Anyone know why there’s no image at frame #290 on Aubron Wood’s page? (Number at upper left corner, you can page through frames using left and right arrow keys.) Was there actually no image on xkcd at that point?
I bet “the river” is a code name for Summer Glau.
My crazy theory - the whole thing will eventually turn out to be a visualization of Mark Twain’s* The Mysterious Stranger.*
So when this ends do you think it will just stop on its final frame and never change again or cycle back around to the beginning and run indefinitely? Interestingly, I could see either as a fitting metaphor for time, albeit saying different things (“You can’t go back to the past” vs. “History repeats itself”).
Either way, the last frame has to be the same as the first, the two of them on the beach, doesn’t it?
I suspect that’s entirely the point. No way Randall didn’t anticipate that someone would do this, and that we’d watch it in the most convenient way possible, no matter what the artist’s presentation was. We don’t give a shit what the creator designed. We’re time lords now. We timeshift our television, we time manage our jobs, we reverse time’s effects on our bodies with surgery, we time out our kids 
… a many hundred panel comic strip unfolding over days or weeks? As the great philosopher of our time said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
We think we don’t have time to watch two cartoon figures build sand castles, even when we’re intently interested in what’s going to happen. When was the last time we gave ourselves the time to actually get sand under our own fingernails?
This may be my favorite post on here in months.
Uh, I doubt that.
The river seems to be rising in the comic - it’s been going up ever since it panned out to the larger viewpoint.
He’s making a tiny little copy of the castle on top of the middle platform of the big castle!
I hadn’t noticed that the water is rising. The last day or so has been as interesting as watching someone twiddle their thumbs. I hope something interesting happens soon.
The river discussion has got me thinking… are we looking at the River of Time and the Sands of Time?
Surely the “Wait for it” should then be some bad pun related to “____ of Time”. Or are there any other concepts that could be addressed?
The worst idea I had was that two mallards swim up and then there would be a Time Paradox.
Who said it was going to be a fractal? I think they win!
I said it! I guessed fractal!
Just kidding, I gave up on it along time ago and have been cheating with the sped-up link.
That was me and leahcim.
All you. I wasn’t thinking “fractal”. I was thinking that they’d finish the second sandcastle and the view would shift again to have more space up the beach (pushing the original sandcastle off to the right) to build another one, and that would happen indefinitely.
I now predict velociraptors.
Looks like Megan wasn’t impressed with sandcastleception…
Zooming into the center sandcastle to reveal a fractal-like, infinite regression of this scene looping seems very xkcd.
But I dunno, maybe it’s supposed to be pretty mundane and anti-climactic. A lesson in obessive anticipation and how it self-generates hype too great to ever meet any expectations.
Or, he could be building up to sex on the beach, but just before, a nuke scorches everything…
Hrmm… The joke’s on us, isn’t it?
Probably wrong, but the idea that occurred to me when I read the dialog above in the Time comic was that it will end with the river washing this sandcastle away.
The idea I came up with after reading this thread, on the other hand, is that it will pan out eventually to show that the whole thing’s taking place inside an hourglass.
Hard to say, have to wait and see what the actual end will be (if there is one)
Tiny trebuchet!
There is going to be a tsunami. I feel it in my bones