This is the livestream window for the first-ever Machine of Death Half-Birthday Party and Talent Show. (If you’re reading this in a feed, click through to the post to see the window.) Right now it’s dark, because it’s not showtime! But I wanted to embed it here on the site in advance. It’ll light up when it’s time for the show. Update: Now it’s the recorded show! It’s almost the whole thing, it cuts out near the end due to Ustream recording limits. But we’ll be posting videos online soon!

The show will be on Tuesday, April 26, 2011, beginning at 8pm Pacific time. We’ll probably have the stream running a little in advance, so pop in a bit early in case Ustream makes you watch an ad first.

During the show, please tweet your thoughts using #MachineofDeath — you can also search for #MachineofDeath to see what other folks are saying! As I host the show, I’ll periodically check in on Twitter and read some of my favorite tweets aloud. You’re part of the show too! Tweeting is your talent.

Or, if you’re near Los Angeles, we’d absolutely love to have you attend the show in person. Admission is free! Here’s the details.

WHERE:

The Fake Gallery, 4319 Melrose Ave, Hollywood

View Larger Map

I have been told that street parking is free after 6pm, and fairly abundant. If you have ever been to Hollywood before, I know this is hard to believe.

WHEN:

April 26, 2011
8pm showtime
Doors open at 7:30. Come early to grab free birthday cake and snacks!
Here is a Facebook invite, if you want to RSVP.

WHAT:

I’ve been working very hard on making this a cool show, and while certain things will remain under wraps until showtime, here are a few things you can expect:

• the aforementioned birthday cake
• the opportunity to get your copy of the book signed by at least three contributors
• free death readings (prediction cards you can take home with you)
• first looks at a prototype new product not available anywhere else
• the opportunity to win free stuff by participating in the show
• mass enjoyment, of course!!

WHO:

The show will feature many performers and performances, among them:

• A live performance of “Boom! And a Bear Comes Out”, by me. I’m perfectly willing to humiliate myself onstage before I ask anyone else to take that plunge.

• A death-prediction-based longform improv set by the famous Mission IMPROVable troupe “The Grind.” I’ve been watching these guys play every week at Westside Comedy Theater for several months now, and they’re just phenomenal.

• A live reading of Jeffrey Wells’ MoD story “TORN APART AND DEVOURED BY LIONS,” by public-radio and comedy-podcast superstar/magnate Jesse Thorn.

• A drawing game that shares everything with Pictionary® except the trademarked name, featuring audience members playing along with L.A. cartoonists Kevin McShane and Keith Knight!

• And of course: the amazing talents of MoD readers. Music, monologues, animation, comedy and more, from performers including Carla Barton, Zachary Bernstein, Matt Bixler, Brett Donnelly, Tim Karplus, Christina Major, Sam McLean, and Cory O’Brien.

• After all that, you’ll be free to go home. IF YOU CAN.

WHY:

I hope you’ll tune in and watch the show live! But if you’re at all able to, I’d really love for you to come out in person. I know it’s a lot to ask on a weeknight. But a live show is a living thing — it absolutely gets better with a good audience. The energy in the room gets charged in a wonderful way.

I’m super-excited to put on the show, and it’ll be fun for me no matter who shows up, but I want to make it an extra-special time for our performers too, one of whom is coming all the way from Phoenix to attend. Please join me in providing these great folks — who took the time to create something new and special simply because I asked them to! — with the friendly, supportive audience they deserve. I want our stage to be a magical place, a place where someone who took the initiative to make something gets rewarded.

See you at the show!

Wow, what an incredible response we’ve had to the hardcover MOD collector’s edition! We sold through the collector’s sets in just a few days. Thanks so much — we really hope you enjoy them! So far you seem to be, as evidenced by:

• this beautiful picture from drmath
• this incredibly dramatic version from HootieD
• and this chilling glimpse of the future from maxelman

We’ve also had a great response to the free death card offer. Here are just a few of the letters we’ve received:

And don’t worry, we will absolutely be sharing all the cool stuff we’ve received with you. But first, a word about the upcoming…

Talent Show

The Machine of Death Half-Birthday Party and Talent Show will be held April 26, at The Fake Gallery in Hollywood, CA. Doors open at 7:30 and the show starts at 8. We’d absolutely love for you to come to the show! But if you can’t, we’ll also be livestreaming the event right here on the blog.

