The first XKCD cartoon I remember seeing was "sudo make me a sandwich". This was a joke for a very niche audience. It only lands if you are familiar with Linux. But a niche audience, at the scale of the internet, is a lot of people.

If you haven't come across it, you're in for a treat. XKCD is a much beloved web comic that makes smart observations about science. It's written and illustrated by Randall Munroe. I fell in love with it when he posted about ISO8601. Talk about niche. Honestly, many of his cartoons are too niche, even for me. But the internet has your back. It has spawned fan sites to help explain them. This is double win, as you get to understand joke, and you get to learn something.

So, Wednesday night was surreal. Randall came to my home town and put on a show. Which begs the question, why here? We're not an obvious choice. Brighton is the bigger town on the south coast, and usually gets this kind of thing. We're a niche choice (to continue the theme). Was he lost? The more prosaic answer is, he's on a book tour of the UK. I can only assume someone at Worthing Theatres is a fan, and booked him first. I don't know who you are, but thank you.

Worthing Assembly Rooms has an interesting history. It opened in the 1930s and is probably the biggest venue in town. It's also a Grade II listed building. In the 60's it hosted everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. It holds around a thousand people, and was close to full on Wednesday. That's a lot of geeks. We put up a Worthing Digital banner in the bar (these are our kind of people) but didn't meet anyone we didn't already know.

In the first half Randall introduced himself and spoke at length about his time as a NASA roboticist, and the genesis of XKCD. This is the ten year anniversary of his book "What if?". He told us how the book came about, his aversion to email and some of the stories behind the research.

In the second half we were joined by the lovely Matt Parker, YouTuber and stand up mathematician. He's a frequent visitor to EMFCamp where this year he compared an Evening of Unnecessary Detail. If any of those links are new to you, enjoy the rabbit hole. More on rabbit holes later.

Audience members had submitted questions for Randall. Matt was here to host the Q&A. Sadly my question about lunar time standards didn't make the cut. But during the next hour we learned a lot about obscure scientific publications, rabbit holes and kettles. Seemingly, American rabbits don't dig holes - they nest. I knew I would learn something during the evening; turns out it's that.

This was a great night and such a lovely surprise. Randall's work continues to inspire and make me laugh in equal measure. I used to draw comics as a kid and I've left it behind, as life went on. The evening has made me think about picking it up again.