Pop Haydn's Teleportation Device at the FAKE Gallery

Pop Haydn entertains at the Machine of Death Variety Show last night at the FAKE Gallery

Nancy Magill and I had a wonderful time last night at the FAKE Gallery on Melrose. It was a great event to celebrate the success of the Machine of Death (MoD).

There were lots of refreshments, magic, music by Lucciana Costa, games and actual operating steampunk contraptions, all in a wonderful environment, a trove of strange and interesting art and sculpture–what a fun time!

Video of the entire event here:

http://machineofdeath.net/mod-magic-variety-show

Machine of Death is an anthology of short stories edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki !, inspired by this episode of Ryan’s Dinosaur Comics. From January 15, 2007, through April 30, 2007, Ryan, Matt, and David invited everybody in the world to submit short stories for the book, without fee or prejudice. Hundreds of writers from five continents took them up on the offer.

Ryan, Matt and David chose their favorites from the nearly 700 submissions, and invested personal funds to pay each contributor. The manuscript was shopped for several years to agents and publishers who liked it, but were unable to sell a book full of material by largely-unknown writers.

Faced with this rejection, the editors self-published the book and, on October 20, 2010, announced that October 26 — six days later — would be MOD-Day, in which they encouraged everybody to buy the book from Amazon at once in an attempt to become, for one day at least, Amazon’s #1 best-selling book.

On October 26, exactly that happened. The book shot up the charts and hit #1 in all categories, staying there for approximately 30 hours.

On October 28, the editors got wind that Glenn Beck, on his radio program, called out MOD as being part of a “liberal culture of death” — for beating his own book (which had apparently been released the same day) to #1 on Amazon. We continue to find this hilarious.

On November 2, 2010, the manuscript was placed online, in PDF form, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 license. That means you can (and should!) read, copy, and distribute all the stories for free.

There is also an ongoing audiobook version, which is being released as a free podcast.

For more info, go here:

http://machineofdeath.net/about/

About the FAKE Gallery:

http://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/comedy/venue/1%3A6253/fake-gallery

Pop Haydn

www.pophaydn.com