Emojidome
Emojidome
[This was an interactive and dynamic comic during April 1st from its release until its completion. But the final and current image, will be the official image to transcribe. But the dynamic part of the comic as well as the "error image" displayed to services that could not render the dynamic comic is also transcribed here below.]
[The final picture shows the winner of the gold medal in the Emojidome bracket tournament, as well as the runner up with the silver medal. There is no text. The winner is the "Space", "Stars" or "Milky Way" emoji, which is shown with a blue band on top of a dark blue band on top of an almost black background, indicating the light band of the Milky Way in the night sky. Stars (in both five point star shape and as dots) in light blue are spread out in all three bands of color. The large gold medal with its red neck string, is floating close to the middle of the picture, lacking any kind of neck in space to tie it around. To the left of the gold medal is the runner up, the brown Hedgehog, with light-brown face. It clutches the smaller silver medal, also with red neck string, which floats out there in space. The hedgehog with medal is depicted small enough to fit inside the neck string on the gold medal.]
[This is an example of how the comic appeared during the competition. The example includes one of the final winner, Space's, matches. The dynamic part of the comic is transcribed below:] [At the top center of the comic, the two emojis battling it out are shown next to each other. The emojis displayed in the comic used the twemoji icon set. A different emoji set was shown in links to image of the tournament brackets. These matches are called bouts in the comic. The emoji from the top (or left) of the bracket is shown to the left. In this case it was space, night sky, milky way or stars vs Maglev train. Between them is the following text:] VS
[There are two buttons one below each of the two emoji. If pressed the buttons became red. They could be pressed multiple times each match. The buttons have text on them:] Vote Vote
[From the buttons colored hearts are released, often in bundles, and then they wave up across the emoji who's button they emanated from.]
[Below the buttons there is and indicator showing how long the current battle is open for further votes. In the example the text is:] Remaining time: 24 minutes
[The time began at "26 minutes" during the final rounds. It changed to "1 minute", with 1 minutes and 30 seconds left, and then 30 seconds later to "60 seconds" counting down to a few seconds. Then, before reaching 2 or 3 seconds it changed (a bit too early) to "Time's up!" Shortly there after a new bout would begin.]
[Above the two emoji at the very top is a comment. The commentator is shown as a robot emoji. The comment often changed during the long final rounds. In the current example the text is:] "~future~"
[But there would have been several others during the match. Given that Space won the entire Emojidome, the train lost this match. Often a final comment was posted just as the result was in. These final messages was then put at the top of the list of past bouts (matches). These bouts was displayed at the bottom of the comic below the remaining time. To the left was the following text:] Past bouts:
[Below this text was a list of all previous matches, showing the two emojis, with the loser grayed out, with their final comment next to them. As soon as there where more than three a scroll bar appeared to the right, making it possible to scroll down through all these previous matches. As it was 512 emojis to begin with, there were 256 bouts in the first round, and then 255 the rest of the way to the final for a total of 511 bouts at the end. Here are the the text of the three matches that can be seen in the example (the grayed out loser was Sushi, Bee and Wizard):] 🌋 vs 🍣 "Sushi has received a technical disqualification for being very very cooked" 🐝 vs 🦉 "Owls well that ends well" 🦔 vs 🧙 "The Wizard didn't do it"
[All the final bouts remarks, as well as the match ups, the score of votes, and all the other comments coming at the top during each bout can be found below in the round 1 to round 9 sections. They are thus not only a transcript.]
[Finally at the bottom of the comic below the scroll-able version of the past bouts, there was a link to images of the brackets, beginning with the full long one of all 512 emojis, and the zooming in and out, plus updating with results along the way. The link was a text that explained what the link was for. In the current example the link text, which is link blue, was:] Full bracket for today's comic (round 3).

[This is the image that appears when JavaScript fails or other errors occur. This is what embeds and automated programs usually see, as they load down dynamic comics. The transcript for this image is below the image:] [A tournament bracket tree is shown with eight participants each on the left and right side, for a total of sixteen, all of which are the 😰 emoji ("Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat"). From both sides towards the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle. Below is an explanation of why this is seen instead of the correct comic. It is due to an error with JavaScript. This is also why the sad emoji is used in all sweet sixteen places.]
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This was the ninth April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous fools comic was 1975: Right Click from Sunday April 1, 2018. The next became 2288: Collector's Edition , which was delayed two days and released on Friday April 3, 2020.
