\chapter{Thanks}

When BenBiddick showed up, with enough of a sense of humor to not only
laugh along with us, but also endorse our fan-fiction to the point of
judging winners, it was feel-good thread of the year for me.  Combined
with Melodywise introducing me to beekeeping, and the revelation of
something called a ``neti pot'', I felt like I'd gotten way more than my
ten bucks out of my Something Awful Forums account.  I coughed up
another ten for a platinum upgrade (which allows a user to send and
recieve private messages), and began working on putting together an
actual book.

Thanks to all the goons who wrote the stories in the first place, and
then went through the hassle of going to a new thread to accept the
license terms.

Thanks to AYBraham for giving the idea momentum in the form of a
contest.

Thanks to BirdZerk!\ for helping me with some of the initial conversion
from the forum to LaTeX.

Thanks to Hamelin for suggesting I list the authors who still needed to
assign permission, and for telling me about Mediafire, so I could host
draft copies without letting a thousand goons know who I really am.

Thanks to benitocereno for reminding me about the "any similarities"
disclaimer, which probably has no legal weight whatsoever, but looks
cool.

Thanks to Ridgley\_Fan for submitting {\em three} git patches, one of
which contained the cool idea of putting a Beretta image on the winning
stories somewhere.

Thanks to Discount\_Bees, for doing so freaking much artwork (8 pieces!)

Thanks to Part of Everything, for doing a lot of artwork too (6 pieces),
and PMing me so much that I was unable to forget that real people were
involved with this effort.

Thanks to rinski for the foreword, just when I was feeling burned out.

Last but most, thanks to Ben Biddick for inspiring 117 crappy authors
and one crappy bookmaker to come together for a great thing.  Terrible,
yes; but great.

--- cruft, July 2009

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