xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This is an interactive and dynamic comic similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series, where players flip to different pages based on the option they chose. The first picture shown on top of this page is the start of this comic, with a possible combination of text options to choose from (see above). The picture is always the same but the order of the four sentences (and the sentences themselves) is chosen randomly (and there can be more than four). The result of all the interactions by the readers led to the generation of crowd-sourced content.

The title 'Lorenz' is referring to Edward Norton Lorenz who, among other subjects, was famous for Chaos theory and the Butterfly effect (mentioned later in the title text of 1519: Venus). This comic is an example of a Choose Your Own Adventure story, as mentioned in the title text.

The title text is also a reference to how the storyline of this comic will be chaotic by nature, since it includes all of the user submitted dialogue and updates over time based on statistics of user clicks. In this manner, it is a reference to the butterfly effect: a phrase coined by Edward Lorenz to describe how a small initial change can lead to wide variations in outcome in a chaotic system.

Every time a story comes to a point where the user can either choose something or contribute when asked to Suggest a line, a link will appear by hovering the mouse over the bottom right corner of the last image. This is named a permalink, as it is a link that will recreate this particular story up to the point, making it permanent. It will not save the options listed below that image (i.e. the order of these will change, new options may appear, either because more than four are already present or new options will be added and some options may even disappear). An option is thus only saved by choosing it and then saving the next permalink — see more below.

Spoiler alert! The best way to enjoy this comic is to try playing it yourself! If you didn't do that already, reading anything below will spoil you from truly enjoying the comic and possibly making some interesting discoveries!

Any particular storyline will typically only have one or two of the many themes possible in the comic, but some very long stories may have several: see the Record section below. Several of the themes refer to previous comics or generally recurring themes in xkcd. (Most obviously is the blowtorch theme which is a reference to the previous comic 1349: Shouldn't Be Hard, where the last comment is I'll find a blowtorch as a response to Cueball's frustration over his problems.)

Because it is not always ending as "well" as with a burnt PC, they might instead end up in a shark infested ocean — see the Ocean theme, which is a reference to 349: Success: a comic that came exactly 1000 comics before the other one referenced in the same computer problem theme. In that comic, the sharks had not appeared yet; but here there may be several (and sharks are also a recurring topic in xkcd).

These issues with computers is generally a reference to the computer problem themes that precedes both the burning of the laptop and the ocean storylines, as Knit Cap tries to install BSD; and when it fails, she takes her friend Hairy with her in the fall, the water, space or into a Pokémon fight (as they are the two main character of this comic). Also Cueball (as a politician vs. another politician with hair) and White Hat have small appearances, but only in a small section of particular storyline. Only few others interact directly with the main characters in the rest of the possible stories.

Other themes that are recurring in xkcd are Politics, Pokémon, Boomerangs and Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs enter the comic in the form of the green talking T-rex from Dinosaur Comics: a clip-art-based webcomic that uses the same artwork with different captions for every strip. This particular Dinosaur Comics has a title text that actually refer to Randall and xkcd, and the comic has previously appeared on xkcd in 145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics.

A way to combine more than one storyline is to let characters wake up from a dream or a nightmare, as can be seen in the Dreams theme (and dreams are also a recurring topic). Here, it can even get recursive, so there can be dreams within dreams. One of the ways to wake from a dream is, of course, by encountering a dinosaur that tries to step on your house (with you inside). Another is in reference to the possible rocket trip that may take the characters into space: see the Space theme (another recurring topic).

There are a few other topics that are covered by Randall himself, but many others will be referenced in the text in the comic. However, since most of the options the users have is in itself created by user input (including naming the characters different names), any reference made by the text is not considered part of Randall's work and thus only sporadically be mentioned below under the themes section and not be included as a category. Here is an example with a permalink where the last comment, in the ocean with a shark, references Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared less than a month before this comic was released [and has yet to be found years later]. But this is a user input, not Randall's.

Some of the idea of this comic was used again in the next year's April Fools' Day comic 1506: xkcloud, where user input also generated a very complex comic, and the concept of permalink was used again. This comic was the first time that Knit Cap has a main part to play.