A friend of mine just posted on Facebook about a minor irritation: when she went to visit xkcd, instead of going to the most recent comic, it always took her to a specific old comic. She figured her cache was messed up or something.
Today she learned different. She works on Capitol Hill, and Randall Munroe has configured his server to detect Capitol Hill IP addresses and redirect all of them to the same comic.
I love this dude so much.
That’s actually pretty awesome.
Mr. Munroe does indeed totally fucking rock!
Wow. 
That’s an excellent comic. The fact that all of Capitol Hill is being re-directed to it is wonderful. Now, if only he could re-direct the Koch brothers to it…
I only found out about this anecdotally–it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the Koch Brothers addresses and those from every oil company on earth are similarly redirected. Does anyone have any contacts they can check with?
Is there an upcoming vote on some climate-related issue? Because it seems to me that, in the long term, this tactic is self-defeating: It only works if someone in the relevant domain tries to view XKCD comics, and people only try to view XKCD comics if they’re interested in the strip, and they’ll only be interested if they keep seeing new ones.
Very few probably follow XKCD or know of it’s existence on Capitol Hill.
So… I’m suggesting redirect as a home page.
I really don’t think it’s a huge attempt to influence policy; I think Munroe’s got a prankster side, and this is coming out.
But what could, conceivably, happen would be that some reporter would pick up on this and think it’s funny enough to write a news story about, driving traffic to the comic in question.
jeph Jacques speaks of the strip highly on the qc site …whats it about ?
nerdery, mostly.
Romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
It’s impossible for me to think more highly of XKCD or Randall Munroe, but stuff like this definitely reinforces that opinion.
You guys should really read Randall’s ‘What If’ book. It features engineering and math answers to reader questions. The one on ‘What would happen if a pitcher threw a baseball at the speed of light?’ does not end well for anyone.
Plus, hey, the cover has a Tyrannosaur being lowered - by crane - into a Sarlacc Pit. So it’s got that going for it, anyway.
Has this been documented somewhere? If I Google “XKCD Capitol hill”, this thread right here seems to be the only relevant hit. Has she got friends on Capitol Hill who are all getting the same result from different offices there?
Thing Explainer is also a great book.
But he hasn’t done a new one in FOREVER
This is definitely a fair question. She’s a casual friend, AFAICT brilliant, and what she wrote was this:
I’d love to get some corroboration, but I don’t know anyone else who works on the Hill.
This speaks well of you. 
Capitol Hill is about 90% young staffers just out of college on their way to other jobs. I’m sure they are familiar with XKCD just as they are with rap.