Transcribe SMBC

This is an effort to transcribe Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics to make them searchable.

Read the latest strip here.

Using the strips for this purpose with Zach’s permission:

Feel free! Sounds cool.

– Zach Weinersmith, 2021-05-25

Why?

You’re about to make a point in an argument, and that one SMBC strip you read five years ago totally nailed it? But you can’t find it anywhere… Fear not!

From now on you can finally search for SMBC content on the web. With luck, the comic in question is already transcribed by volunteers and indexed by search engines.

Worst case, you can search right here on GitHub.

Prior Art

This undertaking is mainly inspired by www.explainxkcd.com - but not because you’re dumb.

Reddit user v4lue4dded created a machine transcript and published it in a humongous Google Docs spreadsheet. Unsurprisingly the quality is mostly garbage, but it could be good enough for finding keywords if it were indexed by search engines.

SMBC Comics Forum dweller NeatNit transcribed a handful of strips which were Proudly ignored since 1867.

ohnorobot.com offers keyword search for SMBC transcripts - if you know how to get there. There seems to be no itemized view of the database, so there is no search engine indexing. It is currently not possible to register to borrow share unleash the existing transcripts… They seem to be high quality though.

Contributing

Fellow dorkwads, put your wetware to good use!

Your favorite strip does not have a transcription yet? Just add it to the respective markdown file in _comics. Then create a Pull Request to become an internet hero.

Tip: Use GitHub’s Go to file button to find the comic, enter the last part of its original URL.