White has an extra bishop

Wut?

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Ha, he changed the picture. There was a white bishop at E4. See: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/6/65/puzzle.png

I thought the extra bishop was part of the joke...

Yeah, I figured that, after four regular moves, white was fed up with black constantly putting new pieces on the board and started doing it too, or something like that.

But folks, since when exactly is xkcd mainstream? Guess that’s the worst insult one could make towards them

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

70 million page views in a month?

HackerNews is the 4615th most visited site in the world (according to Alexa rankings) and I definitely wouldn't say it is mainstream. Far, far from mainstream.

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Yes, indeed. But what is mainstream?

Dictionary: the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are shared by most people and regarded as normal or conventional.

In this context, I take mainstream to be the presentation of go in cultural artifacts that are viewed by most people, or at least, regarded as a normal cultural artifact by most people. (There's a related question, namely what does "most" mean). Thus we can take books as mainstream. Films too, I would say. I would also regard video games (or at least console-based video games) as mainstream. Comics too, albeit it as a subset of books.

But Web-comics? While I think they are now viewed more than regular comics, are they viewed by the majority of the population as a conventional cultural artifact? I'm inclined to say yes, but I'm curious to see what other people think?

I don't think the argument that XKCD is a particularly nerdy comic excludes it from being mainstream (assuming you regard web-comics as mainstream), unless you are also willing to regard certain comics (or books or movies) that appeal to small sub-groups as non-mainstream.

Lets put this in context: with 70 million views a month, more people read that comic than if Go was opening news on a mainstream US news channel.

I have another theory as to why web-comics may not be regarded as "mainstream" - because the barrier to entry is so low. With printed comics, you generally need to be picked up by a publisher, so there's a considerable hurdle, which implies some kind of quality control.

This same snobbishness could be applied to blogs and youtube videos. Implying that mere popularity is not sufficient to be regarded as mainstream.

I don't really buy this as a theory, but perhaps many do.

Just because it's picked up by a publisher doesn't mean it's any good. Look at the Family Circus.

No, indeed not. I'm just trying to ascertain whether self-published media can be classified as mainstream, and if not, why not.

For the purposes of this discussion, I think that mainstream could be defined as 'accessible to and accessed by a group of people who don't have anything to do with go playing or the go community'.

Today's XKCD is about go!

http://xkcd.com/1287/

_________________
Poka King of the south east.

ORLY?

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Mr. Munroe seems better at chess than Go?

To be fair, his shape isn't that bad, and the white positions don't exist to lend context.

_________________
Tactics yes, Tact no...

I don't know, I mean That certianly looks like a shoulder hit on a strong position...