subsidizing Love with mouseclicks

As too many of my recent posts indicate, I've been making Threadless T submissions, thinking I'd swiftly take the $500 prize that accompanies a winning t-shirt slogan. (Sad but true: Threadless has dominated this shower in the dark as of late, and I'll now return to blogging about topics of greater sophistication like ping pong songs.) I thought some of my slogans were pretty fantastic. "If you think I'm cute, you should see my dog." Fantastic, right? Wrong. At least, according to the Threadless crowd, which as I've come to learn, is a damn tough one. Or a damn tasteless one. Or something, but anyways. Meanwhile, I'm madly in Love with someone who lives very very far away. It costs lots of money to see each other. Like $500. [Light bulb sound effect!] So why not submit a slogan that says, "I voted on this shirt so that Nathaniel could visit Stephanie," blast it out to our friends, and defeat (i.e. become) the Threadless crowd! Which is what we did. And we made a Facebook event for it and got adorable scribblings on the wall and people downvoted other slogans and suggested creating aliases to vote multiple times on ours and even those who didn't attend the event voted for it (note: there was nothing to attend).

Too late into this whole thing, I realized we didn't do it right. We should have submitted a stand-alone awesome slogan that wouldn't have smelled fishy to Threadless (Who are Nathaniel and Stephanie? What's up with all these first-time accounts voting for this slogan?), and would have gotten votes regardless. What started as an impossibility became a possibility, but we should have treated it as such from the beginning. Hmph. Polls closed. And the verdict was...........a rockin 82%!!!!!!! Which means, well, we don't actually know what it means. Because, says Threadless, "we look at the top 300 designs every couple of weeks and pick out around 10 designs that we want to print based off of the designs score, comments, and the number of i'd buy it's. Ultimately the decision of which shirts get printed are left up to us." Every couple of weeks? Ultimately the decision is up to Threadless? How absurdly anticlimactic. At the very least, threadless should fork over the $500 for driving so much new traffic to their site.

But hear hear, imaginary audience: if executed wisely, this could be (as one voter/attendee/friend put it) "the stuff of legends." And if you go for it, lemme know. We can cut a massive vote-swapping deal.