Signing
Started: 2022-10-02 21:08:15
Submitted: 2022-10-02 22:09:26
Visibility: World-readable
Seeing Randall Munroe for a live and in-person book signing
Internet cartoonist Randall Munroe, best known for xkcd, came to Santa Cruz in September to promote his new book What If 2. I decided we ought to take the whole family, because Julian has listened to the audiobooks What If and How To on repeat and seemed to enjoy them, carrying an aging iPad around the house in its protective case like a boombox on his shoulder. (At the moment Julian is listening to the Wings of Fire series on repeat, but he did listen all the way through What If 2 before we even went to the book signing.)
(This happened to be the same day I got my bivalent COVID-19 booster, but this time around I didn't have much of a reaction to the shot.)
The book event was hosted by Book Shop Santa Cruz but held off-site at Hotel Paradox. We arrived in time for the event but the ballroom was packed, but we did manage to find four adjacent seats in the last row. The talk featured Randall talking with author Raina Telgemeier. She asked various questions and read questions from the audience. (One of the questions was, "Are you really a stick figure?" He answered, "No, I'm more three-dimensional in real life," despite his appearance in the author photo in the books.)
The talk wrapped up and the event transitioned to the signing. The tickets for the signing line were distributed in lettered groups based on how early one arrived to the event. We had group D, which portended a long wait behind everyone else who had arrived before us, until the bookshop's owner spotted our small school-aged kid and let us go stand in line at the end of group B, in hopes of not staying up too late on a school night.
It was almost 21:00 by the time we reached the front of the line. I bought a copy of Thing Explainer at the event, which had come pre-signed but Randall added a personalization, while I asked him about sharing a birthday with the Loma Prieta earthquake. (I also brought my copy of What If to be signed.)
To get four tickets for the event we ended up with two copies of the new book, so we distributed one copy each to Calvin and Julian and had them personalized to each of them. For Julian's book, Randall drew a hat on the stick figure attached to his signature, presumably turning the stick figure into his own evil avatar.
(In this picture we see Calvin wearing a Google SRE t-shirt, from a time when someone opened the storage closet and found extra shirts to give away, but the most commonly-used shirts were gone and all that was left was the very smallest shirts. None of the shirts fit me, but Calvin is now large enough to wear adult small and extra-small t-shirts, so I picked one up for him. (At age thirteen, Calvin is now the size of a small adult, though he presumably will still grow into his full adult size in the next few years.)
With our books signed and personalized we departed, getting Julian into bed late but after the kids' first book signing experience.
