dreezy posted:

Our ears are practically aching for some sweet gossip and we wouldn't want to hit another dead end (get it because we are dead), so let's drop some eaves.

Pittsburgh Lambic posted:

Ghostly Hamlet Dad is off to a rough start, and Yorick's still nowhere to be seen.

no they will not posted:

Justify this thread's existence, you little beast

Pittsburgh Lambic posted:

Vote's still tied, and I'm on the road at the moment and won't be able to get an update out until this evening, so putting down a deadline: Voting closes at 7 PM CST.

Pittsburgh Lambic posted:

Sent you a few things! You can do whatever you want with them.

quote:

quote:

No book comes together without an author feeling like thon's in debt to SOMEONE.

Thanks to MetaFilter for all the terrific advice on how to dispose of a body and not get caught (SPOILER ALERT: there are murders in this book).

They have a page just about this, did you know that? They're one of the top search results for "how to dispose of a body."

And I guess also thanks to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for not getting me in trouble (yet) after I ran all those searches for:

"How to dispose of a body" and "I want to know how to get rid of a dead human body..."

...and "gross dead body +how to hide it" and "what if I committed the murder act, how do I ditch the body & not go to jail IT'S AN EMERGENCY??"

Thanks also to Chef Michael Smith, Emily Horne, and William Shakespeare for the stew recipe...

(SPOILER ALERT: you can learn to make stew in this book too! It's not all murders ALL the time.)

... for the expansive knowledge of boats and the seas in which they sail...

(SPOILER ALERT: play your cards right in this book and you just miiiiight gain command of a pirate ship, just...just be cool.)

...and for ripping me off and making this book so famous (but which thank-you applies to which person??

That is for YOU to decide. Yes, even here in this acknowledgement parenthetical it's up to YOU to choose your own adventure, but I mean come on it's pretty obvious).

Thanks to all my artist friends who drew all these pretty pictures in the book. You've made death into a visually stunning treat.

And thanks to Crissy Calhoun for copyediting this book and fixing all my dumb mistakes! Any that remain I added in afterwards because of brain problems.

Finally, thanks to Joey Comeau for his skills at chess, Ray Fawkes for his skills at mad libs, my extremely awesome wife, Jenn, for being extremely awesome...

...and to my brother, Victor, who confirmed over walkie-talkie that the idea for this book was rad.

And thanks to you, for buying this book or at least picking it up and flipping to this page: that took initiative!

As a reward, you get to continue enjoying reading this book!!

quote:

Right now, the book exists as mere potential. On one hand, you can make it happen, but it'll take months of work.

On the other hand, ideas are like chest hairs: you have so many of them that it's hard to get attached to any one in particular. Plus new ones are popping up all the time!

You go skateboarding to decide what to do. You're getting mad air while pulling off some insanely rad skateboard tricks while also munching on pizza, and it hits you:

Writing this book is something you want to do.

You say goodbye to all the babes and go home to write.

Almost a year later, you write the last ending for the last version of the reality you've chosen to put in this book. It's done. It's a pretty solid first draft.

A few months after that, you've smushed it into a pretty solid second draft, and then months after that, a totally rad final draft.

All that's left now is to do a final readover to make sure there are no typos, inconsistencies, or spelling errorrs!

You grab some snacks, sit down, and bring your draft so close to your face that you can't really see anything else.

quote:

Gosh, well, I suppose if we're really doing this, then I also want to thank everyone involved in the series of events that led to me being here today...

...able to write and tell jokes for a living, which means I'm thanking... pretty much everyone I've ever interacted with?

And I'm also thanking everyone THEY'VE ever interacted with, for helping to make them so awesome.

And if I'm doing that, I should probably thank the people who influenced the people who interacted with the people who influenced me as well, right?

Thank you, a large percentage of the planet that I'm pretty sure reaches 100%!

But these people didn't just pop into existence fully formed.

My thanks take a step sideways and begin racing back in time, up past everyone's parents and grandparents and great-great-great-great-grandparents, thanking them all as we go...

...further and further, grandparents getting hairier and hairier, until my thanks coalesce all the way back 200,000 years ago in East Africa with Mitochondrial Eve...

...the one woman from which every single human alive today descends.

Thank you, Mitochondrial Eve.

My thanks speed up, thanking faster and faster back in time, humanity devolving before our eyes. My thanks extend to the first human, pass through Australopithecus, and then on through great apes.

Thank you, great apes. Without you, none of us would be here.

But my thanks are still speeding up, tearing through the primates, then the treeshrews, than the placental mammals. We're 125,000,000 years in the past, thanking everyone we meet.

We go back further, thanking the early vertebrates, watching them get smaller, simpler...

...until there's no animal life on land and you blink and it's 2,100,000,000 years ago and we're thanking the very first cell with a nucleus, alone in the ocean.

Thank you, very first cell with a nucleus. You're a neat li'l guy. You started some really cool stuff.

We watch the cells around us get simpler, more primitive, and then they're gone. My thanks are rushing backwards almost impossibly quickly through this empty planet when suddenly we're watching the Earth itself break apart, diffusing into a tremendous cloud of dust and gas.

Mixed in here are the beginnings of all the other planets in our solar system, plus all the material that would one day become our sun.

We're 4,568,000,000 years in the past and we are thanking a lifeless hunk of diffuse matter with all our heart.

As we're doing that, it combines itself with a colossal molecular clous, a stellar nursery from which a whole bunch of suns would eventually form, including our own.

