• Holy cats! Raina Telgemeier has somehow slipped, as the latest iteration of the New York Times Best Seller List includes only three of her books, in the relatively modest #4, 5, and 6 slots (although we’re also a mere four weeks away from Sisters being on the list for 52 consecutive weeks, so there’s that). Not to worry; although the first Baby-Sitters Club color reissue has slipped off the list (after dropping to #10 last week, its 11th on the list), the second BSC color reissue released the day before yesterday.

  You can see where I’m going with this.

  There’s a lag time on the NYTBSL, but I’ma guess we’re shortly going to see The Truth About Stacey join Smile, Drama, and Sisters, and very possibly see the return of Kristy’s Great Idea. Can we do five Telgemeier books simultaneously? With the remaining two BSC color reissues due in October and January, could we see an actual majority of the ten slots owned by books about tween girls? No bets, my friends.

• Holey Cats! Now this is how you meet promised Kickstarter fulfillment goals:
  

  When we launched our Kickstarter back in January, we hoped to sell 500 copies of our game. With that in mind, we wrote the following on our Kickstarter page: “Estimated delivery: July 2015”

  We wound up selling more than 500 copies. We sold 460,000 copies.

  …

  I know we promised we’d deliver in July. But that’s a lot of things we had to do. So, the new expected delivery date is …

  Still July!

  Yep, kittens that ‘splode start their rolling shipping today; it would be impossible to ship to ship every one of the 220,000-odd (some very odd) backers in 122 different countries on the same day, despite the fact that the EK crüe have sent massive quantities of games to various countries around the world to ship domestically, rather than from the US (which would involve customs, and international shipping, and headaches and delays and missing packages galore). Heck, they had to partner with six companies for production and fulfillment, including seeing the Cards Against Humanity folks set up an entire company — Blackbox — just to handle the shipping and notifications.

  Those specific details — 122 countries, six companies, Blackbox — all come from the shipping-commencement announcement along with other facts about the game; my favorite fact-cluster is that printing the 26.8 million cards required 2356 gallons¹ of paint, producing a gross tonnage of 104,000 pounds² requiring 17 rail-car sized shipping containers to hold them all. You can find at least one member ExKit team at GenCon, with copies of the game, just in case you didn’t back the campaign and/or can’t wait until sometime next week. And if you need a primer on how to play, they released a video starring the voice of Dr Krieger, because listening to Lucky Yates talk about stuff exploding won’t cause nightmares at all.

• Depending on what topics he decides to cover, there may or may not be cats (holy or otherwise) involved! Ryan Estrada is feelin’ creative again, and we all know what that means: a burst of comics to bury ourselves in. This time, he’s decided to do fake pitches for licensed comics based on existing concepts, and Dylan Meconis has already tossed the first suggestion out: an animated version of Murder She Wrote. But Estrada being Estrada, he’s already got a half-dozen in the pipeline, and posted his unlicensed adaptation of Bringing Out The Dead. Keep your eye on Unlicensed By Ryan Estrada for more insanity in the coming … forever, possibly.

Spam of the day:

All are hands-free, water-proof, rechargeable, and 100% medical grade silicone. There are specific nipple toys which are created to improve nipple stimulation.

Hey, Erika and Matt? I think this one is for you.

______________
¹ Just shy of 9000 liters, or 0.007230289 acre-feet.

² About 47,200 kilos, or 1 adult humpback whale.

We’re all over the place today, from the neatest, most encouraging news to the most horrifying visions of what eternal damnation must surely look like. I suspect that no two of you will precisely agree where on that scale each of these items will fall.

• Well, okay, I suspect that everybody will place the already-fully-funded Kickstart for Lucy Bellwood’s nautical comics collection, Baggywrinkles, on the positive side of that scale. It’s part autobio, part educational, a downright bargain with physical copies of the book going for as little as US$16, and featuring an all-new story about scurvy! And a very modest US$20K stretch goal will take the collection from B&W to color!
• Sticking with Kickstarter for the moment, we’ll note that Matt Bors was lying to us when he said that the Eat More Comics Kickstarter campaign would not have stretch goals, on account of they just announced some stretch goals. Every coupla’ thousand bucks from the US$45K goal means exclusive comics from the likes of Zach Weinersmith, Rich Stevens, Gemma Correll, and Bors himself.

