Instructions
Happy little turtles
Happy little turtles
This is the 12th April fools' comic released by Randall. The previous April fools' comic was 2445: Checkbox, which was released on Thursday, April 1st, 2021. The next became 2765: Escape Speed released on Friday April 19th, 2023 (a regular release day, but 18 days late).
The comic displays just a small radio button (or option button). Usually, there would be more than one to give the user options. Once it has been selected it cannot be deselected. Once pressed the button turns blue and this starts the real part of this April fool's comic.
The comic consists of an audio file. The speech is a mix of facts about turtles and coding instructions in LOGO. When executed, the instructions draw an xkcd comic. The audio file is 9 hours and 7 minutes long.
- See the resulting comic below.
- And see how it is animated here.
- This has been compiled by theinternetftw on Github.
- The transcript of the quotes (the non-code) can be found here 2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript.
- Images of the dynamic changes and other pictures relating to this comic can be found here 2601: Instructions/Images.
Once the voice begins to describe the instructions (hence the title) it is possible to mute the audio by pressing a muted button at the bottom right of the screen. This fades into view when the radio button is pushed. Pressing it will change the button to a non muted loudspeaker. These were the same buttons that were in the previous April fool's comic 2445: Checkbox. That was the first xkcd comic with audio, and thus these were two April fools' comics with audio in a row, and these are the only comics with audio. In the Checkbox comic, the mute buttons meaning are reversed, so the sound is on when the loudspeaker is shown and muted when the mute button is shown. It could be another layer to the April fool's joke or just an error by Randall.
The image originally displayed on this page was of a small turtle crawling in the center where the radio button is in the real comic. That was the image that would be downloaded by web crawlers like explain xkcd's bot, as it is what was placed here on xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/instructions_2x.png. This is of course not the real comic, which cannot be downloaded in that manner.
The "turtle" is a key concept in Logo, a programming language especially designed to teach programming to children in an easy way. The turtle in the logo is the cursor. Programming commands move the turtle, drawing a line as it goes. Of course, listening to hours of instructions, including the speech-synthesized reading of source code, is not an easy way to code or draw a picture.[citation needed]
In addition, at the end of the audio the voice says:
"I even talk to turtles at times, but you need to understand LOGO to appreciate the great, great things that have been created. We spend so much of our life typing, looking, but never ever seeing."
The title text alludes to Bob Ross's catchphrase "happy little trees" in The Joy of Painting, a PBS TV show in which Ross leads the viewer through the painting of a nature scene. The audio file itself is also presented in the style of The Joy of Painting; it begins with greeting the viewer and introducing the color palette to be used (just one color, in this case, as Logo and all computer monitors of the time were monochrome). The speaker then reads out some helper functions to be used in programming the scene, which is more analogous to Ross's palette of paints (titanium white, carmine red, etc.) along with words of encouragement as each is completed. The functions are DIST, to calculate the Euclidean distance between two points, LERP, to perform linear interpolation, MIX to average two numbers (with LERP), and CUBIC to draw cubic Hermite splines. From there, the speaker alternates between sketching parts of the scene and offering more words of encouragement, mixed in with turtle facts.
Transcribing the audio into text was organized as a project on github.
This is not the first time that Randall made an interactive comic where turtles played a big part, see 1416: Pixels. In this, he jokes with the idea of turtles all the way down, which is also mentioned in the audio file. He also made a comic simply called 889: Turtles.
Unique header text
This comic has a unique header text, see the details here. The header is:
- "Today's comic was created with Patrick, Amber, @chromakode, Michael, Kat, Conor, @zigdon, and Benjamin Staffin."
The header had not changed since the promotion of the new what if? 2 book.