Also here is a Facebook thing! Let us know if you’re coming!

Due to taxes and stuff, we have decided to extend the deadline for submitting auditions until April 20. So you’ve got just under a week left to submit an act for the show.

What are we looking for?

It could be a song, a dance number, a reading, a poem, a video or animation or slideshow…anything you can do in under five minutes that’s somehow MOD-related. We’ll be putting the best acts on stage (or playing them on video), and we’re even going to award a prize to the audience’s favorite act!

There are a couple of bedrock, fundamental ideas behind Machine of Death. One is the most obvious: together, we can do great things. MOD-Day proved that.

There are also the questions about mortality raised by the premise of the book, which we all find pretty compelling.

But another is the notion of the value of the individual — the dozens of non-celebrities, non-famous people who wrote the great stories that we got to discover and share with the world. This is the basic promise of the Internet: the level playing field, the crumbling of barriers to entry, the chance for the little person to make a big impact.

In practice it doesn’t always work out that way, of course. Most amateur work is pretty bad, and even a lot of professional work can be kind of stinky.

There’s no shortcut to success — the only thing that gets you close is a persistent pursuit of fearless self-improvement. But, fine. What then?

What happens when there is something good?

There are a lot of answers to that question, but ours personally is “we give it a chance.” The Talent Show is one of those chances. Make something cool, and we’ll do whatever we can to show it to as many people as possible and reward you for it. That’s all there is to it.

And if you can’t make something cool — if you make something and it sucks to high heaven — for God’s sake make it anyway. That is how you learn how to make something cool! By making sucky things long enough that you get all the suck out of your system. So don’t worry about that. You’ll get there. Do it anyway.

Like me:

Boom! And a Bear Comes Out from David Malki ! on Vimeo.

(Download the MP3)

It just has to be better than this. THAT SHOULD NOT BE HARD.

…Seriously, anyone who’s shared a table with me at a convention for the past year knows that the hook to this song has been running through my mind for a while now. But it’s very rare that silly things like this ever crawl up the priority list to “DROP EVERYTHING AND DO THIS.” This blog post was my excuse to finally finish the song.

I am hereby giving you the Talent Show as an excuse to do the awesome thing you’ve been waiting for a reason to do!

To submit an act for the Talent Show:

Email submit at machineofdeath dot net with a link (audio or video) of your act. If you are local to Los Angeles and would like to perform on stage if chosen, please specify that. If you would rather we play the video you send, please specify that!

The deadline to email is midnight Pacific time, April 20.

That is not much time! Get on it!

If you need inspiration, you can send away for a free Death Card, download our free PDF, buy our newly-discounted ebooks, or just go outside for a walk! Look at the trees. Try to find people in them. What are they saying to each other? To you?

The one outside my window is gently sighing in the wind: “piiizzzzzaaaaa”

I and several of the MOD artists will be at the MoCCA Art Festival in Manhattan this weekend! It’s a two-day congregation of cartoonists, artists, and generally interesting people. In attendance will be at least:

me, David Malki !
artist Aaron Diaz
artist Kate Beaton
artist Jess Fink
artist Scott C.
artist Dorothy Gambrell
artist Christopher Hastings
artist Carly Monardo

We also have a new Contributors page that tells you more about all these lovely people!!

Come to the TopatoCo booth — L10 — to find most of the people listed above and/or pick up a free Death Prediction Card. Just say the secret words: “How do I die?”

You can also follow that link to see how to get a free card by mail! Either way we have you COVERED as far as getting a free card goes. You can MAKE IT HAPPEN for yourself.

SPECIAL GUEST! On Sunday afternoon starting at 2pm, we’ll also have a special appearance by Kit Yona, author of “FUDGE.” A rare chance to get another signature in your book!

You are covering your book furiously with contributor signatures right

We decided to make some cool stuff.

Jump to: Death cards • Hardcovers • Talent show • Ebook pricing drop

I read a great article today called “Less Talk, More Rock”:

Go right from the inspiration — the vision — to actually making it. Don’t think it through. Don’t talk about it. Don’t plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that — if you can start rocking — you’ll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you’re into it.

I love this idea. I love it because it’s how I’ve always done my best work, the stuff that has a spark of spontaneity to it.

