2131: Emojidome

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Emojidome

Title text: 🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼

• To experience the interactivity, visit the original comic.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by 😇. Needs more elaboration on font influencing emoji.. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This is the ninth April fools' comic released by Randall. The previous fools comic was 1975: Right Click from Sunday April 1, 2018.

In the interactive comic, which began at noon ET (16:00 UTC) on April 1, 2019, users are shown two emoji, and vote for their favorite. The voting period for each matchup lasted roughly 40 seconds during the first round, and increased to over 60 seconds for the second round. The competing candidates are periodically overlaid with heart emojis that float up from the vote button oscillating in a sinusoidal pattern before disappearing above the candidate, and may represent real-time votes for each emoji. Below, the results of past bouts are shown with the "loser" displayed in greyscale. Supposedly, the emoji will be eliminated one-by-one until there are a final two emoji facing off, with the one most voted-for being crowned the best emoji. This is likely a parody of March Madness.

The second round of eliminations started at around 14:40 ET (18:40 UTC). The time allotted for voting per match approximately doubled in round 2, although when there is more than 1 minute remaining, seconds are not displayed. Round 3 started at about 21:20 UTC.

Note that the schedule might show different emoji pictures than the main voting screen, presumably because of fonts. The image is pre-rendered.

The competing candidates are chosen in order of unicode value at first, resulting in similar emojis being compared. Examples include:

😜 squaring off against 😛 - two emoji playfully sticking their tongues out

🤩 squaring off against 😍 - two smiling emojis with symbols for eyes

😂 squaring off with 🤣 - two emojis that are crying in laughter/joy.

The title text consists of the wrestlers emoji (🤼) eight times over. If it appears to be nonsense, then your browser may not be parsing the title text correctly.

A robot face announcer-emoji (🤖) and a link to the full bracket was added at 38 minutes in. https://www.xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket.png shows 512 emojis in a single-elimination tournament.

Real live data with results (clicks) can be seen as JSON-websocket at https://emojidome.xkcd.com/2131/socket

A live (user-created) vote tally can be found at https://emojidome.playcode.io/ . Thanks Andy!

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

I've checked the network tab and console - nothing really seems to happen when you vote, which may be something we want to put on the explanation tomorrow - Myxoh

I suspect the real april fools joke is going to come on Wednesday when xkdc posts an app showing us our psychological profiles that they are now selling to marketing companies after data-mining our emotional preferences to marketing firms - Nosajimiki

@Nosajimiki: psychological profiles of xkcd fans. That might be some interesting marketing. - 5Cincinatus

@Myxoh: I came here to see if anyone else had noticed this! But, I do also see a websocket connection to emojidome.xkcd.com, I bet it's counting votes that way.

There is a websocket connection. A message is sent every time you vote. It looks like there are also status update messages every second (saying which emoji currently has exactly how many votes, i suspect this changes the amount of hearts that show up), and "bracket start" messages every so often. The bracket start message seems to contain hundreds of upcoming emoji pairs. Edit: a bracket start is sent at the start of every match (so every ~30 seconds). It also contains logs of which messages to show for previous matches, and which emoji are currently battling.172.69.138.10 16:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

There seems to be nothing stopping me from clicking multiple times. Do you think it actually counts it all those times? Can I click-spam to say "this is much better"? Fabian42 (talk) 16:48, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Randall just confirmed that you can vote multiple times, although if you click too fasr you get rate limited. (*warning: generic ip address assigned to phone data.*) 172.69.70.47 22:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Where did he confirm that? 162.158.93.105 10:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Well this is fun. Look like there are 512 symbols, meaning 256 first-round contests. The first round would take (at 38 seconds / round) ~2.7 hours. The remaining rounds, from an estimate of geometric progression, would just under double this, meaning this comic will run for ~ 5 hours until we have our winner... ~alexandicity 172.69.226.177 16:51, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Did he just add a scroll bar to the previous matches? I didn't notice it earlier 162.158.255.148 18:17, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Nope, you were able to scroll before, too. At least about 2 hours ago. Fabian42 (talk) 18:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

While some of the recaps of past battles are generic (taco vs sandwich: "One for the history books"), many seem to be specifically written for the battle (light bulb vs candle: "Some would argue that this one was settled in the 1800s"). I wonder if/how much this will continue into round 2.

