I went to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox today, and it was good in a way that just smashes your expectations open at how fun and pretty a stop-motion movie can look and feel.

All the shots are pure Wes Anderson attention to every milimeter of awesome detail (I can't wait to slo-mo pretty much the entire movie to take in all the picture-frame worthy shot setups and lil jokes stuffed into every corner), the music both orchestrated and Beach Boys/Rolling Stones is as usual extremely well-implemented, the voices are spot-on and the way the stop-motion characters move in line with the psychical comedy is pure silent film funny. Plus, it's a Roald Dahl story, the king of the modern children's story that is still filled to the brim with complex emotions and horrific moments.

It's one of those movies you can tell by the looks on their faces that everyone on the film was having one hell of a fun time, and you're looking at faces that had to be moved 24 times a second!

Some have said this film isn't for kids, but there were a bunch of children at the screening I saw at 2pm and the kids were very well-behaved except for the moments that they were laughing their guts off at the shenanigans on screen.

I really can't recommend this movie enough. Anyone have a favorite moment or disagree?

GO ON AND GRAB YOUR BANDIT HATS AND JOIN IN ON THE FUN!

hahahahahahaha!

Headlines need to really be more specific if they don't want jokes about Scott Stapp and Kid Rock juicing each other's flesh shakes.

But since this was on The Huffington Post, I can almost see the headline smirking at me and having every intention to lead people into thinking those boys did the sucking. Which wouldn't have really surprised me that they'd only think their expandable inner-thigh telescopes should only be touched by the throat of another rock god since I think they're both two of rock's biggest douchebags.

"I did apologize to him that I didn't just burn that thing. I thought that was a skeleton in the closet that would never find the light of day."

Yeah right, Stapp has probably been playing that video three times a day with his music going full blast and him in a cross-like pose with a fleshlight attached to his johnson just to re-enact the good ol' days of being popular enough that someone might wanna be caught giving you head on a tape that just might get "accidentally" leaked.

Fill in your own story about what this headline link shall lead to!

Did you know how much I still enjoy this song? Oh, and how mind-bogglingly fast everything is speeding up in this world. Sometimes it feels like as a species we're in the Millennium Falcon just about to make the jump to light speed.

I had a goofy "archery targets fighting in World War I" idea that on-his-way-to-print-town artist lawrence loh brought to reality, so please vote & comment on it to say if we hit the t-shirt bullseye and leave your guess for a score here while you're at it!



The person with the closest number aim at the final score without going over will get this shirt if it prints and a play archery set!





GUESSES:

fat pigeon: 3.41
walmazan: 3.33
linkhero: 3.31
PacificLight: 3.30
quister: 3.29
bygrinstow: 3.28
EricDiaz: 3.27
Bio-bot 9000: 3.25
frostedlemoncoward: 3.23
rossmat8: 3.21
Brightwood: 3.19
Pakpandir: 3.18
robroy05: 3.15
tomasappleton: 3.14
goliath72: 3.12
B7: 3.11
soloyo: 3.10
misakaji: 3.08
YAISH2: 3.07
phillydesigner: 3.06
bengineer: 3.04
dschwen: 3.03
Gemma.: 3.02
jess4002: 2.99
mr spiers: 2.97
Frogking: 2.95
greententacle: 2.94
Bonneroo: 2.92
bhoomika: 2.91
TOSOMB: 2.90
Fotologica: 2.89
jeffreyg: 2.87
Brando Graphic Art: 2.84
xlovesconsx : 2.82
theshedlight: 2.79
efunk2332: 2.75
trishxtrash: 2.7

Having a select design is kind of the and-all-be-all of “you made it”-ness on Threadless, and I was pretty certain I’d never get to do one being “just” the collab idea and slogan guy. So when I was the first funny sentence guy in Threadless history to get four type tee prints (Maltzmania and Larlar have since joined the quadruple printie-slogan club), I was just pleased to have had that many slogans Threadless saw fit to print on wearable torso fabric let alone a select invitation coming my way. After all, it made my “look I got printed!” box on the upper right of my profile perfectly symmetrical to ease my minor OCD tendencies. Soon after a couple sloganeers mentioned in the Official Slogan Club that I should get a type tee select, to which I appreciated the thought but knew it was just a pie in the sky dream, if that pie was stuffed with letters and punctuation marks.

