Instructions
Instructions
[The comic consists of one radio button, a small circle in the center of a large white panel. It is interactive. When pressing the radio button (selecting it), it turns blue. The second the radio button is pressed a more than 9-hour long audio file of coding instructions begins to play, and a mute button appears in the bottom right corner. It fades slowly into full opacity. Pressing this button will change it to a loudspeaker. It toggles whether there is sound playing or not. It is not possible to shut down the audio by pressing the radio button. Once selected it cannot be deselected as there is only this one option.]
[Covered by the radio button is an image of a turtle crawling from left to right, with a dotted line trailing behind it, indicating its movement. This image can only be seen by looking in the place where images for xkcd are usually placed on xkcd.]
[To read a transcript of the audio file go here: 2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript .]

The image drawn by the Logo program is a depiction of Bob Ross standing in front of a canvas, on which he has painted "a happy little tree, holding up a happy little world".  However, unlike his usual "happy little trees", the tree depicted is not a small pine, but rather a gargantuan World Tree growing from the back of a giant World Turtle , on which a Flat Earth rests.  (The "happy little world" does bear several small pines more typical of his style.)
Near the middle of the world, a Cueball sits while listening to the radio, perhaps tuning in to the same transmission that generated the image.  Closer to the reader, a turtle is shown walking around, leaving dotted-line tracks behind it, suggestive of the Logo turtle. The dotted-line tracks spell out "TY", shorthand for "thank you".
At the far left of the image, a robot and human are drawn next to a turtle which has flipped onto its back.  The robot declares, "Poor thing!" while the human says "I'll help".  This is a reference to the "empathy tests" employed to distinguish humans from androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner .  As part of the test, the listener is asked to imagine being in the desert, flipping a tortoise onto its back, and refusing to turn it back over, while their eyes are monitored for signs of emotional response (or lack thereof).  In this case, the robot expresses sympathy for the turtle and the human declares that he will turn it back over.  (Although the robot is very clearly distinguishable from a human being.)
[A man with large hair and a beard is holding an artist's palette with five patches of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He looks upon his canvas, where he has painted a large painting.] Painter: A Happy little tree Painter: Holding up a happy little world.
[The painting contains lots of stuff. Among others, is a robot that sees Cueball bending down to lift a turtle that is on its back. They talk:] Robot: Poor thing" Cueball: I'll help
[In the top right corner, there is a dotted line forming a semi-circle around the corner. Inside this are the words:] Vacuum decay
[There are no other words in the image. The image includes:]
In the sky:
On top of the tree:
Under the tree:
[The rest just needs to be written out in detail...]

