"Gotta get back, back to the past"

 It's been a long time. As you can probably guess, I'm not the eighteen-year-old who first drafted this blog anymore. The thirty-one-year-old behind the keyboard now is wincing at some of the smug bad taste of this blog's original author.

For anyone wondering about the initial story arc, neither Nerdyshirts nor Barnes ever got back to me. I've seen another shirt mill producing a replication of the shirt in a different font with proper alignment and kerning, which I think undercuts some of the charm.

A later visit to Comic-Con included me seeing a few folks wearing the knockoffs.

The original shirt is still in a faraway corner of my closet, the letters cracking and falling away with the passage of time.

This post, however, is not to rehash the past, but to give a corroborating record to establish authenticity, a sort of faux-provenance. I'm going to be exploring options for minting and selling the original photo, and perhaps other media related to the shirt, as an NFT. So if anyone out there wants to own a piece of pre-2010 Internet history, here's a quasi-certificate of authenticity to go with it.

With love,

Aaron

Talking to a Wall

In January I used that phone number in the WhoIs info to get a hold of William Barnes. He denied having any knowledge about the shirt, apparently doing very little "ground-level" direct intervention with Nerdyshirts itself. He was receptive enough to my call, saying that he'd need all the information on the matter before proceeding, and giving me his e-mail address. I sent the following e-mail a few days later.


Covered pretty much everything, I think.

So far I've received no reply, and the shirt is still up on Nerdyshirts.com.

The Head Vampire

Re: Those Fuckers; My Shit

Who with the huh and the what now?

Tracing it back

No word back from NerdyShirts. I'll give it a while before trying again to contact them.

In the meantime, I think I've found just how they got a hold of my shirt. I checked their wall on their facebook page.

August 5th, Matt Lally posts the photo of me on the NerdyShirts facebook page:

August 12th, NerdyShirts announces the Twilight shirt's availability on their facebook page:














Am I being paranoid for asserting the timing so adamantly in all this so there's no question NerdyShirt's shirt came after my stunt at Comic-Con? Probably, yeah. But I'm sticking to my guns, I still have no clue as to how NerdyShirts will respond to me (if at all), so consider this a form of insurance.

Matt Lally, in case anyone's interested, seems to have found my shirt through a post on Topless Robot. Jesus Christ, these names. This also fits together, the "Quixotico" that NerdyShirts referred to in their facebook post is a name on a comment on the Topless Robot post. I'm surprised that anyone would expect this much thought being put into this silly shirt that I'd try to embed a thesis in something as simple as how I half-assed the lettering. Really I was kinda down when I first saw how misaligned the text was, until I thought "No, this is actually great! It looks so shitty!".

Another interesting note:

Arcane said:

"Buffy stakes Edward" shirt is lame, Buffy could never stake Edward.

This guy though, between the Joey Ramone Glasses and this shirt, must be just draped in vag.

Posted 08/04/2009 at 09:38:38 PM

Sadly, this Arcane guy's wrong about that, which kinda depresses me. Maybe I had a solid chance with that fat girl who called me a jerk at Comic-Con and I was just too stupid to realize it.

Doing homework

Prior to this episode with the Twilight shirt, I had never heard of "NerdyShirts" (Christ, that's the best name they could've come up with?), so now that I've already dropped them a line, I've decided to actually try and see what this company's all about.

I found this small gripe from another similar company with their hooks in the rapidly expanding "dorky shit printed on t-shirts" market.

I'm not passing judgment yet since I've yet to hear from NerdyShirts themselves, but I will admit that this doesn't look too good.