The interactive comic began at noon ET (16:00 UTC) on April 1, 2019, and ended a day later. In it, users were shown two emojis and voted for their favorite before the time ran out. 512 different emojis were paired against each other in a cup or bracket system, with only one winner. See more below under How it worked .
Brackets - like the one in this comic, for finding the best emoji - are a recurring theme in xkcd. It is also relevant for this time of year, and two years ago in 2017, the first comic in April, 1819: Sweet 16 from April 3rd was a bracket, referencing March Madness . The 2019 version of the National Collegiate Athletic Association College basketball national championship tournament began March 19th and ends April 8th 2019. So this comic could also be said to reference this, although it is not so explicit here. Earlier Randall made another large and "silly" bracket in 1529: Bracket (which someone then actually made into an online voting system, just like in this comic).
The title is a reference to the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome , which had the tagline:  "Two men enter. One man leaves." The "Thunderdome" in the film is a gladiatorial arena where conflicts are resolved by a duel to the death.
In the final round, the Milky Way emoji (🌌) won against the Hedgehog emoji (🦔). The comic was updated to show the result.
Clicking the comic links to a bracket of 128 emojis showing the winners: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_of_128.png
In the first round, the voting period for each bout lasted 37.5 seconds. The voting period for each bout doubled for the second, third, and fourth rounds. The voting period for each bout for the fifth round through the end was 26 minutes. The entire bracket took 24 hours 6 minutes.
Remaining time of a given bout was shown on a timer beneath the voting buttons. If the time remaining was one minute or greater, the time was shown rounded to the nearest minute (e.g., "Remaining Time: 26 minutes"); thus the minute would change on the half minute (e.g., "2 minutes" changed to "1 minute" at 1 minute 30 seconds). If the time remaining was less than a minute, the time was shown in seconds (e.g., "59 seconds"). When there were two (sometimes three) seconds remaining, the timer would display "Time's Up!" through the end of the bout and for a couple of seconds after the end of the bout while the images for the next bout were loading. Then the next bout would appear and the results of the previous bout would be added to the list of past bouts, with the most recent bout at the top.
Commentary was displayed above the images for each bout, and changed occasionally through the bout. In the first round, the commentary was made up of some stock phrases with a few custom phrases mixed in. Later commentary was tailored to suit each match-up and provided live updates on how each bout was progressing. A final comment was included in the list of past bouts.
The competing candidates were periodically overlaid with colored hearts that floated up from the vote button oscillating in a triangle wave pattern before disappearing above the candidate. Below the current competition, the results of past bouts were shown with the "loser" displayed in greyscale, the winner in color, and the final robot-commentator comment on that match.
The commentary appeared to suggest that there was some real-time feedback from the results of the competition. For instance, "It seems like our friends over Australia is joining the fun" appeared in the commentary. So did "We are getting a lot of questions on this today. This is live commentary, folks." https://i.imgur.com/8kPwjou.png , directly declaring that the commentary is live.
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 emojis 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 original title text "🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼🤼" consisted of eight wrestler emojis. This likely represented the round of 8, where the eight winners then can turn to the winner next to them and continue the quarterfinals, etc. The title text was updated after the final round.
Notably, it appears the eggplant emoji (🍆) and the peach emoji (🍑) were left out of the bracket, alongside the middle finger emoji (🖕). The eggplant and peach are frequently used to represent a penis and vulva/buttocks, respectively. There has been no statement from Randall on why they were left out.
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. https://www.xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_256.png was added later and shows the 256 emojis that competed on the second round. https://www.xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png was added for the third round. https://www.xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_4.png was added for the fourth round. The round 3 bracket was later updated with results during the Volcano vs Owl fight. There was an error where the flying saucer had beaten the stars, which was not the case.
A new bracket image was created for the Round of 32 which seems to be updated with new results as they come in. https://www.xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_of_32.png
It is not clear how the winner is decided when both emojis tied for first. This has happened twice: in Cupcake vs. Birthday Cake (🧁 vs. 🎂) with 3658 points each, where the Birthday Cake (🎂) was declared winner, and in the very first match of Grinning Face vs. Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes (😀 vs. 😁), in which no votes were cast, but the Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes (😁) was declared winner. Both of these tied bouts occurred in round 1, and both declared winners lost their subsequent match in round 2.
Real data with results (clicks) can be seen as JSON-websocket at https://emojidome.xkcd.com/2131/socket , transposed into a more human-readable format at https://leet.nu/tmp/xkcd-2131.html .
https://phiresky.github.io/emojidome/ , made by a redditor , shows the brackets along with the final scores and comment.
