XKCD BOOK PARTY: I came, I saw, I asked Randall Munroe about cocks

Here it is! Aloria's thrilling tale of being at the NYC party for the xkcd book. All your questions are answered....below!

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The xkcd book party. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Alright, maybe not. To be honest, though, I walked into this party expecting to be surrounded by the worst kind of nerd stereotype. Keep in mind that I went to an engineering school with a whopping 19% female population. I've seen the dark, stalkerish side of that world, the cheesy Monty Python references side, the "I'm better than everyone because I understand MATH" side, and the "soap? bah. I am growing anthrax in my armpits" side. Taking into consideration that was a) a party to celebrate the release of an xkcd book b) a party advertised as "Hang out with Randall Munroe!" and c) taking place on "Talk Like a Pirate Day," I had my defenses up.

I left around 6:10 and made my way to the subway. Some dude in the station was playing the Super Mario Bros. theme song on steel drums. I dropped a dollar in his case and thought "OH GOD, IT'S ALREADY BEGUN."

Arriving at and gaining access to the party location was pretty unremarkable. My first stop was the bar, as I knew I would need some serious hooch to get me through the evening and also over that speedbump of social anxiety that seems to plague most every nerd. The party was eerily quiet as people sipped their first drink of the evening. I noticed a disproportionate number of wine drinkers; I had this pegged for a beer crowd but only saw about 4 people with bottles throughout the night. As people became more, erm, socially lubricated (ew!,) conversations started to flow, mostly related to what we all did for a living, what everyone thought of The Watchmen, and our surprise at how inexpensive tickets ended up being. Only a handful of people wore xkcd shirts, nobody showed up with a black hat, and with the exception of a goth girl decked out in petticoat and corset, the party looked more like a career networking event than a celebration of a book release.

Throughout all this, there was no sign of Randall. Surprisingly, nobody really seemed all that interested in meeting him. I spotted him about two hours into the party, as we got closer to what was vaguely referred as the "presentation." He quietly approached the snack table, loaded up on cheese and crackers, and left. He could have been any other person there. He was not mobbed by drooling fans; I doubt if anyone even batted an eye at his presence.

TL;DR FOLKS: THIS IS WHERE THINGS START GETTING GOOD.

The evening ended with the "presentation"-- basically the event organizers telling us about Room to Read, Randall doing a little speech and a Q&A, and finishing with an auction. Readers will be comforted to know that NO, the school will NOT be named after xkcd, though there will be a plaque hung somewhere which mentions it. Randall repeated his opinion that it would be SUPER HILARIOUS to have kids work really hard on learning to read and then having no idea how to pronounce the name of their school. My eyes rolled so hard in my head that my eyelids began to cramp.

Randall's speech was run of the mill-- he'd always wanted to do a book, it was hard to do because he lost a lot of the originals, yadda yadda. He then revealed A GREAT TRUTH. You see, when Randall was a little kid, he liked to go down to the library to take out comic anthologies. Garfield anthologies. Yes, throughout the course of his childhood, Randall made a point to check out and read every Garfield book the library had to offer. There is nothing I can add to that revelation that would make it any more beautiful than it already is.

The Q&A started with some generic "quirky" questions that frankly, I don't remember, and don't feel like going back through my crappy video to transcribe. This is because, about three questions in, someone asked about the xkcdsucks blog.

AND I GOT VIDEO OF IT.



Is there really any more I can say? I mean, I basically had my job done for me. I did get to ask a question, which was "So far to count you have drawn 2 pictures of below the waist and 1 above the waist female genitalia. Do you have any plans to show your female readers some love and draw some male genitalia?"

Randall's response: "I wanted to, but then they kicked me out of TGI Fridays!" Then he stood there, thinking intently, for a few moments. I got video of that, too.



A few more questions were asked, including "who is Megan?" (Randall claims the name is just a female name he picked and not of anyone real,) and then the auction began. The top two bidders each won a one-on-one lunch with Randall, at $375 and $350 each, respectively. I put in a bid somewhere around the $200 mark thinking it would be cute to do an xkcdsucks interview, but was not willing to fork out more than that, even for epic lulz.

The second auction was for a commissioned drawing by Randall, which ended up going for $700. Now, the winner can have Randall draw anything he wants, but the fact that someone was willing to pay that much for work by an artist whose specialty is stick figures... well, I'm sure you guys will have a great time with the snark potential therein.

With all that out of the way, we were left to collect our choice of free tshirts (Mine: "Stand back! I know regular expressions,") prints ("sudo make me a sandwich,") and xkcd books. They ran out of pre-signed books about halfway through, leaving the other 30 or so of us to stand in a line to get Randall to sign our copies. I thought I'd wait, thinking this would be a good opportunity to give him the hilarious book you guys put together. However, after standing there for about a half hour, the line hadn't moved. Randall was still chatting with the event organizers. On top of that, one of the dudes standing in line with me smelled like he hadn't mastered the concept of toilet paper. Luckily, I found a friendly waiter who agreed to take my parcel and deliver it to Randall. Whether it made it to him, was accepted, or was read will remain a mystery. However, I think I got my money's worth.
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A thousands thanks to Aloria for doing all this. I think the conclusion to the story with our book (which will be put on the blog in finalized form soon) is rather fitting and nice; Aloria tried to get it to him but we don't even know if it worked. Hopefully those of you who had worried about this operation/ thought we shouldn't do it are ok with how things turned out. Certainly aloria didn't embarrass him, and if thinking about this site ruined his day, it was because of that other guy who asked about us, not Aloria. So I think we are pretty good.