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.

human flower chain

At any given moment, all city intersections have at least one crosswalk available for walking, if not four (like 4th and Folsom in SF), or even more (a la Shibuya Crossing, above). That means you could hang out in a street intersection perpetually, because there’s always somewhere safe to hang – as long as you keep migrating to the available crosswalk. And crosswalks are connected to each other by sidewalks, also safe places to hang. Imagine a flower chain of people, holding hands through an entire city from sidewalk to crosswalk to sidewalk. Now take a bird’s eye view, and watching sidewalkers and crosswalkers fluctuate like swinging doors. I wonder if there are enough homeless people in SF to make a human flower chain from the Presidio to Hunter’s Point. But even the scaled-down version of a perpetual street hang at the 4th and Folsom intersection would be dandy.

craig's middlemen

The beauty of direct seller-to-buyer services, like the 'for sale' section on Craig’s List, is that they eliminate the middlemen, enabling sellers to get the entire cut. But they therefore require sellers to do all the work. And believe you me, it takes work to sell stuff on Craig's List: you gotta respond to a flood of emails/phone calls, be around when prospective buyers want to come by and check out the bike, re-post the ad every couple of days as it expires, etc. Economists tells us scarcity creates demand, and scarcity is a matter of context, so why not re-introduce the middlefolk in the context where they're lacking with a Craig’s List selling service? Pay a small fee, and they'll sell your stuff for you. Sounds like a ridiculous perversion of Craig's dream, but I bet there'd be a demand for it.

"if you think I'm cute, you should see my dog."

That's Threadless #4. And #5:

"If you think I'm cute, you should see my cat."

There's actually a story here. When my sister and I were even littler than we are now, my mom had us wear t-shirts that said: "If you think I'm cute, you should see my mom." (Still so true.) But I'm betting that the way to peeps' hearts is through their pets. If that's the case, vote here.

"first came the universe, then came the university to explain it."

Get out the vote for Threadless T number 3!

"what are you doing right now?"

Threadless #2 pays homage to Twitter and Facebook status updates, and a question special enough to warrant submitting to Threadless for printing a t-shirt. So special, in fact, that someone had already submitted it. Boo. My next (and actual) submission forthcoming.

"it's not that I dropped out of Harvard, I never even went there."

My first ever Threadless T. I've been racking up ideas for too long, and I'm finally submitting them. Submissions will be posted here, so you (my imaginary audience) can vote on them. It might be obvious, but just in case: this first one is joking about how dropping out of Harvard is almost becoming a virtue, an indicator of future success, something to brag about. It specifically references Harvard-dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but pays broader tribute to other fantastically successful college-dropouts, like Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Ok fine, and Eminem. So as part of your pitch, you'd tell the VC, “it's not that I dropped out of Harvard, I never even went there.” A surefire way to get your startup funded. I was pretty amused, but it didn't do super well with the Threadless crowd. Heh.

New submissions will be posted on Sundays. (Another one coming tonight.) Vote here!