This is the 12th April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous April fools' comic was 2445: Checkbox , which was released on Thursday, April 1st, 2021.
When loading the comic just a small dot is shown, a radio button (or option button). Usually, there would be more than one to give the user options. Once it has been selected it cannot be deselected. Once pressed the button turns blue and this starts the real part of this April fool's comic.
The comic consists of an audio file . The speech is a mix of facts about turtles and coding instructions in LOGO .  When executed, the instructions draw an xkcd comic. The audio file is 9 hours and 7 minutes long.
Once the voice begins to describe the instructions (hence the title) it is possible to mute the audio by pressing a muted button at the bottom right of the screen. This fades into view when the radio button is pushed. Pressing it will change the button to a non muted loudspeaker . These were the same buttons that were in the previous April fool's comic 2445: Checkbox . That was the first xkcd comic with audio , and thus these were two April fools' comics with audio in a row, and these are the only comics with audio. In the Checkbox comic, the mute buttons meaning are reversed, so the sound is on when the loudspeaker is shown and muted when the mute button is shown. It could be another layer to the April fool's joke or just an error by Randall.
The image originally displayed on this page was of a small turtle crawling in the center where the radio button is in the real comic. That was the image that would be downloaded by web crawlers like explain xkcd's bot, as it is what was placed here on xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/instructions_2x.png . This is of course not the real comic, which cannot be downloaded in that manner.
The "turtle" is a key concept in Logo, a programming language especially designed to teach programming to children in an easy way. The turtle in the logo is the cursor. Programming commands move the turtle, drawing a line as it goes. Of course, listening to hours of instructions, including the speech-synthesized reading of source code, is not an easy way to code or draw a picture. [ citation needed ]
In addition, at the end of the audio the voice says:
The title text alludes to Bob Ross 's catchphrase "happy little trees" in The Joy of Painting , a PBS TV show in which Ross leads the viewer through the painting of a nature scene.  The audio file itself is also presented in the style of The Joy of Painting ; it begins with greeting the viewer and introducing the color palette to be used (just one color, in this case, as Logo and all computer monitors of the time were monochrome).  The speaker then reads out some helper functions to be used in programming the scene, which is more analogous to Ross's palette of paints (titanium white, carmine red, etc.) along with words of encouragement as each is completed.  The functions are DIST, to calculate the Euclidean distance between two points, LERP, to perform linear interpolation , MIX to average two numbers (with LERP), and CUBIC to draw cubic Hermite splines .  From there, the speaker alternates between sketching parts of the scene and offering more words of encouragement, mixed in with turtle facts.
Transcribing the audio into text was organized as a project on github .
This is not the first time that Randall made an interactive comic where turtles played a big part, see 1416: Pixels . In this, he jokes with the idea of turtles all the way down, which is also mentioned in the audio file. He also made a comic simply called 889: Turtles .
This comic has a unique header text , see the details here . The header is:
"Today's comic was created with Patrick , Amber , @chromakode , Michael , Kat , Conor , @zigdon ,  and Benjamin Staffin ."
The header had not changed since the promotion of the new what if? 2 book.
[The comic consists of one radio button, a small circle in the center of a large white panel. It is interactive. When pressing the radio button (selecting it), it turns blue. The second the radio button is pressed a more than 9-hour long audio file of coding instructions begins to play, and a mute button appears in the bottom right corner. It fades slowly into full opacity. Pressing this button will change it to a loudspeaker. It toggles whether there is sound playing or not. It is not possible to shut down the audio by pressing the radio button. Once selected it cannot be deselected as there is only this one option.]
[Covered by the radio button is an image of a turtle crawling from left to right, with a dotted line trailing behind it, indicating its movement. This image can only be seen by looking in the place where images for xkcd are usually placed on xkcd.]
[To read a transcript of the audio file go here: 2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript .]

The image drawn by the Logo program is a depiction of Bob Ross standing in front of a canvas, on which he has painted "a happy little tree, holding up a happy little world".  However, unlike his usual "happy little trees", the tree depicted is not a small pine, but rather a gargantuan World Tree growing from the back of a giant World Turtle , on which a Flat Earth rests.  (The "happy little world" does bear several small pines more typical of his style.)
Near the middle of the world, a Cueball sits while listening to the radio, perhaps tuning in to the same transmission that generated the image.  Closer to the reader, a turtle is shown walking around, leaving dotted-line tracks behind it, suggestive of the Logo turtle. The dotted-line tracks spell out "TY", shorthand for "thank you".
At the far left of the image, a robot and human are drawn next to a turtle which has flipped onto its back.  The robot declares, "Poor thing!" while the human says "I'll help".  This is a reference to the "empathy tests" employed to distinguish humans from androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner .  As part of the test, the listener is asked to imagine being in the desert, flipping a tortoise onto its back, and refusing to turn it back over, while their eyes are monitored for signs of emotional response (or lack thereof).  In this case, the robot expresses sympathy for the turtle and the human declares that he will turn it back over.  (Although the robot is very clearly distinguishable from a human being.)
[A man with large hair and a beard is holding an artist's palette with five patches of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He looks upon his canvas, where he has painted a large painting.] Painter: A Happy little tree Painter: Holding up a happy little world.
[The painting contains lots of stuff. Among others, is a robot that sees Cueball bending down to lift a turtle that is on its back. They talk:] Robot: Poor thing" Cueball: I'll help
[In the top right corner, there is a dotted line forming a semi-circle around the corner. Inside this are the words:] Vacuum decay
[There are no other words in the image. The image includes:]
In the sky:
On top of the tree:
Under the tree:
[The rest just needs to be written out in detail...]
