xkcd

In one panel, a stick-figure Tevis greets a constituent by rattling off a stream of personal facts he's found online about her -- including her birthdate, voting pattern, divorce, paycheck, credit card balances and medical history -- to illustrate his interest in protecting individual privacy.

When she slams the door in his face, the cartoon Tevis muses, "Maybe I should rethink my approach."

"I figured I'd raise a few thousand dollars, at most," for his bid to become a state representative, said Tevis, a computer systems manager who works for an industrial manufacturing company.

In fact, before he created the comic strip, Tevis spent weeks asking cash-strapped friends and family for help and walking door-to-door in the district. He raised $1,525.

The comic strip -- at www.seantevis.com/3000 -- was first posted online July 16. Today, when he files his campaign finance forms with the Kansas secretary of state's office, Tevis will report that he has raised $95,162.76 in donations through PayPal, the online service that allows payments and money transfers via the Internet.

My name is Sean Tevis. I'm an Information Architect in Kansas running for State Representative. I've decided to "retire" my current State Representative. I'm going to win. This is my story (XKCD homage style) so far.

I can use the trigger mechanism of this gun to ignite a small explosive charge, propelling a metal slug into the guard's head.

Obligatory link to the hover text's mention of the list of problems solved by MacGyver maintained at Wikipedia.

I'm glad to know that I am in good company (Jason Kottke and Randall Munroe) in my hobby of mispronouncing words. Ever since I met Allie, I've been pronouncing antithesis as "anti-thesis". It took her months before she finally said something and it still drives her nuts.

The man who runs xkcd
has created the LimerickDB.
Though often quite dirty
There are more that are nerdy;
If you check out the best ones, you'll see.

Yale students dressed as ninjas staged a mock attack on Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman last week, reenacting a great installment from xkcd, a fantastic webcomic. Stallman came to Yale to give a talk on DRM at the debating society, and confronted the ninjas "with good humor and grace."

Reader Hanji alerts us to a hack pulled off when Randall Munroe, author of the popular webcomic XKCD, spoke at MIT by invitation of the Lab for Computer Science. MIT hackers dropped hundreds of labelled playpen balls onto the audience from hatches in the ceiling. The labels bore XKCD's logo as well as the recently discovered 16-byte AACS processing key. At another point in Munroe's talk he was stalked by remote-controlled mechanical velociraptors; but fortunately he had been supplied with a squirt gun full of grape juice.

The AACS key, an MIT hack and xkcd all at once? Sweet.