A couple days later I booted up the ol’ Threadless talk around town section known as the blogs and saw that incredible sloganmeister Jesse Tatton aka Krokun had started a "Get Evan A Select Type Tee!" blog, one of the most touching altruistic gestures anyone has done for me. After profusely thanking Jesse for doing something so cool and promising that he would win the next five slogan club contests whether he submitted anything or not, I saw some of the OSC diehards jotting their name on the list and assumed the first day of the blog would be the last I’d see of it. But day after day and bump after bump by Jesse and others in Threadville, the most important petition list since the viewers of The Tom Green Show pleaded with MTV for just one more season kept growing, until Jesse had guilted over 100 people to sign their digital Hancock to his typographical mission statement.

Completely unknown to me once again, Jesse took the list and emailed it along with a little letter of intent to Dustin Hostetler, head of the Threadless select project. Lo and behold, within a couple of days he got a reply :

Hey Jesse
Sorry for the delay.. had to pass your email around the office and get some input.
I am in fact the person to talk to about this.. and in general I think its a good idea.

We are not looking to make 4 time type tee winners also Select artists, as at least in my eyes it's two completely different beasts.. but Im open to doing this as a one time thing.

Note: Threadless later informed me that the type tee select honor was also given to me for the four plus collaboration designs I have been involved in that have been printed.

Jesse then excitedly sent me the email and gave me all the info I needed to get in touch with Dustin and start the project, to which I was without speech (or words to type) to say thank you for a couple of minutes to Jesse for actually getting this redonkulous dream into a reality! I was also once again amazed at the power of the Threadless community to band together on something that was not at all on Threadless’s radar to holler and wave their hands around to get them to notice. Threadless also proved for the millionth time over that it is far and away the most amazing and thoughtful giant company in worldly existence. There was no reason for Threadless to give this a green light, yet with Jesse’s blogging grassroots petition and Threadless being so interconnected with its community’s members, basically treating us like we have a seat at their CEO board room meetings, this select type tee came together out of thin air.

After pitching a ton of more radical ideas regarding text and typography using belt printing and all kinds of other fancy-pants processes, Dustin kindly informed me that he really wanted more of an elaborate type tee idea than something that abstract. While I was a little disappointed since I thought the select tee would really let me go crazy, I understood his reasoning, sigh.

I really wanted do this type tee adventure with someone who was an expert typographic marksman as well as someone who didn’t have anything printed before so we could both have our Threadless dreams come true at once! I instantly put Andrew Gregory aka Lunchboxbrain in my crosshairs to do this project with me, even though since this project was completed the guy has had type tee funnies of his own printed! Way to spoil my plan by having an excess of hilarity and being prolific and stuff, man! Andrew hopped aboard right away for the select journey and I promised to keep Jesse up on the type tee happenings since I thought I kinda owed the guy that much, lol.

I had a couple thoughts on how to go with this design and Andrew had a ton of his own, so we produced some rough drafts for Dustin who gave us helpful feedback on the project. I tried to push Andrew harder and harder to get out of his typo safety zone and really cut looser and crazier with the design, and he came through in a monstrous way with every update being more impressive than the last! Here’s a bunch of the styles the design went through.














So there you have it, the power of the Threadless community as well as Threadless itself being the most responsive company there is, all rolled into one extremely long-winded story! Since this design wouldn’t have been possible without the help of everyone here, I gave nearly all the money for the project to Jesse and Andrew, as well as converting the select gift certificate into STP’s to use as prizes for the Official Slogan Club slogan contests (one is starting this week, check in on it!).

I also want to give away this tee to someone who has actually been bored enough at work or are working on their patience by reading this far into the blog, so whoever cut and pastes any slogan that they wanna see printed by anyone on Threadless (links to vote on it would be helpful too!) in this blog will be entered into a drawing for this shirt next Monday!

Viva la good slogans and thanks again everyone!

