I’m a big fan of Bill Amend’s Foxtrot. Not only do Jason Fox and I share a first name and a lot of other traits but I can play along with the jokes and I love solving the puzzles or binary codes that have appeared in the comic strip over the year. Today’s strip (8-26-2012) features Paige and her friend discussing boys in their yearbook. Something about the names mentioned sounded familiar. Here’s the strip, see if you notice the same thing.
Today’s comic has been posted here from http://www.foxtrot.com/2012/08/08262012/ in accordance with the re-use info for general web use.
The male names mentioned are all of webcomic artists.
Frame 1
Richie Munroe = Randall Munroe of XKCD
Randy Kurtz = Scott Kurtz of PvPOnline
Scotty Stevens = Rich Stevens of Diesel Sweeties
Frame 2
Chris Stroub = Kris Straub of Checkerboard Nightmare and Starslip
Frame 3
Mike Holkins = Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade
Mateo Inman = Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal
Brad Kellett = Dave Kellett of Sheldon and Drive and Brad Guigar of Evil Inc. who co-authored a book on How to Make Webcomics with Kellett, Kurtz, and Straub
Ron Josenberg = Jonathan Rosenberg of Goats
Frame 1 scrambles similar first names around with the last names whereas the other frames rely more on combinations or alterations to the names.
Any other thoughts?
Awesome catch; I completely missed it.
Thanks!
I recognized about 1/2 of the names/ciphers and guessed at a couple others, but still didn’t recognize 1/2 of them. With your decoding, I have the appropriate keywords on what to lookup for the others.
Actually, I think you’re not analyzing the first set of names far enough — I’ll bet that the second name is a combination of Randy Cassingham (Something Positive) with Scott Kurtz (as you mentioned). I’m not sure who Richie and Scotty are for, though.
It just occurred to me — the Chris of Chris Stroub could easily be Chris Crosby (Sore Thumbs, Superosity, co-founder of Keenspot) as well as an alteration of Kris.
Chris Stroub is just Chris Straub. The “Stroub” spelling is from a convention he was a special guest at where it was misspelled in the literature (he & Scott Kurtz made a big deal about it on twitter).
He spells his first name “Kris.”
Not sure who Randy Cassingham is, but Randy Milholland does Something Positive…
OK, just googled Cassingham, definitely nothing to do with Something Positive.
Richie Munroe could also be Randall Munroe (xkcd) and Rich Burlew (Order of the Stick).