They’ve outdone themselves this time- the biggest page I remember ever seeing. Is it all one image or is it multiple images dynamically linked? I’m still not sure I’ve found it all.
The xkcd forum post here explains how it’s done.
I just spent half an hour exploring it, and thought I had found everything…
…but apparently I missed Waldo… 
Merged threads. And… woah.
Holy Cromm! The work that this entailed is astounding.
Truly amazing.
I was exploring underground and then got really confused because I got thin lines… I finally realized there were missing images for me. So sad!
Awesome!
Damn. Now I read the linked thread and found out there’s a Waldo in that image. I don’t have time for this! And yet I must!
Dang it…I don’t really have time for this today…
Here’s a google map-like image of it:
Dang it…I don’t really have time for this this week…my mouse is wired, and it still ran out of power twice already.
This is a zoom out that you can zoom in one level (not enough for details but you can get an idea of where you are and where you can go.
http://forums.xkcd.com/download/file.php?id=33894&mode=view
The lemonade stand is my favorite, but the falling whale, waldo, the lemmings level, the Saturn V, the X-wings, the requests to Twitter follow people, the Marco-searcher, etc. are my next favorite.
While I don’t begrudge intrepid readers using their own skills to map out the entire thing, it sort of misses the point of the comic to ask if you can zoom out. The comic is the world and the readers’ efforts are the maps.
The world is big. I mean, it’s fricking massive. That entire landscape covers about two miles (or 10km by one reader’s estimate). Whichever measurement is more accurate, that is an absolutely insignificant slice of the entire world. Even clicking and dragging as quickly as you can, it’ll take a huge amount of time to look at it all, and depending on how much time you really have to spare, you may not even be able to see everything. It’s the same in real life; the world is simply too huge for any one person to see it all.
I had a similar experience while on my most recent plane trip. I looked out the window and saw mountains and canyons that looked completely untouched by humans, and I began to wonder how many thousands if not millions of square miles there were on this planet that have never had a human walk on it. At best we briefly glimpse and map those miles from a plane window or satellite, but there is just so. Much. World. And there are billions of people doing things in it you will never know about, can never know about because there’s just so much of it. It’s easy to forget that in the Internet age when communication and travel are so trivial.
That question would make a good thread!
Or send it to What if?.
Eh - the scroll feature itself is so terrible, that having a zoomable version of it is a relief.
I like the Oregon Trail computer game (from the ancient floppy disk era) reference where the stick lady on the wagon asks the stick man: “You brought no food and how many boxes of bullets?”
I haven’t spent much time yet looking at this enormous XKCD scrolling stick world. How much time does it take to browse the whole thing?
I spent half an hour looking around and I’m sure there is still a lot more than I haven’t seen; I only found one edge (the right side); I started going to the left then eventually found underground passages and followed them to the right until they reached the surface again, then continued right from there (it ends with the initial character wondering where he will go next).
FWIW, the overall image dimensions, according to the page source, are 165,888 by 79,872 pixels (13.2 billion pixels), which appears to be made up of 2,048 pixel square images (here is the one for the rightmost part). That’s about 200 by 100 feet, depending on your monitor size/resolution (pixels per inch). No wonder the mice are wearing out; I’d look more if they had keyboard scrolling.
Am I the only one who is less than impressed by this? I love xkcd, and this is OK, but I just don’t get why people are so gaga over it. It’s a big picture. Whatever.
That’s still missing the point. The scroll itself is limited compared to other easier methods of viewing a large picture such as zoom in the same way that walking is limited compared to other easier methods of travel such as flight. Flight is quite literally the same as a zoom function; you go very high up, travel a smaller distance (or at least the same distance in a shorter amount of time), then go back down to ground detail.
In doing that, however, you can lose perspective on how big the entire thing really is. I can get on a plane and fly from Phoenix to Seattle in a few hours and think nothing of it, but that same journey on the ground encompasses an absolutely staggering amount of stuff. It’s not something we think about very much any more. We do talk about it occasionally when we talk about globalization and the world getting smaller, but that’s only an abstraction due to our ability to instantly communicate and to travel anywhere in the world within a day or two. I don’t think most of us first worlders have a real appreciation for the sheer scale of things these days.
“Seeing the world” is a monumental task.
Is the tree with the tire swing on it (on the mountain to the right of the starting point) the Giving Tree?