Entries Tagged 'announcements' ↓
December 16th, 2009 — announcements, xkcd book
Sales continue to grow for xkcd: volume 0 and the breadpig thought it was about time we gave thanks to all the kind readers who publicly reviewed the book. All of these great reviews no doubt helped spread the word.
If we missed your review – let us know!
And here’s a bonus review from Barklund.org, who explained the unique page-numbering system.
December 11th, 2009 — announcements, xkcd book
XKCD VOLUME 0: THE SIGNING
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 26-100, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
We had an extremely successful book tour shortly after the release of xkcd: volume 0 that raised enough money to build breadpig’s xkcd school in Laos. And we’re grateful to all of you who showed up to support xkcd and this project.
But we didn’t make it to Boston/Cambridge, which is particularly ironic because xkcd lives there. Well, now’s your chance to meet Randall Munroe and pick up a special last minute autographed gift for someone special (or yourself, who, for all we know, is also special). Here’s the facebook event page if you’re into that sort of thing – we couldn’t have pulled this off without the help of the MIT Bookstore (first University bookstore to carry xkcd: volume 0), Berkman Center, and the folks behind ROFLCon (where you can see Randy again in April 2010).
December 3rd, 2009 — announcements
Rather ironically, I suppose, breadpig is a big fan of Buy Nothing Day. The rest of the year, we’d love for you to buy our products, though. But more to the point, if you can avoid traditional commercial gifts this year, the breadpig wholeheartedly supports you. Consider sending someone a kiva gift certificate (or making a donation to their favorite non-profit in their name), or creating something (even if you’ve got no talent, even something like baking is doable and oh so rewarding – especially if you, say, baked a pig-shaped bread loaf), or charting the perfect quest for a night of D&D, planning a hike, or making some music, or promising to turn off your computer & phone for an entire weekend (this is quickly getting too personal).
Anyway, now on to the hypocrisy: If you are interested in buying something commercial, maybe something a little unique, there’s quite a few great candidates at the breadpig store. And we hear LOLmagnetz have been another big hit on ThinkGeek this year. Lastly, there’s always xkcd: volume 0, which ought to be on every self-respecting geek’s wishlist.
While we support (and frankly, are awed by) your choice to Buy Nothing this holiday season, if you do want to buy something this year, consider breadpig – because it’ll be doing more than just commercialism. Happy holidays!
October 13th, 2009 — announcements, not being evil, xkcd book
via blag.xkcd.com:
Sales of the xkcd book continue to be quite strong thanks to glowing reviews (thank you!). And the breadpig recently learned that we’d raised enough from our fundraising book tour to get the xkcd school built!
Now we need your help to dedicate it. You see, each school will have a permanent plaque installed with whatever Randall chooses. Leave your suggestions in the comments of his blag entry and we’ll report back to you later this week when xkcd chooses the final dedication.
October 2nd, 2009 — announcements, not being evil, xkcd book
We couldn’t have done it without you. We aimed to raise $32,000 for Room To Read to construct The Kengthan Incomplete Primary School in Laos (don’t be troubled about the ‘incomplete’ part, that’s just a tricky translation from Lao to describe the education level – it’s going to be 100% complete when it’s built). It wouldn’t be very helpful if we built a school that, for instance, were missing two walls.
Our fundraising events in New York and Silicon Valley alone brought in over $30,000 in generous donations from attendees, but we were pushed [well] over the top through book sales (all of our publisher profits are being donated to Room To Read). So even if you couldn’t attend, you helped by buying a book, and even if you didn’t buy a book, you helped by spreading the word, and if you didn’t do any of those things, that’s OK, too.
You can live vicariously through some of our event photos here.
We’ll be looking for help to write the dedication plaque to be placed in the completed school next week, but in the meantime, we thought we’d share some photos from Laos. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, the xkcd school is in Salavan Province on Road No. 13 South. (Breadpig will be doing a site inspection next year once construction is complete).
Here is their current school.
Those aren’t skylights. The holes in the roof make rainy season rather challenging.And here’s the xkcd school – already under construction!
So far so good.
It’s still missing a dedication plaque, but it won’t be much longer…
September 23rd, 2009 — announcements, xkcd book
Thank you! I’m not sure if this would rank xkcd: volume 0 on the New York Times bestseller list, but we’re certainly pleased with your response to the book. Our events in New York, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley were all packed with eager xkcd fans and we hope you had as much fun at them as we did. Photos to come.
We’re still getting final numbers on how much money we’ve raised for Room to Read to build our xkcd school is Laos; in the meantime, here’s a photo of the first signing Randall ever did for a robot.
Thanks again for hosting us, Anybots!
September 19th, 2009 — announcements, sightings, xkcd book
When the book was first announced in the New York Times, the very first bookstore to email us to stock xkcd: volume 0 was Borderlands Books, a San Francisco geek institution. Not only were we thrilled to have our book on their shelves, we could hand-deliver the first batch — they’re only a few blocks away from breadpig HQ.
The cats were feeling frisky when we dropped off their shipment and it seemed fit to mark the occasion with a few snapshots. If you’re ever in the Mission neighborhood of SF, there’s no shortage of independent bookstores, but there’s only one geek mecca known as Borderlands. Give it a visit, say ‘Hi’ to the hairless cats and maybe pick up a copy of xkcd: volume 0. Or if you hate real-life, follow them on the twitter.
hairless cat is quietly judging you for only buying one copy
September 15th, 2009 — announcements, xkcd book
It’s out! xkcd: volume 0 is available for $18. We came in $1 under our target price. There’s also an option to get your copy with an autograph from Randy (ideal if you can’t make our initial fundraiser book tour). [Sorry for not making it more clear in this entry, but it was a limited time offer. It was so popular, though, that we're thinking of doing it again near year's end.] And yes, as you may have heard, all of breadpig’s profits are going toward Room to Read. Our aim is to have enough money raised by the end of the tour to build a school in Laos that we’ll dedicate to xkcd, or maybe we’ll leave the dedication to xkcd readers…
September 8th, 2009 — announcements, xkcd book
Can’t make it on the tour? Grab the book here, get a bunch of friends together, and roleplay.