Round two has just begun, and the timeout has been bumped to 60 seconds. --Anarcat (talk) 18:41, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

If that trend continues, the full competition will take pretty close to 24 hours. Fabian42 (talk) 18:45, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It looks like it's 1:14/round, which is double what the time was in round one. Will round three be 2:28? 1:51?

It's just over 1:15/round from the history JSON (plus some hundredths of a second, but it appears 1:15 is the intent)

Hadn't looked there. Round one concluded at 18:39:20-ish, 9560 seconds from 16:00:00. At 256 battles, that's 37.34 seconds/battle. However, it looks like the first battle ended at 15:59:57, which would add about 40 seconds, 9600 seconds/256=37.5 seconds exactly. Doubling for round 2 gives 75 seconds.

2 minutes 30 seconds per battle now. Looks like each round will be 2 hours 40 minutes long.

Well it is after 5:00 PST and round 4 just started - and this thing is at exactly 5 minutes a round - which means another 160 minutes for the round. Will see in 2 hours and 40 minutes if the times go up to minutes. --172.69.33.65 00:25, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

And while the match-ups winners are typically colored, and underlined, the losers are endgame grey.

Has anyone determined if multiple-voting is actually counted? For me at least the vote button fades back to gray after I click it, which implies you can/should click it again, but that may not actually be processed. We might add a clarification about that to the explanation. - jerodast (talk) 19:01, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

A reddit user on the r/xkcd thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/b84at1/xkcd_2131_emojidome_script_src2131comicjs/) claims to have attempted "vote stuffing via the console" with no noticeable change in vote totals. So it looks like it may be sending it client-side, but only counting the vote once server-side --l

Just few minutes ago there was message in "fun facts" that you can click multiple times, although it's not counted if you click too many times (or something like that). I guess that vote stuffing was too much. -- Hkmaly (talk) 22:34, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It would appear that we are supposed to believe the commentary is live, and unscripted: " {"This one is a true test of the audience today.", "Just to stress this again. Live commentary, folks. Completely unscripted and coming in hot.} "--162.158.79.173 19:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It's clearly live because the result of a previous round is affecting the next round's commentary - and the combinatorial explosion would prohibit that from being remotely plausible. We're watching live comedy here! SteveBaker (talk) 19:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

On the dog vs. wolf, he said "Again, we are getting a lot of questions on this today. This is live commentary, folks." Proof I guess. HI RANDALL! 172.68.189.241 19:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Is there really anything we can put for the transcript? 172.68.189.241 19:25, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

We can go into the socket data and pull out the commentary for each matchup. -- Bobson (talk) 04:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Any ideas on how the commentary is done? It seems to sort of match the emojis. Svízel přítula (talk) 19:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It seems that Randall is commentating this live, as he periodically says it's live in the robot commentator text. See above. 172.68.189.241 19:36, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps not "live" as each round 2 matchup was known 160 minutes before it was voted on. He could comment on the battle itself, and/or provide a comment if one or the other combatant won. I think he's a couple hours ahead of us.

I dunno. Whenever a new battle starts, there is a default message, that is soon replaced by a more pertinent message. That seems to suggest that he's doing it on the fly. 9yz (talk) 20:03, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

If that's live, Randall, and if you see this, give us a shout-out as proof. -Brent

Just because it says it's live, doesn't mean that it really is. It's also possible that the actual clicks are being ignored and the reported numbers are all pre-generated. Much less likely than that it's actually counting and Randall is inserting commentary live (with default messages when he doesn't), but possible. -- Bobson (talk) 12:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

He updated the title text to thank volunteers for commentating, so I guess we know that the commentary was live, just not necessarily all Randall. Moosenonny10 (talk) 14:34, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

This is a quick piece of python to see the json results (and commentary): import json, urllib.request d = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen("https://emojidome.xkcd.com/2131/socket ").read().decode('utf-8')) for g in d['bracket']['played'][0]: c1, c2 = g['game'] print(f"{c1['score']} {c1['competitor']}-{c2['competitor']} {c2['score']}") Tammo80 (talk) 19:42, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

or if you want to see the vote count live in browser: https://emojidome.playcode.io/ -Andy 22:01, April 2019