  Even better, hitting US$60K means that all the artists — who are getting paid for their comics to run in the collection, on top of the pay they received to run at The Nib, on top of whatever they made from drawing them in the first place — will get a page rate boost. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the best part about Bors & Co is that they pay, and even if some of what The Nib ran made you grind your teeth and regret that money went/will go to cartoonists you despise, I can pretty much guarantee that even more money went/will go to cartoonists you love. Let’s help ’em make rent.

• Love ’em, hate ’em, wonder how they became so dominant in at least one field (webcomics) and superdominant in another (videogames), there’s no denying that the lads at Penny Arcade cast a long shadow and that they attract attention from outside both those areas of endeavour.

  This time it’s the advertising world, where Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik were named to a list of 10 visual artists who are remaking advertising, part of an overall list of the 100 most creative people in/adjacent to advertising. Also on that list with Krahulik & Holkins: Annie Leibovitz (the most important portrait photographer of the past four decades) and Brett Doar (who creates all those Rube Goldbergian installations for OK Go music videos).

  And as long as we’re on the topic, Randall Munroe was recognized not specifically for comics or art, but for his ability to create viral content that blows the hell up. Also on that list with Munroe: Serial’s Sarah Koenig. Looking at the other 80 names on the list, you’ll find the likes of John Carmack (for Oculus VR), Amy Schumer, Janelle Monáe, Mindy Kaling, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and a whole bunch of ad pros and commercial directors you’ll never have heard of. This time next year I’d expect to see Raina Telgemeier or somebody at Ad Week is missing the boat.

• Finally, I think that we all also will agree on which item definitely falls on the negative side of the scale: for all those who have ever seen Lar DeSouza’s Sailor Bacon cosplay has never been able to un-see that spectacle, that extravaganza, those bloomers. We can console ourselves that the display was always for a good cause (namely, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada), even if there was no way to convey the full horror to those that weren’t there to share in the mental scarring.

  Until now:

  In a grand effort to support me and my wife in our annual fundraising efforts for Multiple Sclerosis research, [Ryan] Sohmer and Blind Ferret have made available these adorable and somewhat disturbing Sailor Bacon plushies!! Designed by me and manufactured by the fine folks at Soft Stuff (who also donated a portion of their manufacturing costs to the MS Society of Canada!), these tiny ambassadors of hugs are now shipping from the BFE headquarters.

  You can order up one of these abominations and send it to somebody that needs a good disturbing! Why should you be the only one unable to ever sleep again without seeing … that … lurking behind your eyeballs? Drop your twenty five bucks, spread the madness, take some minor solace that this great sin against Nature benefits a worthy cause, or maybe just buy them all up and see if you can destroy them before they worm their way into your brain.

  It’s too late. They’ve got you. Pray for the mercy that you’ll succumb to sweet, forgetful madness quickly and Glob have mercy on your soul.

Spam of the day:

Your LED Flashlight Coupon, 75% off expires 07/21/2015

I’ll admit — this one almost got me. I’m a sucker for a good LED flashlight.

And that’s it. As quickly as it zoomed across the sky –spreading wonder, and mayhem, providing counterpoint to philosophical arguments, and landing in faces both undeserved and richly so — #buttrocket has left us behind. Jeph Jacques has picked up his normal storyline, with nary a mention of the petabyte of porn carried by 2015-TAYLER-AWESOME. Goodbye, #buttrocket, may you find a worthy place to deposit your payload¹; you were perhaps too good for this world.

Speaking of too good for this world, the news broke too late for me to write about it yesterday, but Brandon Bird has crafted no less than the pinnacle — nay, the apotheosis — of art. I speak, naturally, of a series of thirteen oil paintings of Shia LaBeouf encompassing all of his regenerations.