While I admit I have only seen a few episodes old and new, this kinda sums up everything I dislike about Seth Macfarlane's humor style. It seems to rely heavily on quick references with no setup that are haphazardly thrown together and inanimate objects and/or animals talking for no reason and no real character development outside the moment of the scene.

Family Guy fans, wow me with some of the show's hilarity, I would like to find this show more amusing than i do or give it another chance because i don't wish to get into any more "whaaa....you DON'T LIKE FAMILY GUYOMGITSTHEFUNNIESTSHOWEVER!" verbal pile-ons in real life.

Hello once again all you fine collaboration journeymen and women, it's time for yet another way-too-lengthy addition of "Evan has a goofy concept, an artist draws something amazing, Evan adds some more ideas, they draw something even more amazing and then it's subbed" AKA "How We Collaborate"!

As with every one of these collaboration dissections, it'll start with the finished submission up top and then show the process from first to final draft, bringing the whole project full circle not unlike a blogging version of Fight Club...without the awesome soundtrack and Brad Pitt sweatily screaming out to his space monkeys, "YOU ARE NOT YOUR T-SHIRT!" Well, maybe we're all like 15 percent t-shirt.






Don Pak aka Pakpandir has impressed the living bejesus out of me, bursting onto the Threadless hemisphere with both hilarious concepts and gorgeously detailed single color masterworks that make biblical movie epics and Heavy Metal magazine images forget their sinful differences and shake hands to make our eyes ascend to shirt heaven.

Okay, no more overtly wordy paragraphs from me, just unintentionally wordy ones from now on!

The original concept:

Bad Reception Rainbow: Ever notice how the test bars on a television kind of look like a tiny rainbow? No? Well, go on over to tv land at 4 in the morning sometime and check it out or just take my word for it. Anywho, I'd love to make a sub where a nice view is being shown, from the extreme bottom of the tee rising up there would be a scenic forest, possibly a river running through it that might empty out into a sea or big body of water, and a dazzling sunset going down or coming up from behind the water, possibly with some half tone rays coming up. Over top of this reaching pretty high on the shirt would be a glorious rainbow, but this rainbow would be made out of stacked television sets, somehow stacked on top of the other and in a slant of a rainbow to the other side. Everything else on the shirt would be in olde-timey black and white colors. Even the half tones of the sun coming up or down would be in various grays. We might want to make a few trees in the scenery look like power lines, and possibly some flowers in the foreground of the nature scene would be poking up like rabbit ears on an old-time television.

Don's first ideas and sketches on the concept, which came to me faster than the speed of light, so like, light lite:









Amazing progress already just in Don's mind alone of how to pull the concept even further! All of these drawings got my mind reeling and I suggested (from here on in I'll italicize the ideas I suggested that actually got implemented into the final project for ease of reading reference) we put the bunny ears of a TV on a real rabbit, a mechanical frog saying "ribbit" in zeroes and ones, wires and metals just underneath the dirt of the natural grass, having the rays coming out of the sun turn into power lines for the power towers aka iron pine trees, turning the daffodil satellite pattern into a bigger bush for the foreground, combining natural fauna on top of television antennae to have flowers blooming out of the ends of it, making the sun more mechanical, the water coming out of the television could be cables that eventually turn into a stream that meets the ocean in the background, a robot boy/girl in the scene interacting with the environment, and other environmental pieces such as a run-down schoolbus being overtaken by nature and returning to it.

Don returned that email with this as the first sentence:

I was just ---$$CRITICAL PUNCHED$$----- in the face by a wall of text!

Hehehe, he's a funny dude. After Don digested all that random ideaness, we talked about taking the robot boy/girl concept one step further and turning it into a synthetic world that looks natural at first glance but is completely synthetic, as if the robot is trying to recreate a picture from long ago that no one in the robot's future time has ever seen outside of past picture relics, with Don talking about Blade Runner/Tron influences for the idea.