Awesome, thank you 9yz (talk) 20:23, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

There must be some kind of manipulation going on with the votes. There is NO WAY the poop emoji would lose to the skull emoji in round two. It was my guess for the winner >:( 162.158.106.138 20:50, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

And the 100 emoji just lost to the shiny heart. :(

Well, there's the comment "How do you know for sure that your votes are doing anything?". For my side because every single one I voted for lost so far. Well, I'm not a lucky charm, apparently... 141.101.104.11 10:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The second round bracket was released, but is hidden behind the bottom nav buttons: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_256.png --Thefallen138 (talk) 20:56, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

And now the third round has begun. Strangely, the bracket is not visible yet: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_128.png. The delay has been bump to something above two minutes as well. --Anarcat (talk) 21:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It's here https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png 162.158.107.79 21:41, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It seems to be he overwrote round_3.png with round_4.png (at least its the same picture)

Both the Emojidome and counter were brought together in iframes https://ducakedhare.co.uk/emojidome.html 141.101.99.17 23:39, 1 April 2019 (UTC)taikedz

Anyone have an IRC room for Emojidome discussion? 162.158.146.10

So disappointed he left out the egg plant... :D --Kynde (talk) 12:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Despite Spaaaaaaaaace winning the battle 🌌 (36285) vs 🚝 (17405), the current bracket chart https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png shows 🚝 as having won. 108.162.242.13 13:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What if the April Fools joke of the whole bracket is that the "Vote" buttons were actually switched and all the losers are actually the winners??? 172.68.59.84 15:24, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

In case the websocket ever goes down, here are the data: https://pastebin.com/YYgPS1FC Svízel přítula (talk) 19:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Is that a Kingdom Hearts reference I see? - Bench

"Emoji" or "emojis" as the plural?

Due to the nature of the Japanese language, "emoji" is technically both the plural and the singular - however, the improper form "emojis" is used more as a plural frequently nowadays among English speakers. Which form should this explanation use? --Youforgotthisthing (talk) 22:27, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

For clarity, I think we should use emoji as the singular and emojis as the plural. I'm going to go fix this. 9yz (talk) 19:34, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The "friends in Australia" comment was made during the last round's wink vs upside down smile battle. This is probably a pun on how Australia is on the other side of the world from America; I don't think Randall was seriously saying he witnessed an influx of Australians inbound. 108.162.219.82 00:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Draws

What would happen if any of the fights resulted in a draw? (same number of votes for both)

Given the # of matchups, it's not actually that unlikely.

We should try to test this. Gotta keep Randall on his feet!

Pretty sure one early on resulted in a tie.

The very first round was 0-0. I guess no one refreshed at exactly the right minute to see it. --Bobson (talk) 04:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Actually, Birthday Cake vs Cupcake was a tie at 3658:3658. Birthday Cake advanced. I wonder why? (from the socket: [{"score":3658,"competitor":"🎂"},{"score":3658,"competitor":"🧁"}]) 162.158.106.138 04:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Is Birthday Cake vs. Cupcake the draw referenced at the end of the "How it worked" section? Can we please have names added to all the emoji in the explanation text; I have never found a way to blow up emoji to a visible size, so frequently find I can't see them clearly enough to identify them, and in that bit at the end of "How it worked", the first one isn't rendering on my computer anyway. I'm guessing that the other is the birthday cake; really, I have come to hate emoji because they are so tiny. At least Randall made them nice and big on the voting screens. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I had assumed that the "score" was a not simple count of vote clicks - I'd imagine (especially with all the autoclicking etc) that the raw votes would be gigantic numbers. So it could be that these were not draws when calculated to full precision - just that the API was only sending out a rounded number?

Emoji Fonts

Having an emoji font is required to see emoji displayed on sites such as http://srv-01.valo.media/ . If anybody else is looking for a way to display these, there's a good free emoji font available here: https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font It includes a script to replace the default Windows emoji fonts to get them to display properly on windows. Unfortunately it's only black-and-white in chrome. If anybody knows any better options, please let me know!