Pack it up, world. Museums, try your best to get the eleven paintings still out of the hands of private collectors, in the hopes that someday all thirteen may be presented together as time, fate, and the universe intend. Those of you without the wherewithal to purchase an original can still get signed prints, or get the entire series of in one glorious bolus of Shia LaBeoufosity. Get it now. Do it for the children.

Spam of the day:
I was going to include one, but the contents of my spam folder now reads Shia LaBeouf over and over for about ten thousand lines. Creepy.

_______________
¹ So to speak.

Just yesterday I was raving about the gallery/event space known as Center 548, site of this year’s MoCCA Festival in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York City, and how I hoped the Society of Illustrators had found a new, permanent home for the show. Turns out, nope:

Sad news for anybody who is currently enjoying MoCCA’s new location https://news.artnet.com/art-world/owne…

In case you didn’t click that link, the owners of the building has sold out to a new landlord who intends to — wait for it — build condos, or so say the rumors. I’m sure somebody will be making a buttload of money off the deal, and while I’ve only ever been in that space on one day of its entire existence, the continual repurposing of NYC real estate into high-priced residences is something that will set off another cycle of decline in the city if the real estate industry isn’t very careful.

It’s happened before, as the city became too expensive and people moved away; pretty soon there’s nobody to cook and clean for the owners of those multi-million dollar residences, or to make their coffee or deliver their dry cleaning. Then the super rich all decide to leave, the neighborhood falls into underuse, and then the artists and squatters move back in. Cue one of those Disney songs about eternal circles of real property valuation. Thanks to Darryl Ayo for digging up the story.

• Welp, regardless of what happens with arts happenings in New York, there’s still going to be a TopatoCon in *hampton Mass this fall, and the exhibitor list grows by the day:
  

  Can you guess who the next guest announcement is? I’ll give you a hint; his name rhymes with “Schmanthony Slark”.

  I’m going to throw another guest announcement at you. Go long!

  IT’S CHRIS HASTINGS! @drhastings IS GOING TO BE AT TOPATOCON!!

  The complete list as it now stands is under the cut.

• That’s moving fast — Howard Tayler¹ has been making noise about launching a Kickstarter to fund a role-playing game set in his comic’s universe, and in the hours since launch it’s racked up 66% of of a US$45,000 goal. Not so unusual, but these things are unusual: the US$30K he’s gathered so far is from just 300 backers, for an average of a hundo per; he’s logged eight backers (out of total limit of 15) across two US$500 tiers, and five (out of a limit of 10) backers at the US$1000 (!) tier. People love them some games, but even more love them some Howard. No idea where this is going but I suspect all my predictive models would be garbage given the obvious skew going on.
• How about a simple Kickstarter story? It’s been a while since we had one of thems. Dave Kellett has decided to celebrate the first anniversary of his film, STRIPPED (funded via Kickstarts), with a sale. Until 17 April, you can get the movie and bonus features for 50% off. If you didn’t see it before, see it now.

Spam of the day:

Does your website have a contact page? I’m having a tough time locating it but, I’d like to send yyou an e-mail.

Yeah, it would be that thing under the masthead on the right that says CONTACT US, can’t imagine how anybody’s ever found it ever.

_______________
¹ Evil twin, etc.

(more…)

I got more comments on the post last week where I mused on the lack of a single, highly-visible song with which one might reference the grand T-Dot than any other recent topic. And here we are again with the news coming from that noblest of cities.

• To start with, you got your Chris Butcher, retailer, showrunner, relentless promoter and lover of comics and those that make them, and real-life counterpart to the best character in Scott Pilgrim’s world. He’s been a major force in Toronto becoming a center for the comic arts, and it seems that scarcely a week goes by that he doesn’t get to announce something cool. Today, it’s the TCAF pop-up shop in the Toronto Reference Library, launched for the most recent year-end holiday season, with the promise of converting to an ongoing retail endeavour. Today, that conversion comes true:
  

  The Toronto Comic Arts Festival is thrilled to announce that its festival shop is here to stay for the foreseeable future! Located inside Toronto Reference Library at 789 Yonge Street, we’re pleased to announce that the shop has been newly rebranded as Page & Panel: The TCAF Shop (with a spiffy new logo design by illustrator Chip Zdarsky), and the store will continue bringing the very best of comics, graphic novels, art, design objects and book culture merchandise to Toronto.