I loved his thoughts on tossing another layer on top of the concept, and Don ran with it for the next sketch:



Blown away now by the leap of awesome the project had taken, I suggested moving the robot to the left side of the piece so more attention could be paid to him as well as getting the concept of the picture he is holding in his hand more in focus and grander, altering the robot's appearance to a more "The Day The Earth Stood Still" styled robot, having a pile of tools, nuts, bolts and etc next to the robot to make sure people understood that the robot had constructed this scene, having some green rolling hills that on closer inspection would actually be a bunch of green glass & plastic bottles and cans piled high on top of one another, having the robot also use paint and swiping the ground around him to make it green like the grass in the picture, making metal birds poke out on sticks taped onto the television rainbow in perspective to the scene to look as thought they are flying away (this one came partially to fruition, but more on that later), and a smoke or several smoke machines to pump the clouds up into the air.

Don's next version:



There was an alternate robot Don drew for the scene as well:



Don asked me which robot I liked more, and I asked him if we could combine the face and body of the second robot and merge it with the head of the original, which Don agreed with.







So much advancement in such a short time by Don, I was awe(yeah!)struck! Another round of suggestions came, such as taking the central sun ray line out of the piece, the sun being a bunch of cogs and gears that look like the inside of a watch, with the larger outer one turning one way and the smaller inner ones turning the other, taking the bunny ears off the tv since it was redundant and taking away one of the robot bunnies, hanging the metal birds off the support beam just below the rainbow on strings like a diorama and adding them to the robot's photo, as well as adding some smoke machines on the power lines.

Don's next update:



Discussed this time was changing the bottles to look a bit more like they are piled on top of one another, with less detail in the background and a few bigger ones in the front to make the concept easier to understand when giving it a quick viewing. I also sent a couple pictures to Don of origami flower styles:



At this point the ordeal of coming up with the perfect name for this piece started. Don agreed with me that the original title "Bad Reception Rainbow" wasn't a good fit for the shape the concept had now taken on, plus it seemed a bit negative. As much as I brainstormed, I couldn't figure out an appropriate title for the design, which is usually something I have from the very beginning! As Don worked furiously away on the next version of the design, I had numerous head-bashing-against-the-wall sessions trying to come up with a name that would pull all the ideas in it together.



Don added a lot more flowers in the front than he was originally going to at the request of his girlfriend, who said it made the scene look a lot prettier, and she was certainly right about that so big props and thanks to her for her awesome insight!

At this point Don also sent me lots of pictures of the kind of coloring style he wanted, which was a bit steampunk-ish but a tad more realistic. Don tried a few color combos out (including the original concept's idea of having black and white for a lot of the scene and only bits and pieces such as the rainbow, sun rays, bottle green grass and picture in color), but found the baby blue tee and colorful background coming up against the cold, scarcely colored foreground was a nice contrast between the robot's imagined world and the reality he is living in now looks like:





Don was really hitting all kinds of nails on their heads at this point, and my only suggestion was to give a bit more detail still to the bottles in the background, making them pop out a bit more in back and having the idea a bit more clear in the front. Always one to go the extra mile no matter how many revisions he has done, Don added a bunch of broken bottles in the front and made the background additionally jagged twice more to further refine the concept, but doing so in a way that did not detract from that first glance at the scene, which made it seem like the colorful, warm world was completely natural when in fact it was the furthest away from that as one could get.

Oh, and still no fucking title had come to mind. Crap, it's almost done!

Don added some dark clouds above the rainbow scene to further give the sense of desolation and drabness around the beautiful, happy scene that the robot has constructed.



At long last after an exhaustive two week process with Don drawing night and day into another night which turned into yet another day, the final piece with the corrected bottle background and foreground:





Don went ahead and started with the presentation, which I asked him if we could have the sub fade in on just the sun in the center of the design, and then suddenly the sun's rays would come into the frame and burst into a flash of light to the main image, which Don took to another level all the while learning some new html skills practically overnight!

All that was left was the piece of the submission puzzle which wasn't even going to be something seen on the t-shirt: the title! A few that came to my head which i wasn't very happy with and Don wasn't too enthused either:

A Warm Reception
Warmer Receptions
Back To Nature
The Earth Is Beautiful Again

Don repeatedly gave me other key words to work with such as Receptors, Senses, etc, but nothing seemed to fit the theme while being all-encompassing and sound very eye-catching at the same time.

