all dressed up with nowhere to go

The audiobook I performed last week is called Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I don't know how many of you reading this today were around in the old days of WWdN (lots, I hope!), but if you were, you may remember when I linked to Ernie's spoken world on Fark. Ernie told me in an e-mail that he was so overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response, it gave him the courage to start the outline that would eventually become Ready Player One.

So that's kind of awesome.

Ernie wrote on his blog about the process of choosing me to perform the book, which says so many nice things about me, I can't quote it without feeling weird ... but I'll happily link to it, in the hopes that at least some of you will explore the rest of his website, because it's full of really great stuff. And, hey, Hipsters? You want to familiarize yourself with Ernie's going to blow up when this book comes out in August, so you can tell everyone that you were into him before that happened. Also, his work is just fucking brilliant.

===

I wanted to take a moment and thank the guys at UPS in Phoenix who worked so hard to find my books when they were lost during Phoenix Comicon. A bunch of drivers stayed after hours to dig though packages looking for it, and the shipping manager there worked when he wasn't on the clock to track them down. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to correct an epic failure, and I didn't find out until after the fact that they weren't in there because I was some guy with a blog, or some guy who is on TV; they were in there because I'm some guy who does a lot of work with the Child's Play charity, and one of them (who probably wants to remain anonymous) has a child who directly benefited from the things Child's Play does.

I'm sure corporate and the UPS PR department wanted this to be resolved, and I'm not going to pretend that that didn't matter, but I also know that the guys who dug through trucks in the Arizona heat on a holiday weekend were the ones who eventually got it done.

So I wanted to publicly say THANK YOU to all of them.

===

One last thing before I go (I'm supposed to be on Internet-vacation until next Saturday): my brother is frakking hilarious.