  [Please note that the logo mentioned does not feature even one set of genitals.]

  Page & Panel already has author events planned for tonight (for Toronto anthology comic Monstrosity 2), 30 March (Carson Ellis), and 1 April (Jim Zub), as well as exclusive merch from local creators like Kate Beaton¹ and John Martz. Congrats to everybody at TCAF and TRL for making this happen.

• Staying in Hogtown and speaking of Jim Zub, everybody knows that like every week is Jim Zub week down at the comics shop, but there’s a special coinciding of Zub-owned comics coming next week. 25 March is when we’ll see the release of both the first issue of the last Skulllkickers (aka the series that really launched Zub’s current career trajectory) story arc, and the first issue of the second Wayward (aka the series that took all the hard work that Zub’s put in since Skullkickers #1 and bumped it up even higher) story arc, along with the trade paperback of the first Wayward trade collection. While it seems the dude’s got comics coming out all the damn time, I’m declaring next Wednesday to be Zubday.
• And rounding out our tour of The Big Smoke, Ryan North² has some news for us today regarding the interactive game version of To Be Or Not To Be:
  

  DID YOU KNOW:

  There’s now an Android and iOS version of this game, out THIS VERY DAY??

  Yesssssss it is a FACT

  I believe that this means that every single possible vector for distributing North’s CYOA version of Hamlet is now covered. If you don’t own at least one, there is something distinctly wrong with you.

Spam of the day:

Going time for the furnishings shop in Gloucester example

I am utterly unable to parse what this was meant to convey.

_______________
¹ Speaking of whom, Beaton is back in The Queen City after her book-promotion trip to Germany which she has comic-chronicled here and here. They aren’t trip-home-to-see-the-family comics, but if you’ve ever wondered about medieval German torture devices designed to wreck your butthole at 9:00am on a Sunday morning — and I sincerely hope that you have — then these will be right up your alley.

So to speak.

² AKA The Toronto Man-Mountain, AKA He Who Has Returned, AKA Lord of Castle North.

On his income taxes on the line where it says to enter your occupation, I hope that Jeffrey Rowland puts down internet merchandise mogul.

• Speaking of moguls of all sorts, you know what they need to keep their air of dapper superciliousness? A Monocle. Know where you can get a supply of monocles? From Zach Weinersmith. As I write this, the campaign to bring single-use monocles to the world is fivehours old and less than US$100 from its goal. If you think that it’s a joke, well, that’s where you’re right, but if you think it’s a scam or fake, allow me to share proof with you that these exist. Thank you to Weinersmith et. al.¹ for gifting me with this indispensible bit of dapperment; I await only an occasion when I must exhibit extreme surprise to deploy it for its intended purpose.
• Speaking of Kickstarters, I would like to mention that my very favorite webcomic for reading in book-length chunks — Gastrophobia — has launched its latest campaign for its latest book-lenth chunk (which is to say, a book). Gastrophobia volume 3: Best At Winning, Worst At Love has been fundraising over the weekend and currently sits at an inexplicably paltry 75 backers, although they have pushed creator David McGuire up to some 40% of goal. The strip is great fun, McGuire knows how to both build a damn good story and fulfill merch on a timely basis, and there’s nothing that should be keeping you from dropping the dough to pick up this book. Make with the clicky, already.
• Never bet against Ryan Estrada. Whether it’s setting out to provide guest strips for every webcomic, teach the world to read Korean and Russian in fifteen minutes, or wrangle eighteen different creators to tell one story from six different viewpoints based on an experience from his time running an Indian call center, Estrada takes on seemingly impossible tasks with aplomb.