A night later I was at a friend's house who I showed the picture to, who suggested we brainstorm words and write them down to see what sparks. After a half-hour of word call role playing, my friend suggested the word "genesis" which intrigued me greatly. We looked up on a thesaurus program other words for genesis and "Renaissance" came up, which also means "rebirth". I looked back at the other words we had written down and as much as I didn't want to include the word "robot" in the title, "The Robot's Renaissance" FINALLY clicked together to solve our title problem!

It really hit upon the innovation of the human's first Renaissance art period as well as the "rebirth" to a world that was never known and creating a scene from the very things that helped destroy its natural beauty seemed to be fused into that one simple phrase! Thanks so much to Scott Pollock for suggesting the word brainstorm and saving me from any further head-bashing bruises.

So here we are again, with some additional technical help from Santo76, we really appreciated it good buddy!:






I used too many words again, didn't I? Thanks so much for reading and thanks a million and one to Pakpandir aka Don for riding with me on this amazing collaboration journey!

Whelp, here I am again.

I tried to stay away from the stuff, honest to god I did, but I could only last a mere four incredibly long days without going back on the slogan sauce. Let's face it, it's become a habit that I need to get a fix of every day now, even though I've been doing it daily for so long now that I need at least 2-4 of them a day to feel I made an accomplishment. You have to keep upping the amount to get the same high, but no matter, I'm knocking on the crack house (I mean, fun house) doors and I'm not leaving for another year! Will I be able to make it? Only my brain knows for sure, but I'd appreciate all the encouragement I can get before anyone stages a slogan intervention! And away we go.............

I ALSO MAKE IDEAS COME TO LIFE WITH SPLENDID ARTISTS IN THE FORM OF A COLLAB!


With TSOMB:




Year Second Started On October 29th, 2000 of 9...


10/29
-Atoms Split When Their Relationships Are Going Nowhere.
-Getting A Good Education Is So Old-School.
-Give Me A Dollar And I'll Tell You A Great Way To Make Money.

10/30
-All Of The Funniest T-Shirts Weren't On Sale.
-I Assume All Bearded Men With Walking Sticks Are Wizards.
-The Only Vacation I Can Afford Is Changing Exotic Desktop Images.

10/31
-I Eat Three Square Meals A Day Because Other Shapes Taste Funny.
-Old Photographs Don't Die, They Just Fade Away.
-Attention Muggers: Person Wearing This Shirt Has $5 Or Less.

11/1
-My Mind: Open 24 Hours With Drive-Thru.
-Daylight Savings Is The Lamest Way To Time Travel.
-Sleepwalkers Are Just One Brain-Craving Away From Being Zombies.

11/2
-Kitchen Sinks Are Always Left Out Of The Best Fights.
-Gravity: The Force Is Strong With This One.
-I Just Gave You A Mind-Five.

11/3
-My Recent Home Improvement Was Zombie-Proofing The Windows.
-It's Pretty Easy To Pull The Wool Over A Sheep's Eyes.
-The Students of Ghost High Have Lots Of School Spirits.

11/4
-Music Notes Make So Much Noise When Taking Them.
-The Miss Universe Pageant Is Fixed, I Never See An Alien Win.

11/5
-Nowadays, Ghosts Only Haunt If There's A TV Crew Present.
-My Non-Verbal Communication Skills Seem To Be Working.

11/6
-Youtube Killed The TV Star.
-A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Frame Only An Ellipses.

11/7
-Cucumbers Tend To Lose Their Cool When Being Eaten.
-I Never Use A Compass Because I Don't Take Direction Well.

11/8
-Astronauts Tend To Need More Space Than The Rest Of Us.
-Never Attempt To Wear a Suitcase.

11/9
-Return Your Old Library Books. It's Long Overdue.
-(upside-down) I'm A Hand-Stand Enthusiast.

11/10
-Brains: They Think They're So Much Smarter Than Us.
-I Killed Time And Now All The Clocks Are On A Manhunt For Me!
-Whenever I Spill The Beans I Have To Tell Everyone About It.

11/11
-Pastry Chefs Make The Best Pie Charts.
-Once I Fix My Cloaking Device, You Won't Be Able To Read This.
-Earthquakes Are Known In Nature As Land Slam-Dancing.

