Today is the anniversary of the beginning of a beloved webcomic’s magnum opus. It's hard to explain "xkcd 1190: Time", as it is a webcomic that 2014 Hugo award for Best Graphic Story, but a number of the comic frames are slow frame by frames that make the comic best viewed as a short film, where it has a 40 minute runtime, and it can all fit in a gif that's also 40 minutes. The comics author Randall Monroe has stated in interviews he wanted to blur the lines of animation and comics and he definitely succeeded.
Time, while maintaining xkcd's signature black and white stick figure style, tells the story of two friends whose day at the beach is interrupted by surprise flooding, and they quickly find themselves on an odyssey to save themselves and their home. This is all made even more fascinating because the comic is set in a low tech 13,000 AD where the Mediterranean Sea Basin is refilling, and people only know this from very scientific hints in the story itself. The end result is a one of a kind epic story people are still picking apart to this day.
Something worth noting: when Tom sent me this entry for proofreading, I immediately spent the next couple hours reading the comic/story/genre-buster. I'm a different person now. The internet's way of forging new methods of storytelling is beautiful.
There's something spectacular that a legitimate masterpiece exists in this world based around stick figures playing in the sand. It's humbling that with all the energy and resources put into creating media, many of them are dwarfed in quality by the story of stick people going on an adventure.