Long week, cocktails still hours away. Let’s do this.

• Gather ’round children, and let me tell you a story. First, there was the idea, then the dream. Dinosaur Comics posited the idea of a machine that could tell you how you would die, and David Malki !, Ryan North, and Matthew Bennardo had the dream of collecting stories inspired by that machine.

  The dream had a name: Machine of Death, an anthology of stories about the machine and how it affected people, illustrated by webcomicdom’s finest, released as print book, audiobook, and Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 licensed PDF.

  The stories were selected (so few stories, crushing the dreams of more than 600 aspirants [and now you know why David Malki ! is known to this day as The Dreamcrusher, children]), the illustrators obtained, and then … nothing.

  Until now.

  After a long year of excitement, disappointment, renewed excitement, continued disappointment, thickheadedness, obstinacy and relief, we are pleased to announce that Machine of Death will be officially released this October by Bearstache Books, the boutique printing arm of Wondermark Enterprises.

  So that’s all right, then.

• Lotta guest strips flying through the aether to give the aforementioned Ryan North a break for his upcoming troth-plighting (Happy third night of RyanAndJennyMas, everybody), including today’s by the aforementioned Dreamcrusher. But these are not your only shots at guest strips, whoa no. For instance, Wes Molebash is the sort to plan ahead for disaster, and has issued an open call for Max vs Max guest strippage:
  

  Send your guest strips to me at wes (at) maxvsmax (dot) com and use Guest Strip Submission as the subject. If you do not use Guest Strip Submission as the subject, then it is likely your submission will get buried in my inbox never to be seen again.

  Save your comics as .PNG or .GIF files and make sure they are 980 pixels wide. I don’t care how tall they are. They can be black-and-white, color, grayscale . . . whatever. Draw my comic the way YOU would draw my comic.

  I don’t really care what you write about or what characters you feature. I do ask that you keep it fairly clean (PG or PG-13).

  I’m not sure when these strips will run. They may get published at the end of the month during my wedding week, or I may save them for a later date. You may want to keep that in mind during your writing process.

  Please include any links and pertinent information about your blog/comic strip/website in the body of your email. I want to send you some link love for helping me out, and I won’t be able to do that if you don’t give me a URL.

  Man, everybody’s getting married. Maybe I should do that sometime.

• Is there anything that can’t catch fire with a Kickstarter crowd? Described by its own creator as a “combination of really cute and slightly oogy”, the PuppyCow plush has hit about 1/3 of goal in four days. If you always wanted an abomination of nature craftded “seven inches tall and featur[ing] udders made out of a fake leather material”, now’s your chance.
• Time’s running out to send some last minute good wishes to Steven Cloud before he drops himself into a war zone for the sheer beardiness of it. Rall will be sending out updates via Stephanie McMillan, so follow her on Twitter or watch this page for important news. Honestly, I hope there isn’t any — no news means that Cloudy, Bors, and Rall are alive, fed, and not too uncomfortable, and I wish nothing less than the most boring trip ever for them.