I admit to being incredibly intimidated by the scale of what’s going on with Machine of Death. I have tax paperwork on my desk right now for a company that I partially own that did not exist five months ago. We’ve passed far beyond what we’d ever thought was possible, so now it’s a matter of figuring out next steps — or all of a dozen different next steps.

The tough part isn’t just keeping those dozen balls juggling in the air; it’s dealing with the perception that all of these balls are delicate rare eggs, and thus that any potential move has a million wrong moves for every right one.

The danger of this fear is that the eggs, rather than being juggled, might instead be passed from hand to hand slowly and carefully, with a lot of questions and discussion and hand-wringing first, with plans extensively written to someday throw some eggs into the air… and meanwhile the eggs sit there spoiling while the plan is being written.

This fear, this creeping, paralyzing fear, crawls into the back of my mind all the time. But the irony is that for all the energy spent on deliberation, everything that’s the least bit interesting about Machine of Death is the stuff that we’ve just decided to do.

The Amazon campaign was conceived on a whim — heck, the entire book was conceived on a whim.

The carefully plotted print-media publicity strategy, however — which involved more effort and money than I care to discuss — took many weeks longer to get off the ground than anticipated. And by the time it did, nobody in the media cared about a book that, at that point, had been out for months.

Obviously there are a lot of factors involved, and the traditional media has a lot on its plate, and loads of books get overlooked in the best of circumstances. And who knows if it would have mattered anyway. The point is that, if you simply look at the stats, we have done far better by following whims than by executing carefully-planned strategies, for the simple reason that the strategies eat up time. Matt, Ryan and I love discussing ideas. And letting all the steam out of an idea by talking about it means it’s harder to ever do it. Energy that could be channeled into action sometimes gets channeled instead into hand-wringing.

So we decided to just do some stuff. We now have a little money to play around with — not very much (we funneled most of our immediate profits back into printing more books), but since we all have other jobs and none of our mortgages are riding on this project, we want to play around a little, to buy ourselves a little adventure. Here’s what we’ve done.

Death Prediction Cards

There are ninety-nine different ones. They all have a method of death printed on them. What are they useful for? I don’t know. Bookmarks? Scoop up dog poop off the sidewalk? Flash it to a cop to get out of a speeding ticket? The choice is yours.

How do you get one? Simple:

• Buy something from TopatoCo. Anything at all. You can buy a copy of our book, or something from Wondermark or Dinosaur Comics, or anything else at all. The cheery TopatoCo staff are dropping individual random cards into all orders, while supplies last.

• Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

Machine of Death Card
2554 Lincoln Blvd #214
Venice, CA 90291

And all we ask is that you include something. A note, a poem, a drawing, a piece of grass from your town. If you’re not in the US and don’t have access to US postage, send a self-addressed envelope along with something worth about a dollar, and we’ll call it even. We just want to see something from you. Call it a trade.

• Come see us in person. Anytime the official MOD blog or Facebook account mentions an appearance or signing, take it for granted that we’ll have death cards there to give away. If you can’t come in person, send a friend!

What are these cards good for? No idea. Why did we make them? Because it was cool.

Limited-Edition Hardcovers

Speaking of cool! If you need a suggestion of something specific to buy from TopatoCo, this is our official answer.

The Machine of Death Limited-Edition Hardcover has been printed in a strictly exclusive run of 300 copies. Update: which are all gone! The regular edition is still available though! The title is impressed with die-cut silver foil on the spine and cover, and all the titles of all the stories are printed subtly on the cover as well. The book has no other exterior text or branding. Every copy will be hand-numbered on the title page.

I personally have worked super hard on this book, obsessing over details like choosing the paper stock for the endpapers (FiberMark Multicolor® Espresso) to the color of the stitching of the internal spine (Blaze Red).

And because of the limited nature of this edition, we wanted to package it with something else special and unique — so I designed both a customizable Certificate of Predicted Death and an embroidered patch with a Machine of Death logo.

The seals on the certificate are created with a custom embosser. Why did I make a custom embosser with the MOD logo? I couldn’t honestly think of a reason not to.

All three of these items — the numbered hardcover, the patch, and a customized certificate made out in your name — are bundled together as the MOD Collector’s Set. They’ll only be available while supplies last. So if you think these things are as cool as we do, you should buy them while you can! Update: They’re all gone! The regular edition is still available though!

