Breadpig Blog: Purveyor & Publisher of All Things Geek — Not Being Evil

After selling out (yay!) of the xkcd book, we had some printing delays over the last few weeks (sorry!) that have held up shipping for some of you. All books should have now been shipped, but if something seems very wrong, please forward your invoice to us. After getting your feedback on the xkcd blag, Randall chose the following dedication to be inscribed on the plaque at the entrance of the xkcd school in Laos; we think it turned out quite well: “Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses...

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.

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...

The auction got another bump from ScienceCommons before bidding ended this afternoon at $455. I trust they'll enjoy the ROFLDNA. This is breadpig's second ROFL-success (last year's ROFLaptop contest ended at $521 raised for OLPC) but this one-of-a-kind-DNA-artwork was the idea of Erik Martin, reddit community manager, troublemaker, and member of the breadpig honor guard. And the folks at DNA11 were all-stars for accommodating our rather unorthodox request -- delivering a gorgeous final product. Also, we couldn't have done it without the great folks of ROFLCON and of course, our fabulous DNA-donating Internet celebrities: A.J. "HatPerson" Mazur of Lil' Jon-Lazy...

We kept the auction period for this ScienceCommons fundraiser to a crisp 3 days. ROFLDNA has done well thus far. Thanks to breadpig's friends at Laughing Squid, ROFLCon, and all the wonderful people on the Twitter, we're looking to send a nice check to a very worthy organization. Bidding ends tomorrow (April 9th) at 14:00:20 PDT. This is a once-in-a-lifetime piece of geek memorabilia and humanities only hope for breeding a new super race of Internet meme generators. Update! ROFLDNA also got some props from Sniffing the beaker (please keep sending in other shoutouts that we missed).