  The aplombed tasque du jour is the one about the call center, as he’s launched Broken Telephone launched today as his newest serialized webcomic at Broken-Telephone.com, and it launched with what I believe is the largest initial buffer on record. Namely, the full year-long story is queued and ready to go on a daily basis. Estrada was kind enough to send me a review copy, which I have only just begun to read; what I have seen, however, is really good and plays to the strengths of his various artists, so be sure to check it out.

• It appears that the results of the SPX table lottery have gone out, and while there’s no list of who got in yet, there’s a lot of mention on the Twitters and such from people that didn’t. It’ll be interesting to compare the list of last year’s exhibitors (archived here) against the final list of who made it in. It looks like SPX has become a victim of its own success, with a desire to bring in new talent and meet demand for tables — but when your process is designed in such a way that it finds a way to not include such rarely seen on these shores talent as John Allison, it’s time to look at how well you’re balancing your priorities.

Spam of the day:

A friend of mine got off dialysis (stage 5 CKD) and healed his kidney.

You’re lying or fooling yourself. Go hang out with your flouride-decrying, homeopathy-loving, anti-vaxx friends, and keep your crackpottery out of here before I get some on my shoes.

________________
¹ Which group, regrettably, includes the nefarious James Ashby, aka History’s Greatest Monster. And he gets the girl to “accompany him to the opera” in the promotional film! Boo, hiss!

The gamification of the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter campaign continues; if you thought that just because the actual campaign ended two and a half weeks ago that Lee, Inman, and Small would stop telling the world about it, well, you’ve underestimated their desire to create an ongoing narrative.

See, there are elements of Exploding Kittens that are backer-specific (like the surprise in the box or the NSFW deck), but the game will be available in some form or another after backers have received their rewards — apparently in perpetuity, what with the game blowing up to be bigger than Jesus and all. So to keep interest at a high level, the EK team have decided to make early copies available to interested play-testers; presumably, the feedback will be used to tweak the game prior to release. You can be one of these playtesters, or Kitten Consul as they phrase it:

Create a YouTube video explaining why we should choose you to be a #KittenConsul for Playtest Deck #3. Tweet a link to your video to @gameofkittens with the hashtag #KittenConsul.

We’ll accept the top YouTube videos evaluated by YouTube likes. (Dislikes will be ignored, let’s share the love)
We’ll also pick a bunch ourselves that tickle our fancy.

Your tweet and video title must both contain “#KittenConsul.”
Video must be 60 seconds OR LESS, and it must be on YouTube.
Your playtest party event must occur between April 3rd and April 19th.
Video AND video description must include the location, date, and duration of your playtest party.
Your kitten consulate location must be open to the public. (No private residences please!)
Likes will be tallied March 24th 11:59PM EST.
We reserve the right to refuse applicants as we see fit.
No purchase necessary.

That all went up yesterday afternoon. As I write this, there are a few dozen tweets mentioning the hashtag, although in some cases multiple tweets reference the same video. Over at YouTube, there are bit more than two pages of matches for kittenconsul, with about two dozen of them being probably relevant videos. It’s looking like the 60 second maximum duration was a smart idea, as team Kitten will have a substantial number of these things to sort through on the 24th¹.

Is this all just a case of preaching to the converted? Sure, everybody that’s heard about the contest is probably already in the Exploding Kittens Kult, but if this thing has legs (and it likely will), a fair number of those videos will remain on YouTube for years to come. The name of the game is Exploding Kittens for glob’s sake — somebody is going to be putting actual cats into their entry, which means there’s a nonzero chance that at least one of them goes some degree of viral and hooks in people that don’t know about the game. Yes, yes, the game went huge, but you know what’s bigger than the number of people that pledged for Exploding Kittens? People that didn’t and might become later customers.

You know what’s bigger than those future customers by orders of magnitude? People that have never even heard of the damn thing. Your friend that only reads two websites and avoids all comments. Your aunt that sends you Facebook posts that make you wish you could force Snopes into her brain by wishing. The people who have jobs and school and fewer devices and don’t get to screw around in close proximity to the internet all day. Astronauts aboard the ISS, sailors at sea, military personnel on deployment, and the ever-popular Florida Man, just back from six weeks in county lockup. The people that don’t know about a thing will always outnumber those that do (no matter how popular it is in your experience), and Lee, Inman, and Small are going to reach as many of them as humanly or kittenly possible.

