Help us Threadless-Ones, you're our only hope!

Amazing illustrator Mike Reisel and whatever the hell I am are putting the finishing touchity-touches on our first collab, and we'd like help from the Threadless community to finish it up!

The concept of the design is a reversal or abstraction of a cock fight/gladiator battle, with astronauts that have been caught freewheeling it up in outer space- polluting every corner of the cosmos for exploration sake- are pushed into an arena filled with thousands of different species of aliens to battle it out for their blood-thirsty satisfaction. Check out a small sampling of the spectators:











Quite a festive bunch ain't they? We've got FOUR missing spots in the spectator pile-on that we need your help on, so in this blog please describe up to four alien characters you'd like to seen drawn by Mike and whichever four we like the best will be made a t-shirt reality in the design!

Let go to the creepiest crawliest funkiest craziest and est-iest corners of your sci-fi mind to come up with a character so awesome and hilarious the design would not be half as good without its inclusion.

We are also gonna have an alien flying a banner outside the arena to really sell the fight night concept with a quick burst of exciting words and phrases, so we also need a writing guru who can come up with the magic lines to make viewers of the tee instantly understand the idea and make it as exciting sounding as possible, from the perspective of a banner trying to sell this sporting event to alien passers-by to come on in and have one hell of a good time:



If one of your characters or banner heading is picked to go into the submission, you will win a free t-shirt of this design if it is printed and our favorite alien/banner will get a 25 Threadless gift certificate straight-on-up!

The contest will last until we find five elements we love like a Snuggie loves embarrassing its wearer, so maybe a couple hours, maybe a few eons, who knows?

Thanks so much for being a part of our intergalactic fun-timery!

And I couldn't be happier with Threadbuck holes in my head and all over my porch! Thanks a lot for all the STPs today, and in fact in the last week or two for the sale I've been getting a good deal of them, and it fills me with the warm and fizzy fuzzies. My unlimited love to y'all and if you reveal yourselves on this blog in the next half hour, I'll try to repay you with my order and future ones as well! And don't take credit for the Threadless cash payment if you didn't do it, you will get yourself into seven years bad luck of your bought t-shirt designs falling right off your tee as soon as you put them on!

Please vote on all these glorious designs and I will pay you each a hay-penny for your efforts if these designs get printed!

























Some designs I adore but moreso for the wall than less for my chest:








And some designs I really enjoy and deserve much accolade-ance:

I'm all for debates about political debates with people who don't share my viewpoints, but then there's the people who rant and scream and make the biggest noise who really aren't adding anything to the debate except blocking the real issues, and those people I think are abusing and the democratic process, like these peeps below.

Apparently some folks in the ludicrous completely-proven-to-be-put-together-by-Fox-News Teabaggers Tea Party movement have made a documentary film which tries to make their mostly hollow, pissed off but not offering any of their own answers, purposely mis-informing as well as covertly and not-so-covertly racist meetings on capital hill to protest a progressive agenda (that really isn't that progressive once it gets completely watered down and toothless before it becomes an official bill) look like a patriotic uprising of voices that MUST BE HEARD!

I love the action movie bravado that the narrator of the trailer has for the film, like it's the sequel to 2012 or something.

These people have every right to voice their opinion, but it mostly consists of people that have an EXTREMELY skewed look at reality and don't really say much when you actually stop mocking their ridiculous name for a movement and dressing in Revolutionary War outfits.

Get a load of these flick's trailer here and check it out: they actually found a black youth to try and make the Teabaggers movement not look like it's made up of 95 percent white folks!



In other news, Sarah Palin stated today that she thinks the "birther" question about Barak Obama- you know, the one that has been completely debunked and dealt with for several months now- is a legitimate question for people to still ask about. I'm so glad this portion of the country isn't in charge right now.....not that the peeps in charge are doing so much different or still aren't kowtowing to Goldman-Sachs and every other bank interest to keep feeding them our tax money....but at least they're trying to close the door a little bit on corporations running the country instead of just flinging it open as wide as it can go.

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.