My name is HOVChristina Xu, and I’m the newest member of the Breadpig team. HI!

I am THIS excited to be here!

Before joining the Breadpig crew, I wrote my undergrad thesis about the history of instant messaging, and then became the Outreach Coordinator at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, a research group that built and evaluated technological platforms to inform and empower communities. On the side, I am also the proud co-founder of ROFLCon, a trustee of the Boston Awesome Foundation, one of the proprietors of a coworking space in Boston called p.irateship, part of a crew making a documentary about Chinese-Jamaicans in reggae, and a DJ for a weekly radio show called Global Frequency.

tl;dr I really love the internets, fixing the world, food (see above), and music with bass so loud it makes your organs bounce.

I’ll be doing a little of everything for Breadpig, but I’m most excited to experiment with ways of directing the goodwill, resources, and expertise of our legion towards those projects that can make the biggest impact with them. In essence, to make it easier for well-intentioned geeks to do good for the world and have fun while doing it.

We’re thrilled to have been selected to carry the Room To Read torch for this Twitter #tweet4books fundraiser!  In fact, they just reached their goal a few hours ago. Thanks to all of the RTing of #tweet4books, we’ve reached our goal of adding another 5,000 books to Room to Read’s 10,000th library!

As promised, we’re going to be letting all of you, the breadpig legion, vote on where we’ll build our next schools from our xkcd: volume 0 profits.  Stay tuned early next week for the poll.

We’re doing a long overdue redesign of breadpig.com. Things should be looking better come Tuesday. Do not be alarmed. Keep calm and carry on.

Once this is done, maybe we’ll finally update LOLmagnetz. Thanks for your patience, breadpig legion!

But if you want spoilers, dive right in to the xkcd forum thread!

This happened back on March 10th, but the breadpig just got around to putting this blog together. For what it’s worth, davean, the not-Randall-half of xkcd was alerted by this very porcine hero. But if blog entry is news to you, you obviously have better things to do than keep up with solving geeky book puzzles. Your loss.

The news scored a lot of attention on Slashdot and a Wired story. We don’t want to ruin the surprise if you’re keen on picking up a copy to try decrypting yourself, but you may want to check the spoilers as July approaches if you haven’t solved it yet…

It’s a little known fact that monkeys and breadpigs are naturally quite amicable with one another. Less known is that monkeys can be found riding breadpigs during their lunchbreaks as a means of sport, similar to that one Harry Potter plays with brooms. One result of this is the success of LOLmagnetz on ThinkGeek (who’ve been proudly carrying them for a couple years now). Most recently, we’ve had the pleasure of seeing a new addition to the ThinkGeek arsenal — xkcd: volume 0.

We’re thrilled to see xkcd on their virtual shelves and urge you all to earn some geek points and buy a few copies. Already own a copy of the book? Burn it! Gift it to a friend and buy another!

With over 25,000 copies of xkcd: volume 0 sold so far, breadpig is thrilled to announce that the xkcd school is complete!

Thanks to all of you who helped get us here. This school was built from the proceeds raised from two stops on the xkcd book tour (NYC and Mountain View). And we’re not done there!

Based on breadpig’s profits from xkcd: volume 0 sales in 2009, we’ve donated $52,961.78 to Room to Read for more schools in 2010! We’ll be letting you, the breadpig legion, vote on where and what we build in the days to come!

Ever since raising $32,000 from the fundraiser book tour, we’ve been keeping you abreast of construction as it’s progressed. And now it’s done!

Here’s the dedication plaque that adorns Kengthan Incomplete Primary School — featuring the message selected by readers of XKCD (it’s in Laotian and English).

And below are some more photos of the completed school and some of its adorable students — future xkcd readers.

Thursday Dec 17th in Cambridge, MA is your last chance in 2009 to meet Randall Munroe for a book/poster/raptor-signing. It’s a free event, so please drop by.

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.

• Legal Nomads
• Doomkopf
• BoingBoing
• xkcd sucks (yes, it was a positive review)
• PBS
• Comics Alliance
• LATimes
• Mental Floss
• ArsTechnica
• FranZone
• Richmond Magazine
• PopMatters

If we missed your review – let us know!

And here’s a bonus review from Barklund.org, who explained the unique page-numbering system.

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).

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!

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.