stumbled upon the whereabouts of long-sought-after international fugitive Carmen Sandiego.

Sandiego, who has been on the run from authorities for nearly 30 years, is wanted in connection with the theft of a large number of extremely valuable objects, including the Olympic Flame, the Silver Pagoda, and Nairobi International Airport.

Of the many countries who have issued warrants for her arrest, the United States has been the most active in pursuing Sandiego, but until now has been desperately starved for leads. Observers say that the failure of U.S. intelligence officials to locate Sandiego was likely because they did not know enough about geography.

But all of this has changed today after a group of CIA agents discovered Sandiego while sweeping a Moscow hotel room in hopes of finding Edward Snowden. Sandiego has been placed in custody by Russian police, and is awaiting extradition to the United States.

President Barack Obama announced the capture in a live speech that interrupted late night programming across the entire nation.

“Good evening,” said Obama, his demeanour conveying the enormity of the moment as he approached the podium in the West Wing. “Tonight I can report to the American people, and to the world, that the United States has conducted an operation that captured Carmen Sandiego, thief of Gandhi’s glasses and the River Nile.

“Today we are reminded of the strength and resolve of our brave intelligence officials, who work tirelessly and without recognition to achieve results such as the one we have seen today.

“Make no mistake; this triumph for justice will not miraculously heal the wounds of the last thirty years, it will not get back the Liberty Bell or the Willis Tower, nor will it repair the lives of those who have lost at the hands of Sandiego. But it is an important first step in a process of healing that, as Americans, we all must share in.”

The White House is winning praise both from inside the U.S. and around the world this evening, and is fielding nonstop calls from countries curious to know whether their stolen objects have been located as a result of the capture. Obama has promised that Sandiego will be interrogated as soon as possible, and says he is committed to helping as many countries as he can to “get back all their things.”

While the success of the operation has been welcomed, it has also raised questions about why similar progress is not being made in the hunt for stripe-suited eccentric Wally, something the White House says is complicated because “there are just too many people who look like him.”

By Sam Neill

As with most people, I didn’t really hear about science for the first few decades of my life. Oh, every now and then you’d see it mentioned in the newspaper, or perhaps in a book somewhere; “science” had solved some great conundrum, such as how to make butter spreadable. But for the most part, we lived on merrily here at the edge of the world, gazing out over bleak coastlines and not speaking about all the great family crises that apparently gripped our grey, hopeless communities.

But then I became an ac-tor, and this allowed me to go out into the world and learn a great many things, such as how to ride a horse for Ivanhoe, and how to strangle a priest for Omen III: The Final Conflict. This came in tremendously helpful when I travelled to Elizabethan England several hundred years ago, but I shan’t go into more detail at this time as I am still gripped by the wizard’s curse.

These skills were useful, but as my career ascended so too did the value of the new things I learned. When I filmed The Hunt for Red October, I was amazed to discover that beneath the water there was a whole other area known as “under”water. What I didn’t know then was that we had this “under”water thanks to something called science. At the time I asked Sean Connery if he knew anything about science, but I was unable to understand anything he said, as he is Scottish.

It wasn’t until filming Jurassic Park some years later that I began to find out more about science, where fortunately the Scots were kept out. When I auditioned, Steven Spielberg told me he was interested in me for the part of Dr. Alan Grant, a “pay-lee-on-toll-oh-jist”.

“What’s that, Steven?” I asked, while swirling tea around in my goblet.

“Well, Sam,” he answered, while tearing at a large piece of unadorned baguette, “it’s a scientist who studies dinosaurs.”

“Oh,” I responded.

“Yes,” he said.

After we then sat in awkward silence for six-and-a-half hours, occasionally offering each other a smile and looking like we were about to say something, but then stopping for the other, and then neither of us saying anything, I thought I had perhaps find out just what this science thing is. And I think the most marvellous thing about science is, is the fact that nobody really knows what it is. It just does things, which is quite wonderful.

But even though we can’t really understand science, I still like to talk about it and listen to people say things that have science in them. However, it can also be concerning, and as an actor I believe it’s important that I speak out about the issues that science presents us with in this day and age.

I was going to speak out against genetic modification, but I thought that may have been a mite hypocritical after my starring role in the Jurassic Park, and also due to the fact that I was engineered by a team of exiled German biologists in a secret facility in rural Northern Ireland in 1947. I also considered global warming, but then lots of people are already on that bandwagon and I don’t like to share, which is why I’ve been systematically buying up every last haberdashery in Aotearoa.

But then I was asked to host the documentary television series Space, which is about something called “space”. I was fascinated to learn that science had not given us only “under”water, but also “space”, which is everything that is not land, “over”water, or “under”water. And although I have never been there and have no real reason to believe it exists, I’m told that it is very large indeed.

I was alarmed, though, to discover that Earth does not sit flat on some kind of cosmic tabletop, but is rather sitting suspended in “space” – with nothing beneath it. Nothing. It is really only by sheer luck that it has stayed put these past 972 years.

I decided to science my way through this idea a bit. And it was then I thought, “Hang on a moment, Denzel” – I call myself “Denzel” sometimes – “sometimes if you put too many things on something, it collapses, or falls, such as that time you piled all the skulls of the unfaithful atop the Crystal Altar of Grah’froourhk”.

That is when I realised: the Earth is getting heavier. And if it gets too heavy, it may fall out of “space”.

Try sciencing yourself through it: we keep building things. Heavy things. Concrete is very heavy. And with all this concrete we put on Earth, we increase the strain to a level it simply cannot take. Yes, for now our buildings stand tall, and proud, but I do not believe Earth can sustain its enormous erections much longer.

Also, I have noticed that people are much fatter than they used to be. And fat people are heavy.

What then for us, should we fall? Fortunately, I know about science, and I know about awareness, and I know that once a respected celebrity has made you aware of a problem, then it is no longer really a problem at all.

What’s more, you can “science” up solutions to things. For example, in response to this, I say we simply attach helium-filled balloons to everything. I saw the documentary film Up whilst I was travelling on an aeroplane once, and I learnt how balloons can lift things up very effectively. This will have the secondary benefit of making the world seem much jauntier. I like jaunty things.

I realise that some of you may be now wondering if “science” is really all that positive a thing. But it’s important to remember that as scary and mystifying and confusing as it can be, it also gives us wonderful things, like telephones, and the clap. In fact, just last week, that nice Tom Cruise man was telling me all about some new science that I hadn’t heard of before. I’m going to see him next week to talk about it some more. My goodness. I certainly do feel lucky to know about science, and to be able to tell you all about it.