The Family

I don’t know if any of you have heard of Wondermark or Dinosaur Comics. They’re online comics, and I find them humorous.
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php
http://wondermark.com/

About 5 years ago, the Dinosaur Comics guy wrote this little gem:
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=675

The premise (if you didn’t go to the link) is that there’s a machine that predicts, with absolute accuracy, how you will die. But even so, there’s some ambiguity. You may know .. but you’ll still be surprised.

So, after this strip came out, people kept posting story ideas and plots and such about what kind of thing the machine would predict and then what happened. And one thing lead to another, and the author of the one strip turned to the author of the other strip for help in all of it, and the stories poured in from all corners, and 5 years later (ie, now) the book was published.

Machine of Death on Amazon

Now, they couldn’t get the book published through traditional means. It was too different, too unusual, so finally they self-published and got it onto Amazon. And the dream, the impossible dream, was for their book to be the #1 seller on Amazon for a day – for just a day. So they picked a day, one that seemed fairly neutral, and posted on their blog that they’d like everyone to hold off and all buy the book on October 26th. This Tuesday. Because if all their sales were concentrated on one day … they could do this.

And you know what? They did.

I got my copy on Tuesday. By the time I got my copy, the book was already the #1 Amazon Bestseller for all books. Totally amazing. Quite the rush. The authors were just about beside themselves. It was awesome and humbling and fun and all that.

And then………

It so happened that Tuesday was a special day after all. Tuesday was the release date for Glenn Beck’s latest book. They did not know this when they picked that date. Now, Beck has apparently ALWAYS debuted at #1. Except – for the first time – this book. Where he debuted at #3. (A Keith Richards biography, also released on Tuesday, was the #2 book).

And so the next day, he ripped the book on his radio show, and characterized it as part of the left’s culture of death.

And I want to tell you that, um…our books are ALWAYS #1. And I find it REALLY fascinating, FASCINATING, that if you go to Amazon.com, Broke is number THREE. And the two books that are ahead of it — one is Keith Richards’ Life, which is getting a TON of — you know, that’s everywhere.

And then, the #1 book — TODAY, at least — is Machine of Death. And it’s a — collected stories about, you know, people who know how they’re gonna die. Haowww!

So you have DEATH — I know it’s called Life, but what a life it is, really! It’s a culture of death! OR, “How do we restore ourselves?”

These are the — this is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we’re headed? We’re headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us.

There are some pretty awesome responses to this in the blog areas for both Wondermark and Dinosaur Comics. There’s also some hilarity – and the full transcript of Beck’s rip – at http://machineofdeath.net/a/

So.

As you can imagine, this delights me to absolutely no end. I got to be part of this most amazing of things.

I may be buying more copies. If you all get a copy of Machine of Death for Christmas, you’ll know I had to do something with my surplus. Or you could get your own copy now and read it sooner.

But mostly, I just had to share this with you all. This is simply the most amazing of things.