UPDATE: see John A’s new and improved Wendigo/Yak design here.
It took me a while to start following John Allison’s Scary Go Round—RSS helped a bit with that—but boy, when that comic finally grabs you, it does so with the gusto of a soul-rattling death grip! In a good way.
Those of you who have been reading the comic recently know all about the Wendigo of Canada. For everyone else, the shortest explanation can be found here, but I recommend going back a little farther in order to more fully contextualize things.
In a recent blog post, John A. posted two designs with varying degrees of shirt potentiality. Despite his reluctance towards the second of the two, I’d say its simplicity complements its haunting eeriness. Bonus points for promoting the oft-ignored, terrifying underbelly of the Great White North.
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:
The crowd at ROFLCon, as seen from the Fantastic Bonanza table
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 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.
Look, Joe is saying “hi!” Hi, Joe! [The table on Saturday looked way better than the haphazard spread of Friday! -Joe]
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.
I stole this picture from the ROFLCon site because I am incredibly bad at taking pictures of my own. But see that arm on the left side of the picture? See it? That’s my arm!
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…
A view of our table… from the side!
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
1It’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.
What momentous occasion furnishes my Jabberwock-ish delight, you ask? Well, let me tell you: Joe Infurnari’s wonderful design, Roboto Mori, (which was a Top 10 T-Shirt of 2007 for both me and John (and which you can read about in more detail here)) is up for competition at Threadless!
Unfortunately, perhaps my initial enthusiasm was a little premature. Because as much as I’d like to see it get printed at Threadless, there’s one teensy little problem: the design was already for sale on Bountee! You can’t buy the shirt at Bountee anymore—but as some Threadless commenters have mentioned, that might not be enough. This technicality might keep the design from getting printed, even if it gets a really high score. I don’t know Threadless’s exact policy on this, but it seems to me that those folks have enough submissions to choose from that they can afford to be a little particular about these sorts of things.
But hey, I figure it’s worth a shot, right? So if you want to help Mr. Infurnari out, head on over and show this design a little love.
Assuming that you have the love to give. If not, then you should, um, probably go to the store and… buy some more? Or something.
Hey! Hey. Hey. Did you know that Ananth Panagariya, that scrambling scribe penning scripts for Applegeeks, is one of four founding members of an online t-shirt store called Mutagenics? If you read the webcomic regularly, then, yeah, you probably already knew that. Ssh!
For the rest of you, check it out. As its name implies, Mutagenics is very invested with, well, mutagens and mutations and the like. Odd things. You’ll see what I mean.
Shark Costume is a humorous shirt. Not only humorous, but practical! Mutagenics does its consumers a disservice by imparting such meager slivers of wisdom—though some might argue that an excess of wisdom quickly loses its value. I dunno. Don’t wear sharks as costumes! You will become a skeleton.
I should probably point you toward TMNT before I head off, although guys and gals averse to fits of nostalgia will probably want to look elsewhere. I really wish that Mutagenics had featured the tortoise—tortoises?—the tortoise-thing—more prominently in this design. They definitely have a point, though—radiation does not equal anthropomorphization. Two lessons learned, now! The knowledge!
Check out the other designs in the Mutagenics store! Guaranteed* to solve your social ills without the need for any cumbersome cables or pull-strings!
Sixteenth president of the United States. The Great Liberator. Preserver of the Union. Possibly the greatest president in U.S. history. And a man with impeccable taste in facial hair.1 Behold Abraham Lincoln: t-shirt superstar.
It’s often much easier to pay homage to a person’s mythology rather than to probe both his strengths and faults through comprehensive study. While Lincoln’s mythology has been firmly established in homes and schools for many decades now, the Internet Age hasn’t really done anything to dispel the Fictionalized Biography Phenomenon, either.2
That said, I must admit that I do enjoy ridiculous perversions of history as much as the next guy. It’s no mystery, then, why I’m so enthralled with Enclothe’s latest and greatest t-shirt offering:
Here, we are introduced to an alternate universe where the U.S. falls prey to the ravenous zombie virus in early 1864. With the zombie population rising at an exponential rate, who takes charge and quells the undead menace? Yes: Abraham Lincoln. I know that zombies are on the official list of Internet Things That We Should No Longer Find Interesting, but the vigilanteism inherent in both the post-apocalyptic wasteland and the wild west gives the pairing of Honest Abe and zombie hunting an appropriate appeal.
Also! If you buy two or more items at Enclothe before these holy days come to a close, they’ll reduce the cost of your order by 25%! Nice.
Witness yet another marriage of history and geekery with this shirt from Kristofer Straub, better known as the brains behind Starslip Crisis. Who knew that George Lucas’ revisionist practices affected our nation so drastically? It’s kind of unfortunate that Lincoln wasn’t a better shot, to be honest.
Rounding up today’s peek into the past is this more cryptic offering from Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. Rather than nerdifying iconic historical figures, AAMR instead chooses to surreptitiously whisper conspiracy theories to people via eye-catching apparel. They list some telling coincidences between the deaths of these two presidents at the hoodie’s product page, and to be honest, I think they’re onto something. You know, for a few months now, I’ve been setting up this undergr—say, do you hear helicopters?
Well, whether you know Mr. Lincoln’s personal affairs down to a T or whether you’re content in making up stuff about someone you’ve never met, you’ve got to admit—the Lincolnator ain’t going anywhere anytime soon!
— 1In so many words, anyway. History buffs need not remind us that such brief statements lack truthful nuance—or any truth at all, in fact—it’s just an intro, after all! 2“Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer! Too bad he never cries.” That sort of thing.
Indie Week is still going strong, here at Fantastic Bonanza at least!
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