Spam of the day:

So if you wish you have a wonderful dinner some evening or you have a special event to celebrate, try Gary Danko Restaurant.

I find it utterly hilarious that this text was part of a spam that was shilling for Olive Garden. Maybe they were hoping that some reflection from Danko’s Michelin stars would stick to their sad, bland, revolting (yet cheap) food-like substances? Yeesh.

_______________
¹ I know, you don’t have to watch a video to count up how many likes it’s gotten — but you do if you want to declare additional winners that tickle your fancy.

We are close to finishing up a pair of long-running creations in Webcomickia, and I thought you should know.

• For those that listen to Coffee & Cider¹, Friday’s update of Girls With Slingshots was a known quantity — a triple-size strip, a long-simmering plot point, and the melancholy landmark. As we learned around the end of last year, Danielle Corsetto is wrapping up GWS, and doing so by clearing up a final bit of backstory; namely, what’s the deal with Hazel’s dad?

  Today we meet him. Tomorrow, we’ll learn more. And in about two weeks (as that’s what Corsetto told us on C&C²), it’s all done. It is not going to be easy for Hazel to say hello, or for us to say goodbye. If you’ve read and enjoyed Girls With Slingshots for these ten or so years (and as of tomorrow, 2000 strips), it might be a good time to drop a note to Corsetto and tell her so.

• It’s been apparent that Chris Yates has been making puzzles like a madman for years now, but the past few weeks he’s thrown it into overdrive. But nothing prepared me for today’s Baffler! Monday, where Yates unveiled 50 state maps, as big a work tranche as I can recall. But what caught my attention even more than the immense volume was the text that accompanied the announcement:
  

  Here’s our last Baffler release for awhile: All 50 states, all under 40 bucks! http://www.chrisyates.net/store/puzz.html

  Did you catch the important part?

  our last Baffler release for awhile

  Yates has been doing fine motor control work for a decade now, the sort that would wear down anybody’s hands/eyes/other body parts³, so here’s hoping it’s just a case of refreshing the creative batteries and not medically mandated to avoid debilitating injuries because that would suck for all concerned. Well, except for somebody buying up a bunch of Baffler!s and selling them on eBay when Yates’s fame outstrips his output, but those people suck. So, anyway, last Baffler!s for a while. Get in on the back stock while you can.

Spam of the day:

I made a fool of myself.

No argument here.

_______________
¹ For those that don’t, it’s an approximately-weekly podcast conversation between Danielle Corsetto and Rich Stevens, named after their respective life-giving drinks; they talk about comics and whatever else pops into their heads. Also, if you don’t listen to Coffee & Cider, what the hell is wrong with you?

² She also said that Hazel’s dad was almost named Gary, about which fact there may be multiple conclusions.

³ For those that have watched his process videos, Yates has always been careful about proper eye protection, but there’s also a lot of squinting and close visual work that could lead to vision strain. The constant vibration of power tools has been known to do a number on motor and sensory nerves in hands and ears of factory workers, and I can’t imagine that Yates (powerful as he is) is immune to such rigors and dangers.

When I pointed out yesterday that it was possible for Exploding Kittens to pick up some US$600K in seven hours to become the #3 most funded Kickstarter of all time, I wasn’t entirely convinced. But there it is¹, and with just shy of 220,000 backers (Heck there were more than 200,000 in one reward tier) it has set a support record that is not likely to be broken for a long damn time. Now let’s just hope it’s as fun to play as we’re all betting.

But first, let’s let the team of principals — Elan Lee, Matthew Inman, and Shane Small — have the weekend to not think about this project, its enormous community, and the immense task they’ve taken on of making sure everybody’s happy². Lee estimates that will take him the next two years.

