Pulling rank

Couple of things of note today…

The beloved Kick machine sold this morning on eBay for the opening bid. No sweat there – I was happy for it to go for that much, and to a fellow arcade collector no less. I will just say that the buyer is based nearby, and I’m hoping I might be able to persuade them to bring it to OVGE one of these days. I’ll be extremely bummed to see it go – even when it hasn’t been working 100%, there’s just something about that bright, happy side art on the machine that takes the edge off of things a bit. A really happy guy (with a spiked helmet) riding a unicycle, popping balloons. If that doesn’t make you crack a smile every time you see it, I can’t help you. I’ll miss the machine though.

Other big news of the evening: VWORP!1 has apparently been chronicled in Howe’s Transcendental Toybox. Howe as in David J. Howe, co-author of all of the seven Doctor Who “Handbooks” (now out of print and hard to find) which I used as primary research material while writing the book. Howe also wrote a book chronicling Doctor Who merchandise, Howe’s Transcendental Toybox, not long before the new series started, and now that there’s new merchandise rolling in by the boatload, he’s transferred the daunting task of tracking every new bit of Who merchandise to a web archive by the same name.

As is often the case, and almost out of necessity given the amount of stuff he has to track down and catalogue (man, I wish I had his job), the page simply notes VWORP!1’s existence and repeats the back cover blurb, without any critique. In an early draft of the thanks & acknowledgements page in VWORP!1, I wrote…

For research and fact-checking, I leaned heavily on the ‘Handbook’ series by David J. Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker, as well as The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties by the same authors. Anyone professing to do any sort of guide to Doctor Who, while simultaneously claiming not to have used Howe, Stammers & Walker as a research source, is being disingenuous at best.

I backed off on including that note because, at a second glance, it seemed a bit incendiary, a little too much of a challenge that wasn’t really justified and was, perhaps, a little bit uncalled for. There are folks like Andrew Pixley (to name just one) who have written plenty of articles and books chronicling Doctor Who without leaning on Howe, Stammers & Walker; it’s just that, with the Handbook series published in the 1990s, they set the gold standard for that category of book. I won’t even claim for a second that VWORP!1 is in the same league.

Elsewhere in the multiverse, in Amazon.com’s entertainment history & criticism section…

…although I’m almost more jazzed to be 1 ranking behind William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade in the Television category…

When I checked shortly after taking these screen grabs, I saw that VWORP!1 was ranked #76,403 in books; on Amazon UK, it’s ranked #91,105.

I know these rankings are all fleeting, and that they can and will drop precipitously when the “new” shine has worn off the thing (edit: just three hours after writing this, I plunged to #121,844 in books – it was fun while it lasted! 😆 ).

But I’m enjoying it for what it is, in the moment. I promised I’d throw a party if I cracked the top quarter-million books; guess I better start printing out party hats for all the kitties. 😆