Rob

Rob
A close-up of Rob from 782: Desecration
First appearance	276: Fixed Width
Appearances	13

Rob is a stick figure in xkcd. Rob has no identifying features and is a Cueball. In most cases, he seems to represent the same character, usually being portrayed as Black Hat's roommate. He is one of the few of Randall's characters to be given a name. Rob is specifically named in 276: Fixed Width, 632: Suspicion, 647: Scary, 716: Time Machine, 723: Seismic Waves, 782: Desecration, 838: Incident, 1102: Fastest-Growing, 1168: tar, and 1783: Emails. In 276: Fixed Width his screen name appears as "rob", and in 723: Seismic Waves he is posting on the internet as "robm163". In 838: Incident his username appears as "robm". In 1783: Emails, Cueball replies to his email in the title text.

After the Emails comic, Rob is not mentioned for 800 comics before the name is used in 2584: Headline Words. Cueball is also in this comic, but it seems like Cueball represents Randall rather than Rob in the comic. So again only mentioned by name.

Relationships

Rob had a relationship with a "woman" known as <emily> on IM. This ended tragically in 276: Fixed Width when he told her the relationship was only for sex while he wasn't really paying attention to what he was writing; he just wanted their chat responses to line up nicely on the screen. Two years later, in 2009, he had a relationship of a few months with what ended up to be a spam bot. He discovered this when he asked the bot to pass what it calls a VK test. This happened in 632: Suspicion.

In 647: Scary we find that he has a nephew born after September 11, 2001, but by 2009 he was old enough to have discussions with Rob about it.

In 1102: Fastest-Growing it seems that Rob is Black Hat's room mate. In fact, it's possible that within the xkcd continuity, every time we see Black Hat's roommate, it's Rob. But with no name mentioned it is not enough to list these comics as comics featuring Rob.

Notes

• the VK test is a reference to the world of Blade Runner, where they use a Voight-Kampff (VK) test to help determine if someone is a replicant.

See also

• Category:Comics featuring Rob
• Category:Comics featuring Cueball
• It was at some point suggested that Cueball and Rob should be merged. But nothing came of the discussion.