I don’t understand what the sea is doing.
I keep checking in at the xkcd forum thread every now and then and read the last page or so—this is actually pretty fascinating, you can basically see a subsubsub-culture of Time readers develop, with idiosyncratic vocabulary, rituals, and even belief systems*. There even seem to be occasional schisms, such as subsubsubsub-factions believing the ‘sea’ to be either ice, coffee, or semen. Maybe the whole thing is just an experiment in the complex systems dynamics of social interaction?
*All hail the magnificient Lord Randall
The Author of the One True Comic
The Illustrator of Sandcastles
The Keeper of the Newpix
The Creator of Time
We have seen the Castles
We reject the Outside
We do not Sleep
We watch Time
We wait for It
He’s definitely making a mini-version of the larger scene. I created this animated gif to make sure.
Maybe he’s going infinite regression/fractal after all?
Nice work. Post that to the xkcd thread, and people will probably worship you as a minor deity!
This is how I’m following it to. I check the comic to see the latest frame, then the forum and read the last page.
Then I pop over to this page to catch up on the other frames.
Only a minor deity? Well, fuck them!
Interesting. In this frame he does an extreme close up of her holding a miniature trebuchet. Then she adds it to the small scale sandcastle, and he remarks, “I don’t think we can build it much taller than this. It’s been fun though.”
Then “I don’t understand what the sea is doing.”
Yep, it’s about to get interesting…
Nvmd, I see you people ninja’d me. Damn you Internet ninjas!!!
And the water level is, in fact, slowly rising. It’ll take a long time to engulf the castles at the current rate, though.
Any idea what the boards are for? I’m guessing a makeshift ladder…?
I’m thinking he’s going to zoom out to an exponential degree and reveal their sandcastle’s are atop a mega-version, like the tiny version they built. And so on, and so on.
Maybe the boards will be for giant flagpoles on the meta-scape (assuming that’s where it’s headed)?
I don’t think that’s likely. He’s never been known for doing things so blatantly supernatural. Tiny miniaturized people seem unlikely - especially since even tinier miniaturized people weren’t added to the smaller sandcastle.
But, who will operate the tiny, little trebuchets?
IIRC, he’s already done one comic where someone builds a scale model of their own town, including the basement where the scale model was, which contains a scale-squared model, and so on. And he pointed out there that there was a hard limit to how many layers of recursion were possible, since relatively quickly you end up being limited by the fact that things are made of atoms. So I don’t think it’s going to go into a fractal zoom-loop.
EDIT: Found it. Not quite how I’d remembered it (the model never actually gets built), but close enough.
Well yeh, but physics is limited by reality, but mathematics is not! Who do you think actually builds the Julia sets? Tiny little people who live on the prime beachfront real estate in Cantor space, that’s who. They simply start at 0 and work their way to ∞.
Of course, the trebuches keep pushing the completion date out. At this rate, they’ll never finish.
(I remember that particular strip. Good one. He’s also done a few others on the topic of scale.)
The water rising could simply be the tide coming in, or it’s something delightfully unexpected. Especially since they made those cryptic remarks about the river and the “sea”.
Hoping for delightfully unexpected.
Does anyone know if Randall drew all the frames before the run, or is doing so many frames, piecemeal over the intervening time?
So, somebody from the xkcd forums has actually animated the ‘zoom-in’ fractal and put it on the wiki…
Oh yeh… I posted that gif of the scaled comparison I made over there, and then we we’re nerding out making more pointless analysis (I’m “cmyk” over there too).
I then created an animated gif of how I think it’s going to end, then Deadcode created that awesome recursive gif you mention.
So, I then took that, and made it a weee bit more psychedelic.
The fun never ends!
I’ll admit that while I’ve been lurking in that thread for the whole..err..time, I think I only noticed one name. And that’s just because of all the talk about her hats. 
Guess I should pay more attention.
Page 4 access.