For Ubuntu Linux users: sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji -- then restart Chrome/Firefox.

SteveBaker (talk) 11:29, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm on Android here & many of the emoji do not show up. Notably, this includes the hedgehog, which... is not in the emoji set of any of my Android devices. Could somebody please add the emoji names next to their pictograms, where they appear the explanation? ProphetZarquon (talk) 04:16, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Tested on an iPad, a Mac and a PC, a lot of emoji are still appearing as black rectangles. Herobrine (talk) 07:09, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Commentary Transcript

I've written a script that pulls the commentary history and transforms it into a wiki table. It's up to date as of right now, and I'll run it again in the morning and one last time after the final round. If you have formatting suggestions, just put them here and I'll incorporate it when I regenerate the table. -- Bobson (talk) 04:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Wonderful, thank you! Could you perhaps make the winner bold (or underlined like in the comic)? -Andy

Successful Ballot-stuffing?

As I type this, I'm watching owl blast past 180000 votes in the owl-octopus bout. That means that in about 10 minutes, owl has earned more votes than all the votes earned in the entirety of any other individual bout. I could be totally off-base, but that seems vaguely suspicious to me. 162.158.214.82 05:28, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I concur: that is highly suspicious. Fortunately, nothing of importance is at stake here, even if you were really pulling for the octopus. At this moment, we're ±10 minutes into bee vs pineapple and nothing comparable has happened. It may be an isolated incident. 162.158.106.144 05:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I've seen enough hentai to...what? The *owl* has won? O RLY? I demand a recount! 141.101.105.6 08:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

YOLO. You Obviously Like Owls. 141.101.104.11 10:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

For the violin vs the curling stone ('classical vs house'), the stone was ahead, but in the last four minutes I spammed my discord server to vote and we just got it over the line. - fudgeforlife

Rrrr. :angry face: I love curling, and of course I wanted the stone to win. With curling no-one complains if I fall asleep watching. But with classical music everyone complains... 141.101.104.89 12:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

A similar thing happened for the "scared cat vs devil" bout - those two were consistently nearly tied until about T-10 minutes, whereupon the devil voting rate spiked and devil finished ~12000 votes ahead. The "cat vs hedgehog" bout was also similar - hedgehog had a consistent lead of ~1000 votes until about T-10 minutes, when the hedgehog voting rates spiked and hedgehog ended up finishing ~10000 votes ahead.162.158.214.28 14:39, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What? It's possible the owl cheated? IT'S POSSIBLE OCTOPUS TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE WON IF THE MATCH WAS LEGITIMATE? 162.158.75.226 12:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I love how owl getting 200 000 votes in 20 minutes is causing all this controversy when crayon got 40 000 in 75 seconds --Maple42 (talk) 18:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Avocado quote citation

I'm not sure where to put this. The "I like avocados because they taste pretty good and also they come with a cool wood ball you get to keep" quote is from here: https://twitter.com/jitka/status/236240801926086656 . 172.69.33.41 07:15, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

How sure are we the voting is real

I'm no expert at all, but it there any way that the websites that shows the number of votes live etc. can test whether these votes are real, or something Randall has pre-programmed? Not that I would not believe he was willing to stay up for the duration of this day, but it is an April Fools' Day comic, so he is completely "allowed" to have decided him self who should win all matched and have made up the commentaries in advance. Yes it would take along time, but not longer than doing it on the fly. It could just be that joke on us, that our votes does nothing and we just see how Randall has decided the dome should end. Can anyone go in to this, and explain why it is as it is either way (for sure made up, for sure real or uncertain if real or fake)? (PS I dislike these sections in the commentaries, but there are already 6...) --Kynde (talk) 12:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

It should be noted that Milky Way won over Maglev by a long shot, but the bracket shows otherwise. - Brent 172.69.50.58 13:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Which picture should we use for the comic

