Okay, so this Sunday, I'm going to have to eat 102 peeps (per earlier agreement with the nerdfighters). I would have to eat more than 300, but several nerdfighters came to my rescue and agreed to eat some Peeps on my behalf.

This means that nerdfighteria raised more than 3,000 dollars in a week to help Shawn Ahmed do cool work in Bangladesh. The money nerdfighters gave during the Great American Tour de Nerdfighting has already changed lives through a newly built pond sand filter now serving a village in rural Bangladesh.

People preparing the sand used for water filtration:


Construction on the interior:


Almost finished:


For the first time in decades, clean water for the village:


Many thanks to Shawn and Save the Children and all those involved in the construction for getting it done (on time and under budget!).

People are always trying to use sparksflyup to do, like, actual research for actual school reports and whatnot--and of course this web site is profoundly useless on that front (and also, let's fact it, on most fronts.) In an attempt to make this site more reference-oriented, above you can view the interview I did with my friend Mark Bazer as part of his amazing monthly live talk show in Chicago. Hopefully, it will tell you everything you need to know to write a research paper about me.

(I can see the papers now: "John Green drinks beer. Facebook won't allow him to have any more friends. He looks like a cheeseburger."

Well, that was fun.

(If that vivid textual description of our week in Amsterdam fails to sate you, pictures and video will follow shortly.)

Okay so: Some of you may remeber that I am obsessed with thisisnottom, a web site that initially appeared to be a series of insanely hard riddles but has since become a larger multimedia experience. Every week, a mysterious video is posted to a youtube channel called isthistom. The video leads to an address at the thisisnottom.com domain, and then you have to solve a few more riddles.

And then the riddles lead to a snippet of a story about a woman who has escaped some kind of experiment (I think) in which she was able to go on adventures with people including David Foster Wallace (I think). The woman has lost her memory and is apparently counting upon us to help her recover it. I find the story very interesting so far.

If "This Is Not Tom" continues to tell an unfolding story, it begs the question: Can a good novel be hidden inside of riddles? I'm beginning to think so, and while I know that hypertext/online-only novels are nothing new, this feels new to me. And I like it. You?

I'll be reading and signing twice in the coming days, once in my hometown and once in my favorite city ever. (

INDIANAPOLIS: This Friday, March 13th, I will be reading and talking and signing books at a fundraiser for The Second Story, an awesome nonprofit group that brings creative writing into students' lives through school programs and tutoring. The event is at 7 PM at the Harrison Center for the Arts (1505 N. Delaware). It's $5 for students; $8 for adults, and it all goes to a very worthy cause.

AMSTERDAM: That's right, Amsterdam! Thursday, March 19th. 7 PM. De Jaren (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20-22 / 1012 CP Amsterdam). Reading, signing, and a generally nerdfightastic extravaganza.

A video in which I talk about the difficulty of imagining the radically other with complexity (a theme that my poor, long-suffering readers have been force-fed for years now) and make a ridiculous commitment to eat a lot of Peeps.

You can donate here. A word of caution as always: Shawn is not a charity. The nerdfighter community pools money, and then we vote on how we want to spend that money, and then Shawn does the things we want him to do. (He keeps open books, and makes videos about each project, so we're able to follow every dollar.) For instance, right now he is in Southern Bangladesh getting a pond sand filter built in a village that hasn't had safe water in recent memory. The PSF, if properly maintained, will ensure safe water for three years. Next, he'll be rebuilding a school that was destroyed in a cyclone. To watch his progress, check out his blog or follow him on twitter.