Machine of Death Collector’s Set: Available right now at TopatoCo Sold out!

The Talent Show

Another thing I wanted to do was put on a show! We never had a real “release party” of any sort with MOD, because its release was so internet-centered — I guess you could call October 26 the Virtual Release Party. It was plenty fun, don’t get me wrong! But I got it into my head to do something more tangible, something with a stage and an audience and, I don’t know, snacks. So I’m going to!

On April 26, 2011, we’ll be celebrating MOD’s six-month birthday with a party and live comedy show. The show will be held in Los Angeles and will be free to attend. It will also be streamed live online, so everyone around the world can watch and participate live on Twitter.

The lineup of the event will include:

1. A live reading from MOD by Semi-Famous Person ?????

2. A game of MOD Pictionary featuring audience volunteers playing with Celebrity Cartoonists ????? and ?????

3. A comedy performance by Famed Improv-Troupe ?????

4. A talent show featuring you! Prizes will be awarded!

5. Multiple contributors will be in attendance to sign your books!

6. Finally, we’ll close out the night with ?????, in which everybody present will go home with a ?????

The Talent Show is the part I’m most excited about — we want to put you up on stage and make your creativity part of the event! Just submit an audition of whatever you want to perform. Anything is allowable — a song, a performance, a reading, a dance, a video, you name it. The guidelines are:

• The act can be a maximum of five minutes in length (shorter, punchier = better)
• Related somehow to MOD or to the concept of a death prediction
• Performable in front of mixed company (no nudity, Nazi uniforms, or both)
• If you want to perform live, you must be willing to come to Los Angeles. Otherwise, we can show a video.

Send your audition (which, if you can’t attend in L.A., will be the video we show) to: submit at machineofdeath dot net. A link to YouTube or Vimeo or something is fine. Video is strongly preferred, but audio is okay if it’s a song or reading or something audio-only. Submissions that do not include a video or audio clip will not be considered.

Why submit an audition? Well, we’ll be putting you on stage, in front of tons of other people and the internet, endorsing you with our brand, and if you’re really good we’ll ask you to be part of our regular lineup as we put together future shows. Plus the audience will vote on prizes to be awarded to all performers!

It’s gonna be pretty cool.

The deadline for submitting an audition is April 18. That’s not very long! Get going!

Ebook pricing drop

We mentioned this before, but we’ve dropped the price on all our ebooks from $9.99 to $5.99. This is a temporary drop between now and the talent show — this is so folks who’d like to perform in the show, but maybe who haven’t read the book yet, can do so a little easier. To recap, we offer the following ebooks:

• Kindle version from Amazon
• Nook version from Barnes & Noble
• iBook from Apple’s iBookstore
• ePub directly from us

All $5.99, from now till April 26. So, if you have friends who’d be great on stage at our show, point them our way! We’d love to consider their audition.

And finally — thank you.

We do cool things like this because you think they’re cool too. And we want to live in a world where doing cool things is enough — where following whims to make interesting things works. It only does when other people want to live in that world too: it’s teamwork, it’s a partnership between “I had an idea, hope you like it” and “I do like that idea! I want a part of it for myself!”

So we’re doing our part, the first part. We aren’t done yet, not by a long shot. But this is a first salvo. Hope you like it all.

This weekend, the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle welcomes several Machine of Death contributors! Artists KC Green and Aaron Diaz, as well as author and co-editor David Malki !, will be at TopatoCo booth 202 all weekend. Also spread around the show will be artists Danielle Corsetto, Kris Straub, and Scott Campbell. UPDATE: And Dylan Meconis! DOUBLE UPDATE:: And Karl Kesel, Cameron Stewart, Dean Trippe, and Matt Haley!! They will sign your books! They are contractually obligated to.

Special guest! “MISCARRIAGE” author James L. Sutter will also be in attendance on Sunday, March 6th, signing books from 1-2 PM at the TopatoCo booth! Don’t miss this rare chance to fill out your MoD Contributor Signature Checklist — or at least make some progress towards ULTIMATE COMPLETION.*

Bring your own copies of MoD to be signed, or we’ll also have a limited number available for purchase directly from us with free smiles included (while supplies last). See you this weekend!

* First person to have their copy signed by every single contributor gets an AMAZING prize.