There's a whole bunch of new tlds that are not, as of yet, in common use. 'companyname.website' might have been 'acme.com' 20 years ago (and you'd also have been laughing all the way to the bank, eventually).
I guess xkcd's author has bought it? I tried digging a bit with WHOIS, but didn't see any actual names.
It has a DNS A-record pointing at 184.168.221.2, which didn't have much content. Not sure how the forwarding happens, but didn't spend a lot of time on it.
According to Netcraft, IIS (Microsoft) has about 27% marketshare, and I occasionally see an ASPX extension every now and then. No good reason you wouldn't see an IIS header, but I don't know why someone would downvote you for not noticing things.
No, it's just because comments like "IIS sucks" or "my webserver > your webserver", like, "my programming language > your programming language", or, "my text editor > your text editor", are lame.
I'm not an IIS fan, and I didn't downvote you, but only because you were already < 1.
As an XKCD comic, I thought this one was just ok, but what made me post it to HN was when I went to check the availability of companyname.website and found out it redirected to the comic :)
oooh. awesome, thank you! I probably should have checked the actual link. I think my Chrome build has a bug where "show url on hover" gets disabled after some time. I guess I can blame my confusion on that ;)
I did the same thing this morning with the intention of recreating the web page from the first panel of the comic, but someone beat me to it to make this redirection (which have to admit I find less cool than my (and I guess many others) idea).
So, XKCD is not actually all that funny in itself. Trying to "find a joke connecting panels together" is the wrong way to digest XKCD.
The joke in this case is the same as most of the Beret Guy jokes: He has some sort of alien view of the world which has mired him in a 9-year-old's mentality, so that when we see him appear we are seeing an overly literal concept of what the adult world is about. The humor is not "ha-ha" funny so much as a mind-state of vague bemusement.
This may be the reason XKCD has been so successful. By offering a comedic "buildup" which is insufficient to generate a "release" of hysterical laughter and all of the neurotransmittery goodness that comes with that, you are left trawling the archives for more and more humor.
> This may be the reason XKCD has been so successful. By offering a comedic "buildup" which is insufficient to generate a "release" of hysterical laughter and all of the neurotransmittery goodness that comes with that, you are left trawling the archives for more and more humor.
I dunno about that. One of the things I appreciate most about xkcd is its whimsy. Seeing things from a different point of view, or having a bit of absurdity pointed out, is fun.
All of the panels happen during the same business meeting. The meeting is for a company that is successful, but no one is quite sure why. The people working for the company don't seem to know what the company even does.
The domain name reminded me of those t-shirts that say "City Name Sports Team: Defeating Opposing Teams Since The Year We Were Founded". Poking fun at a fairy generic thing to say by saying something very generic.
The first character is called Beret Guy, he is a recurring character. He exists as a commentary on subjectivism. His shtick is that he is absurdly out of touch with reality. He not only speaks in buzz phrases, he gets those buzz phrases wrong. Much to the other characters' chagrin, he is still quite successful, as reality seems to distort around him, making his errors in understanding manifest in reality. So is he the one who is out of touch with reality, or are we, and we just happen to live in a bubble in which we have only come in contact with people who are equally out of touch? And in the end, if you're happy (and Beret Guy is always portrayed as happy), then what does it matter which is the "true" reality?
Actually. he rarely has comics in reserve. He has a notebook of ideas and sketches, and each day a few hours before a comic is set to go up, he picks one and draws and inks it. I've watched the process firsthand, and I was surprised as to how little lead time there is.
When he knows he'll be busy he gets a few in the hopper, but it isn't his standard SOP (at least it didn't used to be).
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadedit: derp. the url points directly at companyname.website and my Chrome build has a bug that prevented me from seeing that.
I guess xkcd's author has bought it? I tried digging a bit with WHOIS, but didn't see any actual names.
It has a DNS A-record pointing at 184.168.221.2, which didn't have much content. Not sure how the forwarding happens, but didn't spend a lot of time on it.
Fun!
companyname.website. 3217 IN A 184.168.221.2
curl -i -i http://companyname.website
Location: http://xkcd.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Yes, it's a redirect. The domain is registered on GoDaddy and uses a domain anonymizer (you can't see who really registered it).
Just checked, and xkcd runs lighttpd.
got a downvote for that, btw. weirdest downvote ever. maybe I upset some hardcore IIS fan or something?
[1]http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/01/15/january-2015-we...
I'm not an IIS fan, and I didn't downvote you, but only because you were already < 1.
[Yes, you can own a .website domain too!](http://radixregistry.com/dot-website/)
(bla, bla, obligatory notice about explaining jokes and dissecting frogs here)
The joke in this case is the same as most of the Beret Guy jokes: He has some sort of alien view of the world which has mired him in a 9-year-old's mentality, so that when we see him appear we are seeing an overly literal concept of what the adult world is about. The humor is not "ha-ha" funny so much as a mind-state of vague bemusement.
This may be the reason XKCD has been so successful. By offering a comedic "buildup" which is insufficient to generate a "release" of hysterical laughter and all of the neurotransmittery goodness that comes with that, you are left trawling the archives for more and more humor.
I dunno about that. One of the things I appreciate most about xkcd is its whimsy. Seeing things from a different point of view, or having a bit of absurdity pointed out, is fun.
When he knows he'll be busy he gets a few in the hopper, but it isn't his standard SOP (at least it didn't used to be).