11/12
-Science Lies, Tiny Wizards Make The Lights Go On and Off.
-Abbrevs Suck IMO.
-Meteors: Nothing Makes A Better First and Last Impression.

11/13
-I'd Rather Be Riding On The Back Of Loch Ness.
-Metal Forks And Electric Sockets Is A Love That Can Never Be.
-Doughnuts Love Our Taste Buds But Hate The Rest Of Our Body.

11/14
-I Can't Wait To Come Back As A Zombie After I Die.
-Puppets Talk Out Of Their Ass When You Put Them On Backwards.
-My Lyrics Are Always Better Than The Ones In The Actual Song.

11/15
-Vegetarian Zombies Only Eat Heads Of Lettuce.
-Wishes Are A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme Thought Up By Water Fountains.

11/16
-A Family Of Skeletons Keep All Their Clothes In My Closet.
-I'm An Ironic Nudist.

11/17
-I Know How To Work Out My Problems, I'm Just Too Lazy To Exercise.
-My Relationship With A Balloon Ended Because It Felt Empty Inside.

11/18
-It's All Fun & Games Until Someone Breaks The Controller.
-Luck Favors Those Who Have Access To A Time Machine.

11/19
-I Deserve More Credit, Mostly Because I Maxxed Out My Limit.
-Can Someone Tell Me What The Hell Satanism Is All About?

11/20
-You Can Always Count On Me, Rain Or Shine. But Not When It's Snowy.
-Clowns Invest All Their Money In Laughing Stock.

11/21
-I'd Rather Be Wearing Another T-Shirt.
-I Took The Skeletons In My Closet And Buried Them In The Desert.

11/22
-I Invented Oxygen. Internet Encyclopedias Don't Lie.
-Meteorites Can Kill Several Thousand Birds With One Stone.

11/23
-The Only Way To Catch An Eletric Eel Is With a Lightning Rod.
-I Don't Run With Scissors, But I Do Skydive With Them.

11/24
-Your Shoulder. I'd Tap That.
-With Great Power Comes Wearing Laughter-Inducing Costumes.

11/25
-Ghosts Who Haunt Didn't Get Enough Attention In Life.
-I Often Contradict Myself. Wait, No I Don't.

11/26
-Status Update: Yup, I'm Still A T-Shirt.
-Adjusted For Inflation, I'm Actually One In A Trillion.

11/27
-I Wasn't Born Under A Bad Sign, Just Power Lines.
-Good Music: I Like That Sound Of That.

11/28
-Magic Beans Grow Up So Fast Nowadays.
-I Dare You To Not Accept Pointless Challenges.
-Times Have Changed. If They Didn't, We'd Be Living In The Past.

11/29
-Balloons Like To Get High On Helium.
-The Sun Always Wins In A Staring Contest.

11/30
-Sadly, Birthday Cakes Won’t Live Long Enough To Celebrate Theirs.
-I’d Start A Revolution, But I Get Easily Dizzy.
-Statistics Make My Life 58.6% Better!

12/1
-My Vegetables Can Get As Fresh With Me As They Want.
-Lightning Bolts Are Just Free-Range Power Lines.

12/2
-If This Shirt’s Not Fancy Enough, I Have My Birthday Suit On Too.
-Every Day, Zombies Try To Live Undeath To Its Fullest.

What a cool fucking idea! Some dude is putting together an entire version of Star Wars splitting the entire movie into 15 second sequences that anyone can recreate any way they wish! You can claim up to three pieces of the movie, I'm seriously thinking about grabbing a shitty camera and some shitty props with some shitty acting friends and doing it! I thought some animation gurus here would wanna get in on the 15 second action as well, can't wait to see the whole movie!

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/


Trailer:

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Like, delete them forever without going to each and every one and it saying "do you wish to delete this forever" and you going "i just fucking told you i did" and then it gets deleted forever even though you can actually find it again and bring it back.

Cause I ain't doing that for the 4,000 or so slogans I have festering in a rejected word pile that make visiting my slogan page to vote for something blowing up a person's computer 9 3/4ths out of 10 times.

HELP ME SLOGAN PEOPLE, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE!





I also found this awesome tumbling video to show you I appreciate your future solving of this very important problem.