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Books

XKCD Contest Winners Force Book Tour Stop In Juneau Alaska (xkcd.com) 22

XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe says he received "a huge number of submissions" in a contest to choose an additional city for his upcoming book tour. The challenge? "Write the best story using nothing but book covers... You'll get extra credit for including as many books and people as possible." And the winning entry involved 98 people in an earnest community project featuring Alaskans young and old, in a series of four YouTube videos that lasts nearly three minutes. ("Listen to me. This idea is brilliant. Stop staring at screens. If you love me, get a life...!")

Munroe applauded their efforts in a blog post announcing their winning entry. I'm a sucker for (a) public libraries, and (b) people who get so excited about glaciers that they lose their train of thought."
Several runners-up will receive a personalized drawing of their bookstore or library -- or a signed book. Runners up include the Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minnesota, who assembled over 60 people for a story in the form of a choose-your-own adventure flowchart. And Naitian Zhou of Ann Arbor, Michigan built an interactive tool that generates arbitrary grammatical sentences by running a database of book titles through Python language tools. ("Don't judge a book by its cover," jokes its web page. "Judge it by its linguistic productivity instead!")

The How To book tour starts on September 3rd in Cambridge, and Munroe says "I'll be appearing in conversation with some very cool people, including researchers, journalists, and cartoonists. We'll be discussing How To, science, comics, the destruction of the universe, and the ethics of hitting drones with tennis balls."
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XKCD Contest Winners Force Book Tour Stop In Juneau Alaska

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  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Sunday August 25, 2019 @03:39PM (#59123582)

    XKCD Contest Winners Force Book Tour Stop In Juneau Alaska

    It appears to me that no actual force was involved.

  • I found their multiple-path storytelling a great idea. Too bad they used what could have been Amazon printouts of the book covers instead of actual books. Does "Content Bookstore" just sell pictures of books? Or maybe they just sell "This One Weird Book" or "Ten Books the Kardashians Love."
  • Oh shit. Killer fucking bears. I can see why they won

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