And all that aside, even if it’s not useful for anything and the idea does turn out to be bad, it can just be fun.ĭid you have a favorite how-to method that you discovered or investigated for the book?

So even if it doesn’t work for the thing I’m actually trying to use it for, I might learn to use a tool or learn about some cool stuff that will help me with an idea later on. Sometimes it’s really entertaining just to imagine trying to carry out an idea.Ī lot of the time I’ll learn something really cool in the process of figuring out whether an idea would work or not. But what’s really fun is that sometimes the ones that are pretty clearly bad ideas, it’s still a little bit interesting trying to figure out why exactly they’re bad. It’s just that when I’m trying to figure out how to do something, I just think of a bunch of different ways and see which ones seem like they might be good ideas. It’s not like I try to think of terrible ways to do things. Randall Munroe: Well, I’m always thinking of really terrible ways to do things. Polygon: Where did the idea for How To come from? It has some similarities with your previous books, but it also has its own very specific hook. Polygon sat down with Munroe to talk about stick figures, science, and the internet - and wound up touching on ’90s kids, astronaut Chris Hadfield, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What If? gave realistic answers to absurd questions, like “what would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw?” His latest, How To, is the exact opposite: absurdly bad advice for mundane problems, like how many pounds of rocket thrust it would take to literally move your house, instead of, you know, moving your belongings to another house. Thing Explainer offered explanations of complicated scientific ideas using only the 1,000 most frequently used words in the English language. Munroe’s books are reflective of the same inventiveness. It’s inspired the chessboard roller coaster picture and a method for creating easy-to-remember secure passwords, and Munroe won a Hugo award for a comic in the form of 3,099 individual images uploaded sequentially over the course of four months. XKCD has formed, if not the backbone, then at least some of the ribs of internet culture. But they’ll certainly recognize the hundreds upon hundreds of stick figures he’s drawn over the 14 years he’s been producing the often funny, sometimes heartfelt, frequently experimental webcomic xkcd. Say the name Randall Munroe to your average internet literate, and they might not recognize it.

Randall munroe comics