Thank you, giant molecular cloud 65,000,000 light-years wide. You were probably very pretty.

The universe around us is contracting, getting smaller and denser and hotter until we're in a universe only a few metres across and shrinking at an incredibly fast rate.

13,000,000,000 years in the past, we are thanking the entire universe, which is right now mostly superheated plasma with a colossally high energy density.

We would hug all that is and ever would be, if we could.

But we can't, so we say thanks instead!

Thank you, the universe as it existed a mere 10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang. If you really are sensitive to initial conditions, then I hope nobody ever goes back in time to mess with you.

And then, at last and finally, my thanks race just a little past the origins of the Big Bang...

...give secret unknowable props all around, and careen back to the present where you're here reading this book.

Hey, thanks babe!!

Not an actual infoblurb posted:

For some reason, this one image doesn't appear in the gallery after unlocking it. Not only does this mean you have to put up with this too-small version until I get a different method of getting these pictures going, I also can't give you the infoblurb on who made it and what they do! Fun!

quote:

Ryan North was born on October 20, 1980. Since then he has done the following things (this is NOT an exhaustive list):

• failed to die for over 11,322 days IN A ROW;
  
• eaten food and then converted that food into ideas;
  
• kissed over FIVE different people not from his family, all of whom totally came back for more;
  
• studied computer science and computational linguistics and graduated from university TWICE;
  
• written the online comic Dinosaur Comics; it's that comic with the dinosaurs that you love;
  
• co-edited the anthology Machine of Death, which is a book about people who know how they will die;
  
• written the Adventure Time comic book series, which has a lot of really awesome stuff going on in it;
  
• analyzed the novelization of Back to the Future in way more detail than probably anyone could've anticipated;
  
• gotten married, and adopted a dog named Noam Chompsky;
  
• oh I also totally wrote this book!!

Okay, your stalling tactics are really easy to see through and also really confusing because it's not like someone has a gun to your head and is forcing you to read this book.

Right? If this is indeed the case and you are totally fine, let me know by NOT sending a message back in time to me the very moment I'm reading these words, which is March 25th, 2013, 1:11:34 pm EST.

Okay, terrific, we're good.

quote:

"Oh, I'll play your game," you say.

"Excellent," she says, motioning to her throne. "Please, have a seat."

As you sit down and settle in, she quickly sets up a chess board in front of you, pulling up another throne for the opposite side.

She arranges the pieces with the air of someone who actually knows what she's doing when it comes to playing chess, which isn't the greatest sign for you.

She's white, you're black. "Since you're the one who barged in here, it's my turn to make the next move," she says, advancing her king's pawn up two squares.

"Ah yes, the Queen's Gambit," you say.

"That's not what that is," she says.

You're - kinda in over your head here, aren't you, Ophelia?

quote:

You move your pawn up one square.

Gertrude quickly jots down something on a piece of paper you hadn't noticed before. "e4 f6," it reads. Beside it she's noted the words "oh man, seriously??"

Wow! Maybe she's impressed? I mean, that is a really optimistic way to look at things!

Gertrude moves her queen's pawn out two spaces, so it's standing beside her other one. She's building a wall of pawns!

But she's overlooked the fact that when pawns are side by side, they can't defend each other as well as if they're in a zigzag pattern.

What's she doing? Doesn't she REALIZE?

"d4," she writes.



You bring up your horsey's pawn two spaces to form the first step of a zigzag wall.

Gertrude raises her eyebrows.

"Congratulations," she says. "You have managed to lose the game in the shortest possible time: two moves.

It is impossible to lose at chess any faster. There is no way for you to be worse at this game."

quote:

"Not true!" you say. "I could be worse if I didn't know how the pieces moved." Gertrude writes down "Qd5#," then moves her queen diagonally as far as it'll go, putting it beside your pawn.

"The thing is, I'm not convinced you haven't been guessing your way through it so far," she says, "but it doesn't matter anyway."

Duuuuude, I'm pretty sure that's...

quote:

Gertrude looks at the board, looks at you, and smiles beatifically.

"Checkmate," she says.

You look down at the board, trying out all the possibilities you can see. She's right. There's no move you can make. You've lost.

"Looks like you don't get to kill me after all!" she says, flipping the table.

Attached to the underside of the table are two short-swords that she grabs in mid-air. She takes a swipe at you, which you dodge.

"What the hell? you ask.

"You can't kill me, as per the terms of our agreement," Gertrude says. "But we never agreed that I couldn't kill you."

You reach to draw your sword.

"Now now, be careful with that!" Gertrude says. "You wouldn't want to cut me! I could die from an infection!"



You put the sword away, and Gertrude continues pressing her attack. You fight back passively, dodging all you can, finally dodging your way out through a window and backflipping to the ground below.

"I'll find you!" Gertrude yells after you. "There was no time limit on our promise! I'll continue trying to kill you until the day I die!"

"Of natural causes!" she adds.

You spend the next several days dodging her attacks and traps.

They get progressively more ingenious until one day you break a twig in the forest, which sends a log careening towards a stack of logs, which knocks the logs over like dominoes...

...which sends a boulder down a hill and off a cliff, which hits a see-saw, which sends another boulder up in the air, which comes down on your head, killing you instantly.

"Nailed it!" Gertrude yells. "Man! I KNEW that had an small chance of working!"

Artist Information posted:

Emily Partridge is an artist from the pacific northwest and you can totally tell. She makes cartoons and comics and illustrations and painting and arts and crafts and stuff.

empartridge.com