Ryan North

During his academic career, North co-authored three papers on computational linguistics.

Some of North's original comedy writing appears on the website Madhouse, including Robot Erotica,[22] and prank emails such as attempts to stop other people named "Ryan North" from using his name.[23][24]

In November 2006, Ryan North created the site Every Topic in the Universe Except Chickens,[25] which purports to provide a solution to vandalism on Wikipedia, in that it encourages vandals to vandalize only the article on chickens: "...instead of vandalizing Wikipedia in general, we all just vandalize the chicken article." North reasoned that it was worth trading the reliability of the chicken article if it meant freeing the rest of the encyclopedia from the threat of vandalism because "Dudes already know about chickens." The site received media attention.[26]

A collection of short stories titled Machine of Death was released October 2010 through Bearstache Books.[27] The book, featuring stories and illustrations by various authors and artists, was based on a Dinosaur Comics comic by North of December 5, 2005, with the premise of a machine that predicts the manner of a person's death accurately but in a difficult to understand manner.[28] North was one of its editors, and contributed one of the stories. Machine of Death reached #1 on Amazon.com, beating Glenn Beck and drawing criticism from him as exemplifying a "liberal culture of death".[29]

In November 2012, North launched a Kickstarter project to fund a book entitled To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure, a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet modelled on Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The project raised more than six times its $20,000 goal in less than a week, and closed on December 22, 2012 having raised $580,905, nearly thirty times its original goal,[30] and a record for a Kickstarter publishing project at that time.[31] The book allows readers to take the role of Hamlet, Ophelia or Hamlet's father and make their own choices throughout the story; the latter characters, as well as over 100 colour illustrations by a range of artists, were added to the book as funding increased.[32] The book made a New York Times Bestseller list.[1] In 2016, Ryan published a similar book titled Romeo and/or Juliet. There are 46,012,475,909,287,476 possible adventures in it. [33] The book received generally positive coverage.[34][35]

In 2018, Riverhead Books published Ryan North's How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveller, a nonfiction guide to technology based around the fictional premise of a time machine stranding the reader in the past, with illustrations by Lucy Bellwood.[36] It was named one of NPR's and BBC Science Focus's Best Books of 2018.[37][38]

In 2019, North helped develop the story and writing for an iOS game app called AVO![39] by Playdeo Limited [40]

North wrote the 2021 action-adventure video game Lost in Random, published by Electronic Arts.[41]

In April 2022, North was the writer for the six-episode podcast series Marvel's Squirrel Girl: The Unbeatable Radio Show which is a direct continuation of the comic series he wrote; the series is produced by Radio Point, directed by Giovanna Sardelli and stars Milana Vayntrub as Squirrel Girl.[42][43]

North was born in Osgoode, Ontario, in 1980. His parents are Anna and Randall North[55] and said in an interview that he has a younger brother, Victor.[4] In an interview, North said that his family lived in rural Osgoode and there was not a lot to do, so spent much of his time on the computer.[4] After high school, he studied computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, then did his master's degree in computer science at the University of Toronto in Toronto, specializing in computational linguistics.[4]

North once hosted instructions on his website for building cardboard boxes designed to look like elements of Super Mario Bros., designed by his friend Posterchild. In 2006, a group of teenage girls in Ravenna, Ohio were arrested after they created and distributed several of these blocks, over fears they were bombs.[56][57]

On August 18, 2015, North became stuck in a skate pit with only an umbrella, a leash, his phone, and his dog, Noam Chompsky, after rain made the surface too slick to easily climb with a dog in tow. He posted about his conundrum on Twitter, leading hundreds of Twitter users to reply with suggestions on how to combine the items in his "inventory" to escape, eventually leading to success.[58][59]

North is married to his wife Jenn Klug.[60] As of 2016, they lived in Leslieville, Toronto, Ontario.[4]

• Author, The Best of Dinosaur Comics: 2003-2005 AD (April 15, 2006, Quack!Media) ISBN 0-7560-0518-3
• Author, Dinosaur Comics: Dudes Already Know About Chickens (2010, TopatoCo) ISBN 978-0-9824862-6-9
• Editor and contributor, Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die (October 13, 2010, Machines of Death) ISBN 0-9821671-2-1
• Author, Everybody Knows Failure Is Just Success Rounded Down: Dinosaur Comics (2011, TopatoCo) ISBN 978-1-936561-90-2
• Writer, Adventure Time Issues 1-35 (2012-15, KaBOOM!)
• Author, To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure (2013, Breadpig) ISBN 978-0-9828537-4-0
• Editor, This Is How You Die; Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death (2013, Grand Central Publishing) ISBN 978-1455529391
• Author, The Midas Flesh Vol. 1 (2014, BOOM! Box) ISBN 978-1608864553
• Author, The Midas Flesh Vol. 2 (2015, BOOM! Box) ISBN 978-1608867271
• Writer, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1 Issues 1-8 (2015, Marvel)
• Writer, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 2 Issues 1-50 (2015-2019, Marvel)
• Author, Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure (2016, Riverhead Books) ISBN 978-1101983300
• Writer, Jughead Volume 2, Issues 9-11 (2017, Archie Comics) ISBN 978-1-68255-998-7
• Writer, Jughead Volume 3, Issues 12-14 (2017, Archie Comics) ISBN 978-1-68255-956-7
• Author, How to Be a T.Rex (2018, Dial Books) ISBN 978-0399186240
• Author, How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time Traveler (2018, Riverhead Books) ISBN 978-0735220140
• Author, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel (2020, Archaia) ISBN 978-1684156252
• Writer, The Mystery of the Meanest Teacher: A Johnny Constantine Graphic Novel (2021, DC) ISBN 978-1-779501-23-3
• Author, How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain (2022, Riverhead Books) ISBN 9780593192016

Wikiquote has quotations related to Ryan North.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ryan North.

• Dinosaur Comics
• Whispered Apologies
• Truth and Beauty Bombs Archived 2015-09-30 at the Wayback Machine
• Ryan North's LiveJournal
• The Amazing Regret Index
• Ryan North at University of Toronto
• ProjectWonderful
• Every Topic in the Universe Except Chickens
• Carleton University alumni profile
• Oh No Robot
• RSSpect