At last it’s time! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, when four of you beautiful human specimens will have your lives completely transformed! A few weeks back, we announced the first-ever Autostraddle Grand Excellent Sweepstakes Blowout of All Time. The rules were simple: register as a member on Autostraddle, comment on the contest post telling us your favorite thing to read on Autostraddle, and then comment at least every other day until December 12th. About 100 of you weirdos ended up following through on your commenting commitment, and Adorable Forever Intern Grace and Adorable Editorial Assistant Chelsey put all your names into their little hats and made a video, as promised! ARE YOU READY? I DON’T THINK YOU’RE READY.
If your name was called, then email me (riese [at] autostraddle [dot] com) for instructions on how to redeem your prize! If you were the grand-prize winner, also please let me know in your email if you want to apply the $100 towards a future A-Camp tuition or If you’d like to use it as credit in the Autostraddle store.
Lastly, on a community note: thanks to all of you for participating in this contest! Your feedback on your favorite Autostraddle things has been SO helpful — both in guiding our editorial plans for the future and in reassuring the authors of some of our less-trafficked regulars that y’all are indeed reading and loving the work we do. The energy and enthusiasm you infused into the site with your frequent commentary has accordingly energized and enthused our writing team. Coming to work every day (and by “coming to work” I mean crawling out of bed and opening our laptops) has been five billion times better since the sweepstakes started. So we hope you stick around for the long haul.
We’ve put a lot of energy into making sure that the new website debuted with kickass content and a super-engaged community and so far, so good! You’ll read more about that and our plans for the future in a Letter From The Editor / State of the Autostraddle Union I plan to finish writing some time in the next few weeks.
Feel free to proceed directly to the Autostraddle Store from here ’cause we’ve got all kinds of new shit in stock:
- 2014 Autostraddle Calendar: 12 months of pure queer beauty.
- You Do You Flasks: Support us while supporting your own pursuit of hedonism.
- “You Do You” Grey Zip-Up Hoodies: So soft, so necessary.
- A-Camp Hoodies: These navy A-Camp hoodies are the hottest hoodies in the history of hoodies.
- We’ve also got You Do You T-Shirts, Straddle This Boxer-Briefs, So Many Feelings Journals (on sale for $8!), You Do You Pins and You Do You stickers and totes in stock!
- Also. Also. Also. We’ve sold over 1,000 “Autostraddle This” shirts since their debut in 2011, and this run will be our very last! So, if you’ve been holding out, now’s your chance to snag one for only $18!
Happy Hunger Games!
Yay, congrats to all the winners! :)
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I won a thing! I never win anything! Now my dilemma is choosing which hoodie to get. Or maybe I should get pictures of hot ladies for my wall. Thank you! I love you all!
yay Emma!!
I didn’t win, but Christmas still came early. Oh, Grace… You are just the cutest.
Oh my, i love you, intern Grace.
Oh, and CONGRATULATIONS, WINNERS. (that was going to be the first thing i said, but her cuteness was alarming. Disarming? It was SOMETHING, that’s for sure.)
omg grace and chelsey you are so cute.
way to go winners! everybody wins because god, look at grace.
yes to everything stef just said.
Editorial Assistant Chelsey is adorable.
<3
the spiel about not having a hat though
Congratulations everyone!!!
So sad I didn’t win but SO HAPPY for the people that did.
Can we live vicariously through the winners? I want to know what they do with their free money because all the options are awesome.
A Camp or AS Store?!?! I need to know!
Congrats winners!!! It’s been super fun commenting so I’m making it my goal to keep it up. I can’t wait for the State of the Autostraddle Union article Riese.
Congrats to the winners! And to Grace and Chelsey because HELLO CUTE.
Congrats to the winners!
Truly appreciate that Grace and I are both wearing stripes in our videos without planning this.
CONGRATS TO ALL THE WINNERS and also to the qualifiers! Your names will forever live in that gold bag because I am a hoarder.
Congratulations! Also, can I say that I’m kind of excited about an Autostraddle State of the Union? It will probably be way cooler than the President’s State of the Union.
petition for any and all video announcements in the future to star grace and chelsey and stripes. congrats to the winners! and thanks to autostraddle for finally convincing me and my fellow former lurkers to join in this awesome community and conversation!
we’re so glad you’re here and contributing! <3
I agree on the delurking! This was just the incentive I needed to start commenting even if I feared some of my comments were fluff. Still I figure it is a good start!
Congrats to the winners! I’m really glad this sweeps happened, because I can spend a long time lurking before I jump into new communities and I didn’t here because of this and it was wonderful.
I really, really want to know which version of Sleigh Ride plays in the outro? I need more jazzy christmas music in my life.
Hi hi hi! The outro is later in the same song as the intro; it’s just the classic recording, which you can listen to here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuSl9PKx6M4
Dear Grace,
I like your hat choice.
I WON A THING!
It’s kinda exciting :) I’m gonna have a great week now
CONGRATS! i always love your comments, especially because they are sometimes south-africa-specific. please keep contributing, your voice on the site is lovely :)
Thanks @floralprintdress , that’s really lovely to hear. Like everyone else, I’m gonna miss you a ton on the website, but I really hope you have a grand adventure and get some stuff figured out – or not if you prefer. :) Really I just wish you all of the best. Know that with your writing and interviews and friendly online persona, you’ve made an impact on my life and you will be missed A LOT A LOT A LOT.
<3 thank you.
Congrats to the people who won things! Also I am pretty shy about commenting on websites, so it was nice to have the sweepstakes as encouragement to start commenting more regularly. I’ll have to keep it up.
yes me tooo
yes please to both you and @lex-gstein and everyone else! <3
wow, tagging is real
I was really hoping to win, but it’s okay because Intern Grace and Editorial Assistant Chelsey are indeed adorable, and this whole thing helped me stop lurking so much, so I guess it worked out pretty well!
Seriously, I wanted to win just so I could get Intern Grace or Chelsey to say my name on video.
Omg you muppets are the muppetiest.
I’LL NEVER COMMENT AGAIN
jk ilu autostraddle never leave me
Aw no, I read the instructions wrong >.< Oh well. Congrats to the winners!
THIS VIDEO IS THE BEST AND OUR COMMENTERS ARE THE BEST AND I LOVE YOU ALL VERY DEEPLY.
Wow, I had never anticipated a post telling me that I didn’t win a hundred bucks being the sweetest thing I’ve seen all day. This was off the chart adorable.
Yay, winners! I forgot that this contest was a thing but I will say that I’ve been coming to AS way more frequently anyway because it seems like there is so much more content! If I don’t keep coming back every day I will be too far behind because y’all are ON IT. I’m like a weirdo that has to read/assess every page of a magazine and AS is the same way for me as I read pretty much every article & comment.
I totally feel this – it was a really big step for me to accept that I actually couldn’t quite keep up and that it’s okay for me to skip articles that are less interesting to me. (No offense to the writers, though! It’s not you, it’s me, honest!)
This is so awesome to hear! Your observations are perfect.
This was super duper cute and I’m sad that I didn’t comment on it right away because my gd laptop charger broke last week. ANYWAY it was a pleasure to see people win things! And to see all the new commenters! Keep commenting I want to know all your feelings I know you have a lot of them.
Congratulations to the winners! And happy holidays to everyone. :)
Congrats to all the winners! I feel sad that I scuppered my own comment efforts with an impromptu holiday, and I salute all that commented to the max!
Mainly, this whole campaign reminded me that AS is even funner when it’s a two-way street, and I’m glad the competition and whole relaunch have been such a success!