We Blog Indie T-Shirts
Check it out, Fox 25 interviewed me at ROFLCon and then put the interview up on their website! The camera dude was asking me about the shirt I was wearing, AVE Mizar.
Too bad when I mention ‘Fantastic Bonanza’ has gotten cut from it… but whatever. Check out the speech bubble from Ji Lee’s Bubble Project in the background!
‘We have talks. We just brainstorm things.’ Yesssss…
4/30 through 5/9, use coupon code FF2008 for 20% off your order from Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction!
Link: [Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]
Expensiveness: 20% less than usual!
Should you hurry: Offer ends 5/9. You decide.
Hey everyone! As John mentioned back on Friday, Joe and I spent this weekend at ROFLCon, a.k.a. The Great Meeting of the Internet. It was a blast!
First, a word of explanation. From ROFLCon’s “About Us” sidebar:
Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon. [...] It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.
So what was Fantastic Bonanza doing there? Well, we designed the t-shirts!
In addition, the ROFLCon organizers (being the awesome folks they are) kindly offered us the opportunity to set up a booth at the convention. Of course, we jumped at the chance. Things happened, deals were made, and soon enough Joe was flying across the country to meet me in Cambridge, MA.
Here’s the breakdown:
Day 1:
We arrived a little late on the first day, but the super-awesome Christina was there to cheerfully greet us and hand us our schwag bags—among the goodies included were a Firefox-branded apple and a 16-ounce can of Brawndo1. In an extremely well-conceived plot, I downed the Brawndo in the span of 10 minutes, thereby dumping a cool 100mg of caffeine into my normally stimulant-free circulatory system. Between the resulting jitters and my poor vantage point, I didn’t really catch most of what the opening keynote speaker was saying. I believe it had something to do with the internet.
After the keynote, a group of Internet Famous folks took the stage to talk about how to make money from being Internet Famous. Among the panelists were Joe Mathlete (of The Mathletes and Marmaduke Explained) and Andy Ochiltree (from JibJab).2
After the talk was over, Joe and I went to Building 34 to set up shop. After a fair amount of hustle and/or bustle, we were ready to go.
Our table was situated right next to Leslie Hall’s booth, which was kind of neat. Leslie herself was out and about for the most part, posing for pictures and whatnot (you know how it must be for Internet-Famous People); her mom had the duty of managing the booth. So we talked with Leslie’s mom for a bit, and she was extremely friendly. She even bought a shirt from us!
Before long, Joe Mathlete came on by and set up shop right next to us. He was selling off the last handful of MARMADUKE IS AN ASSHOLE shirts in the world. Yes—the whole entire world. This was extremely lucky for us, as it meant that we got to hang out with Joe Mathlete on-and-off for the next couple of hours. From this experience, I can say without equivocation that Joe Mathlete is all three kinds of awesome. Yes, all of them.
Internet Famous People with Fantastic Bonanza T-Shirts after Day 1
Day 2:
On the second day, we had our table a bit more standardized than the first…
At the bottom edge of the table, you can see our super-neat Conezor buttons (courtesy of the amazing Purebuttons3) and our last-minute DIY cannibalized stickers. We were situated between the ROFLCon info/schwag desk on our left, and the Weekly Dig (whose special ROFLCon issue is hilarious) crew on our right.
We spent a pretty decent chunk of Saturday chilling with Larry ‘Liontamer’ Oji and David ‘djpretzel’ Lloyd (from Overclocked Remix). I was going through Greg’s iTunes library, and he has basically a million video game music remixes from OC Remix. So if you see some sort of OC Remix/Fantastic Bonanza collab, don’t be surprised!