[This was an interactive and dynamic comic during April 1st from its release until its completion. But the final and current image, will be the official image to transcribe. But the dynamic part of the comic as well as the "error image" displayed to services that could not render the dynamic comic is also transcribed here below.]
[The final picture shows the winner of the gold medal in the Emojidome bracket tournament, as well as the runner up with the silver medal. There is no text. The winner is the "Space", "Stars" or "Milky Way" emoji, which is shown with a blue band on top of a dark blue band on top of an almost black background, indicating the light band of the Milky Way in the night sky. Stars (in both five point star shape and as dots) in light blue are spread out in all three bands of color. The large gold medal with its red neck string, is floating close to the middle of the picture, lacking any kind of neck in space to tie it around. To the left of the gold medal is the runner up, the brown Hedgehog, with light-brown face. It clutches the smaller silver medal, also with red neck string, which floats out there in space. The hedgehog with medal is depicted small enough to fit inside the neck string on the gold medal.]
[This is an example of how the comic appeared during the competition. The example includes one of the final winner, Space's, matches. The dynamic part of the comic is transcribed below:] [At the top center of the comic, the two emojis battling it out are shown next to each other. The emojis displayed in the comic used the twemoji icon set. A different emoji set was shown in links to image of the tournament brackets. These matches are called bouts in the comic. The emoji from the top (or left) of the bracket is shown to the left. In this case it was space, night sky, milky way or stars vs Maglev train. Between them is the following text:] VS
[There are two buttons one below each of the two emoji. If pressed the buttons became red. They could be pressed multiple times each match. The buttons have text on them:] Vote Vote
[From the buttons colored hearts are released, often in bundles, and then they wave up across the emoji who's button they emanated from.]
[Below the buttons there is and indicator showing how long the current battle is open for further votes. In the example the text is:] Remaining time: 24 minutes
[The time began at "26 minutes" during the final rounds. It changed to "1 minute", with 1 minutes and 30 seconds left, and then 30 seconds later to "60 seconds" counting down to a few seconds. Then, before reaching 2 or 3 seconds it changed (a bit too early) to "Time's up!" Shortly there after a new bout would begin.]
[Above the two emoji at the very top is a comment. The commentator is shown as a robot emoji. The comment often changed during the long final rounds. In the current example the text is:] "~future~"
[But there would have been several others during the match. Given that Space won the entire Emojidome, the train lost this match. Often a final comment was posted just as the result was in. These final messages was then put at the top of the list of past bouts (matches). These bouts was displayed at the bottom of the comic below the remaining time. To the left was the following text:] Past bouts:
[Below this text was a list of all previous matches, showing the two emojis, with the loser grayed out, with their final comment next to them. As soon as there where more than three a scroll bar appeared to the right, making it possible to scroll down through all these previous matches. As it was 512 emojis to begin with, there were 256 bouts in the first round, and then 255 the rest of the way to the final for a total of 511 bouts at the end. Here are the the text of the three matches that can be seen in the example (the grayed out loser was Sushi, Bee and Wizard):] 🌋 vs 🍣 "Sushi has received a technical disqualification for being very very cooked" 🐝 vs 🦉 "Owls well that ends well" 🦔 vs 🧙 "The Wizard didn't do it"
[All the final bouts remarks, as well as the match ups, the score of votes, and all the other comments coming at the top during each bout can be found below in the round 1 to round 9 sections. They are thus not only a transcript.]
[Finally at the bottom of the comic below the scroll-able version of the past bouts, there was a link to images of the brackets, beginning with the full long one of all 512 emojis, and the zooming in and out, plus updating with results along the way. The link was a text that explained what the link was for. In the current example the link text, which is link blue, was:] Full bracket for today's comic (round 3).

[This is the image that appears when JavaScript fails or other errors occur. This is what embeds and automated programs usually see, as they load down dynamic comics. The transcript for this image is below the image:] [A tournament bracket tree is shown with eight participants each on the left and right side, for a total of sixteen, all of which are the 😰 emoji ("Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat"). From both sides towards the middle the brackets reduce to eight, then four, two, and one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle. Below is an explanation of why this is seen instead of the correct comic. It is due to an error with JavaScript. This is also why the sad emoji is used in all sweet sixteen places.]
Visit xkcd.com to participate
If you are on xkcd.com, then you're seeing this because of something something JavaScript.
Listen, websites are hard 😰