• Hey look at that — the Nebula Award nominations are out and Ursula Vernon recognized the Short Story category for Jackalope Wives, a cracker of a tale about skin-walking and Vernon’s latest excellent take on a feisty wise old woman (cross reference here). I haven’t read the other nominees in the category so I can’t say that Jackalope Wives is the best story in the bunch, but it is damn good and worthy of your time.
• Uh-oh. Howard³ is planning something. Take care around your wallets, whatever he makes is going to look alway appealing, and it’ll no doubt regular readers & book buyers to make new purchases, and then he’ll do the I got paid three times dance. Last time that happened, I had to buy him a smoothie while we dodged a massive zombie walk snarling the Gaslamp district of San Diego.

Spam of the day:

Online Married Ladies Seek Immediate Offline Boinking*.

I do not want to know what kind of clarification is hiding in that footnote.

_______________
¹ And there’s still a week or so before the final figure gets adjusted due to failed payments.

² Which may be considerable. How many people in the world do you figure are complete and utter dicks about the smallest things, the ones who will complain and whine and make your life miserable, particularly if they figure that you’re faceless and remote and have infinite resources and why are you oppressing them? One in a thousand? One in two thousand?

By those extremely optimistic projections, Lee & Company will have to deal with literally hundreds of miserable sumbitches on the internet. Delivery delayed by a day? Box a little dented? Color scheme not perfectly as imagined? They’re going to be dealing with that for potentially years, so it is my sincere hope that the EK team spends at least 10% of the funds raised on whatever they find pleasurable and distracting.

³ Evil twin, etc.

It’s Thursday. We could all use a little uplift today, so let’s look at some critical and popular successes.

• Following up on yesterday’s story about The Sculptor becoming a movie, we have the closest thing we’re going to get to an insider view of what happens when your creative child gets adopted by the studio system.

  Lucy Bellwood has a unique point of view on Hollywood — her mother is a script analyst, and her father one the screenwriters of Highlander¹, so she can tell you from long experience what Hollywood bought your thing and now it’s going to be a movie! is like, and she shares it in comic form at The Nib. It’s not pretty.

  Don’t get me wrong; should a movie of The Sculptor actually ever be made — and that’s years down the road at the very least — I will be there on opening night, happy to see what got made. But unlike a big-screen version of characters defined with broad strokes and a few zillion plotlines to mine (see: any superhero movie), a story with a beginning, middle, and end is far more likely to end up significantly changed². I’m cautiously optimistic, and overwhelmingly glad that the movie version won’t ever cause the print copy to disappear from my bookshelf.

• In about eight hours, we’ll find out exactly how huge a success the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter has been. As of this writing, they are probably going to cross the US$8 million mark in the next hour, and are about 500 backers from the 200,000 threshold. To put those numbers in perspective no wait scratch that, in the time I took to write that sentence things have changed. Literally in the two minutes that I looked away from the campaign page, the funding level jumped by about US$40,000 and the backer level by more than 800. They’re now over eight actual megabucks and 200K backers.

  To again attempt to put that in perspective, Exploding Kittens has the #4 all-time highest funds raised record on Kickstarter (and it’s not inconceivable it might raise the US$600K to become #3) and is by far the most-backed project ever. Right now, Exploding Kittens has eclipsed the Reading Rainbow (formerly #1) backer count by not quite 95,000 people, and has an even shot of outright doubling the onetime record.

  Here’s hoping that whole West Coast port-worker slowdown thing is resolved by the time that Exploding Kittens gets put on a container ship (I am presuming it will be printed in China, but with this kind of money, stateside manufacture might actually be economically possible), because otherwise a few hundred thousand pissed-off nerds are gonna be looking for some longshoremen and stevedores to beat up until their rewards fall out.

Spam of the day:

Oprah prevents carbs

I’m speechless. Who knew that Oprah could operate at a metabolic level?

______________
¹ The good one. Also, sadly, the sequel which was … yeesh, not good.

² Please, and I say this as somebody who enjoys his movies for what they are, don’t let Peter Jackson anywhere near The Sculptor.