Dates of the xkcd book tour:
Sept 19th @ 18:30 – New York (R2R event) [waitlist online]
Sept 21st @ 18:00 (VIP), 19:00 for all – San Francisco (EFF event) [get tickets]
Sept 22nd @ 19:00 – Silicon Valley (R2R) [get tickets]
We’re looking at a mid-September release date for xkcd: volume 0. Now that it’s in the hands of the printers, we thought it was time to announce the xkcd book tour, a series of stops where you’ll not only get a chance to meet and chat with Randall, but also help a couple great non-profits.
As publisher, breadpig’s goal is to build a school in Laos with its profits from the book. But with xkcd’s help, we’re hosting some great fundraising events in New York (Sept 19) and Silicon Valley (Sept 22) where your ticket price helps get us even closer to that goal. Room To Read is the fantastic non-profit doing all the real work here and we’re thrilled to be working with them.
Tickets are now on sale for the above events, using a variant of the Dutch auction for maximum win. Check it out. And good luck!
Our defenders of digital freedom, EFF, is handling the event in San Francisco, but there’s a special geeky portion of this event that involves a reddit-powered interview. Got a question for Randall? Ask it here!
July 22nd, 2009 — LOLmagnetz project, announcements
Alas, breadpig, while a full-time hero to the world, has its day-to-day operations handled only on a part-time basis – if that. But the SF/SPCA and EFF alike have benefited from what was a pretty successful year. Drawing from a year with $30,000 in profits, breadpig donated $15,000 to the SF/SPCA with profits derived from the sale of some magnetic LOL speak poetry called LOLmagnetz. With the hope that others will consider replicating the breadpig model, we thought we’d share what we learned.
The economy may have been tanking, but despite that (or maybe because of it) people were looking to spend $19.99 on magnetic poetry in pidgin English. If you don’t know about LOLcats, take a moment to educate yourself, and perhaps you’ll see why people would want to adorn photos of pets or relatives with such captions. Yes, what had originated on 4chan was now going to cover dorm refrigerators nationwide.
Like most good ideas, this one came up over a few beers. I was getting a round with breadpig partner, S.I. Newhouse. Discussing new product ideas to complement our existing unholidaycards, he suggested the idea — if they could make magnetic poetry for The “F” Word, surely someone would want it for LOLspeak.
It was many months before we finally got the chance to track down a supplier (not knowing anything about the magnet business, I ordered a kit of traditional magnetic poetry and found their supplier with a Google search). From there, we aimed to be ready in time for the first ROFLCon. I’d been invited as a panelist and moderator — coincidentally, to moderate the LOLpanel. It seemed like the ideal place to announce and perhaps peddle our wares.
The conference arrived, and like most projects, we had hit some delays and only had a few kits ready. At that point, it just made the most sense to create tiny gift sampler bags with 10-15 magnets in each. We lugged a few hundred that we hand-packed up to Boston and distributed them widely throughout the con with an additional magnet instructing people that they’d be for sale soon. In fact, Scott Beale of LaughingSquid was the first to ever report on them.
It just so happened that Ben Huh, founder of icanhascheezburger was also at the conference – on that aforementioned LOLpanel in fact. A month or so after our debut at ROFLCon, he had produced his own version. These kits are smaller and cheaper, but it turns out we even shared the same supplier, who confirmed that these had been ordered shortly after our own.
Well, that’s business for you. We knew we had to make up for lost time and S.I.’s brother Ben (another breadpig partner) finalized our 384-word corpus while S.I. wrote up the instructions and I created some suitable box art (story of our first model-cat here – with pics!).
We’d long ago registered the LOLmagnetz.com domain and Chris Slowe (the 4th partner) hacked our open-source reddit code into a site where anyone could submit, vote, and comment on photos of LOLmagnetz creations.
It wasn’t long until the first kits were ready to ship — we just had no idea where to. Distribution of shirts has no problem starting from one’s apartment, but the weight and scale of all those LOLmagnetz kits posed a problem. Furthermore, we didn’t have the market strength of icanhascheezburger, a community of rabid LOLcat fans. And that’s when S.I. had his next great LOL-idea: ThinkGeek.
It started with a few emails and maybe even a voicemail, but I got in contact with a buyer there who loved the idea. ThinkGeek made their first order near the end of the fall, just as global economies were collapsing and the world needed LOL more than ever. They would make a number of subsequent orders, much to breadpig’s delight.
ThinkGeek’s support was invaluable, going so far as to feature LOLmagnetz twice in their much-anticipated catalogs and sales have continued well past the holiday season. I wish there were more time to focus on growing it, but things like a LOLmagnetz.com redesign will have to wait. In the meantime, maybe we can encourage someone to try something equally as zany.
As appealing as digital is for most of us, there’s still very much a place for tangible stuff. And it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got any experience making it or selling it (though it doesn’t hurt). A good idea, some work, and a bit of Googling is enough to bring something to fruition.
Let us know if you’d like elaboration on any of the above or share a related story of your own in the comments.