A camera dude from Fox 25 Boston came by and talked with me, and they posted the brief interview on their website for some reason. So that’s pretty cool! I obviously wasn’t ready to give a spiel about Fantastic Bonanza, and they cut the part where I mentioned our name:
Before his appearance on the Internet Cult Leader panel, Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics) stopped by and got a t-shirt. We heard it straight from his mouth: he doesn’t consider himself to have either a) a cult or b) a leadership position. But, in our opinion, he still has a pretty sweet webcomic! After this final panel, Jeph Jacques (of Questionable Content) swung by for his very own Fantastic Bonanza tee. He seemed pretty discombobulated… Christi described him as like ‘leading a herd of cats’. At the very end of the day, shortly before we packed everything up, Andy Ochiltree (head writer at JibJab) came by to get Octotree because his last name, Ochiltree, is so eerily similar!
So all in all, ROFLCon was good times. Pretty much a lot of the internet was there. I got live Rick Rolled… twice. Hundreds of people did a barrel roll. And Tron Guy was there. It was great.
Internet Famous People with Fantastic Bonanza T-Shirts after Day 2
1 It’s got electrolyes!™
2 Why am I mentioning these two dudes specifically? Because of foreshadowing, my friend.
3 Use coupon code HPB for 10% off at Purebuttons.
As always, use coupon code fanblog for 10% off at
Yikes, sorry for the dearth of updates as of late—it’s been a busy couple of weeks for all of us. We hope to be posting more regularly in the upcoming week! Anyway, on to the real news. Remember back when Hot Topic started selling those t-shirts that looked suspiciously like Remember back when Hot Topic started selling those t-shirts that looked suspiciously like Seibei’s Sandwich Dinosaur? As you might remember, that issue fortunately got resolved relatively amicably; unfortunately, it seems as though something funny is up at Hot Topic yet again: If you’re interested, you can read Jess’s reaction to the matter at her LiveJournal. She’s also written about it at You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice. Finally, you can find a brief yet interesting discussion on the matter in the comments section at this Fleen post.
Some of you may recognize the bottom image as Lil’ Soap, a Threadless design by Jess Fink that’s been around for quite a while. The suspiciously similar design immediately above it is a rip that’s up for sale at Hot Topic.
Need someplace to spend all of that holiday cash? Here are some deals to help you out:
Design by Humans: 35% off using coupon code DBHFAM from 12/26-12/31
Spreadshirt: 20.08% off using coupon code NewYear08 from 12/31-1/14
Heavy Rotation: a nice selection of sale items
I-Manifest: all shirts are $20 through 12/31
Lazy Oaf: I’m not sure what the deal is with this sale, but: [via HYA*]
The Ryde: 5 random t-shirts for $25 (total) until 12/31 [via So Many Shirts, etc.]
Sub Urban Riot: buy 2, get 1 free until 12/31
Divine Clothing Company: all shirts $15.99 + free shipping until 1/1
Beautiful/Decay: up to 70% off dozens of sale items
Are there some that I didn’t catch? Probably. Feel free to let me know about them!
The CliffsNotes™ version of this post: Here is a thing I made!
The long version:
Let me spin you all a tale.
Many moons ago, in an age long shrouded by the impenetrable fog of arcane history1, I trekked to the strange and wondrous land of Southern California with co-bonanzier John in order to partake of an august and monumental rite—The Annual Inter-National Comick-Conventione of San Diego Towne. The annals of this journey (or what remain of them, anyway) can be found here.
For those of you who don’t remember/never read that post, the main thrust is that I spotted a lot of people wearing Threadless tees at the convention. So many, in fact, that upon my return to Bonanzier HQ I was compelled to create a ‘Threadless Bingo’ board. Here are the fruits of that labor:
No matter—it’s not very hard to make your own board, if for some reason you don’t like the one I’ve made here. In fact, someone who has mastered the dark art of internet wizardry (not I) could probably lash together some kind of randomized Bingo-board generator, perhaps out of some flotsam and leftover parachute cord.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I now recognize at least two errors in that statement:
And so, without further ta-do to-do adieu adoo fuss, here is the link to the world’s first, best, and only Threadless Bingo Board Generator!
So generate a board, print it out, and play with your friends! Hours of fun, guaranteed!2
1 i.e., last July
2 Guarantee actually nonexistant.
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