The current picture shown is not relevant. That is only shown to web crawlers that pick new images up. Does anyone have a picture of the very first match? Not sure that is relevant either. Anything in between could be used. like this: --Kynde (talk) 12:43, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I’m assuming there’ll be a picture at the end. Show that when it finishes. “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 13:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I added the current picture originally as a temporary solution since the bot didn't upload one. No one commented on the image so I kept it though I considered using something like this:

--Asdf (talk) 14:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Right now, for me at least, the comic shows this image with the hover-text "Thank you to the xkcd April 1st volunteers/commentators, including @Chromakode, Kevin, @Aiiane, Patrick, Kat, Reuven, @cotrone, @bstaffin, @zigdon, schwal, Stereo, and everyone who voted!" Just another option, though that image doesn't explain the comic set-out during the competition. 172.68.133.84 19:12, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes for sure we should use that now. I should have thought of that. Can see it has already been uploaded, but it takes long time, hours, from these pictures have been changed to the change can be seen ion the site. I have no idea why, but have experienced it several times, so later today the final picture should be ready. --Kynde (talk) 18:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

If we do that, we should add example pictures in the explanation of what it actually looked like during the competition. I vote for yours, Kynde. 172.68.133.84 19:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I added Kynde's image in the "How it worked" section as it is useful for people who missed the competition. --Asdf (talk) 19:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Great, I also added it to the transcript section and transcribed the dynamic part of the image. As well as the final image, which is not on-line and added the error image we had to begin at the bottom of the transcript and kept that transcript as well. Tanscript is more or less done I think.--Kynde (talk) 21:29, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

References and jokes in the commentary

Should we start explaining some of the robot announcer's commentary lines? Some of them are clear references to things. For example, the "Kickpuncher vs. Punchkicker" line is a reference to Community (Kickpuncher is a character in an in-universe film series, and Punchkicker is one of the characters' OC based on it.)

Maybe make extra pages like has been done for several of the previous years huge comics, especially April Fools' comics. And yes it would be interesting to explain them... But that is a huge job. --Kynde (talk) 13:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Errors

There’s a mistake in the bracket, the genome won but is grayed out “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 13:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Same with stars vs flying saucer --Kynde (talk) 13:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The genome has been corrected, but not the stars. --Kynde (talk) 13:48, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Yeah - stars is currently duelling volcano - but the bracket shows that stars was eliminated by monorail. This kinda suggests that the bracket is being manually generated! SteveBaker (talk) 13:59, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Speaking of errors, hearts no longer show up on mobile. “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 14:31, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I think that was intentional, as, at least in my experience, the comic was a massive battery hit. 108.162.241.4 17:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Disappointed no one thought to get the egg to at least the second round. 162.158.255.142 15:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Many of the rounds were incredibly close - even the final was won by just a couple of percent. It was rare for there to be an overwhelming majority on either side. But it's incredible that 1,393,048 votes were cast in the final...given that all those people had to be there over just the 26 minute voting timeslot. I presume explainxkcd was taken down by overwhelming traffic? SteveBaker (talk) 16:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Why are brackets relevent to this time of year. The FA Cup has reached the semi-final, the Champions League and UEFA have reached the qarter finals. The European Rugby Champions Cup and European Challenge have reached the semi-finals. Arachrah (talk) 17:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

March Madness is under way, he has referenced this before, it is in the explanation. Do not post at the top but at the bottom, for continuity. I moved your post down here where it belonged --Kynde (talk) 21:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

So it is to do with boxing hares.

In the mentioning of eggplant and peach, peaches represent butts, not the female sex organs. At least that is the far more common usage, including but not limited to the gay community. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/peach-emoji-%F0%9F%8D%91 172.68.54.76 16:50, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Stuffing

Did anyone else noticed these comments :

• Honeybees vs. colony collapse disorder
• I’m looking at the totals, and this one is extremely close.
• 🦠 fans need to click more and faster!
• I mean, 🐝 fans need to keep clicking!
• Fun fact: You can click more than once, although if you click too much it ignores you.
• No! Save the bees!

I'm quite curious as to how many people did those 1.4 million clicks in final ! --172.69.226.131 11:43, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

random object battles in popular culture!

Hee hee! All I could think of during this was the old Laurie Anderson recording about which thing was more macho Jonwchgo (talk) 14:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)