Mid-Atlanticon!

[Ecureuil Ecumant]

OK! Here's today's new draft. I added the Washington Monument in the background, as well as some extra bushes etc. that were needed due to the other changes. I also made the following significant changes:

-- Removed Mr. Potato Head and replaced him with a Potato-Ade bottle down in the bushes. Using Wilbur's apple juice bottle from MW proved unfeasible due to its small size and too much tweaking needed to make it look good. So I used a Hennesey's whiskey bottle as the starting template instead.

-- Removed "Comics Curmudgeon" entirely and replaced it with the date (just 5/22/2010 since there still seems to be some uncertainty as to whether there will be anything "official" happening on the 23rd -- this would be an easy change, though).

-- Flew the narrative boxes partway off the graphic because they were covering up too much of the graphic, and also to give the overall outline a little more zip than a simple rectangle would have.

I haven't tried adding any facial hair to the lorikeets, but can do that if there's a consensus.

The new draft is posted at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32890005@N ... 8/sizes/l/

I'll be happy to consider further changes, but will give great preference to those that come from Mudges who are planning to attend. If you're not in that group, please feel free to use this or future drafts as a starting point for your own preferred mods. Keep in mind that this is intended for use as an iron-on transfer so you can make your own shirt, for those who are adept at it. I can also provide completed shirts at cost to those who show up, if you prefer.

[bourbon babe]

Oh my goodness, Ecureuil Ecumant, that's.... that's wonderful!

Seriously, I love it!

I think your options for production are good. We can coordinate further as we get closer to the date--but I'm certainly willing to help out with that part, too.

You have earned yourself many Potato-Ade cocktails in May!

Thanks!--bb,u

[wossname]

Bee-YOO-tiful! I will wear it proudly.

How much skill does it take to iron on one of these things?

[Ecureuil Ecumant]

Thanks for the kind words. We do have three months till the big day, so I'll be putting in some more work to take care of the color-monkey slackness in tight corners, and zap the remaining JPG artifacts to clean it up. I'm also thinking about putting a blue-sky gradient background on it instead of leaving the sky Kalahari white; that will require changing it from JPG to a file format that supports image layers and transparency, so I'll have to play with it a bit more.

wossname, the trick to t-shirt transfers is to use fresh transfer sheets (not two-year-old leftovers), as hot and dry an iron as you can find, and use a piece of plywood or a board instead of an ironing board. Then push down as hard as you can on the iron (I use both hands, one on each side of the top of the iron body -- not the handle -- you have to pull your fingers up away from the iron to keep from burning them). Then keep pressing the transfer for twice as long as the package says, almost till the cotton starts to turn brown <g>. Home irons are about 200 degrees cooler than the mangles that t-shirt shops use, but with that technique you can get transfers that bond very well to the shirt. As the day approaches, I'll be glad to take orders from anyone who doesn't trust their t-shirt transfer chops.

[Mooncattie]

I love it! The text, the broken bottle, all of it...it's wonderful!! I'm bringing Potato-Ade from North of The Border!

[Miss Othmar]

I've been out of the loop -- LOVE the t-shirt design! So we're going to download and print to iron-on transfers, is that it?
I think I can manage that....

Too bad there are no lorikeets at the National Zoo. What else is on the agenda?

[bourbon babe]

No real agenda yet--although I imagine that I'll be working on more details with Josh in March. I think that Saturday looks like a pretty firm date for the main event. (And I'm hoping that PerkyBird will be able, sometime during the weekend, to give us her extra-special prehensile sex tour--of the zoo, I mean.)

[Ecureuil Ecumant]

Woke up laughing this morning from a dream of Mid-Atlanticon. Fortunately, it wasn't because I'd "pulled a Wilbur" and gone to the meet-up sans pants.

I'll spare y'all Acts 1 and 2 (planning and preparation), bizarre though they were, and cut to the chase. We all started gathering at the end of a tree-shaded cul de sac. (No, I don't think it was Richard Thompson's house.) Wossname arrived on her 'sickle and pulled out -- you'll have guessed this -- a battery-powered 8-track player, which she set on top of a car. Then she showed me an 8-track of Marquesan music and asked me if I might be able to verify the translations on the back of the cartridge sleeve.

Now Marquesan is somewhat out of the mainstream of generic Polynesian, which would render this a difficult ad hoc endeavor, but hey, it was a dream so I said punch it up. The first song was a grace before meals (actually, that'd be quite believable). I started listening to the song and reading the translation, and suddenly began laughing as it became clear that the meal they were singing about was a missionary ragoût -- wicked sense of humor, those Marquesans! -- but this, er, crucial detail had been omitted from the translation. Wossname asked me why I was laughing, and I replied "We've all heard of people singing FOR their supper, but these folks are singing TO their supper!"

And then I woke up laughing.

Something tells me this is gonna be fun.

[bourbon babe]

EE, I think that your dream might have a slight Baldo influence; wasn't Tia Carmen in that stew pot yesterday or the day before?

Actually, the bizarre nature of that dream pretty much reflects the eclectic, encyclopediac knowledge of the CCers--so it was probably a pretty good prediction!

I love it--thanks for posting that!

[Ecureuil Ecumant]

"EE, I think that your dream might have a slight Baldo influence; wasn't Tia Carmen in that stew pot yesterday or the day before?"

Well, I won't dispute Baldo might have played a role. It certainly did prompt me to make some Portuguese bean soup yesterday in a cauldron nearly as big as Tia Carmen's. Mine, however, isn't Farberware.

I'm more inclined to think, though, that the dream was precipitated by my premature stewing about whether to wear my lavender vs. my salmon leisure suit to Mid-Atlanticon.

[gnome de blog]

I'm more inclined to think, though, that the dream was precipitated by my premature stewing about whether to wear my lavender vs. my salmon leisure suit to Mid-Atlanticon.

Lavender suit, salmon shirt. If I could come I'd go with the peach, a la Professor Papagoras. Peach is the new electric blue.

[bourbon babe]

EE, if you wear any form of leisure suit, you will have my undying admiration!

[Perky Bird]

I've just checked the message boards for the first time in a while, and I have to say I LOVE EE's t-shirt design! I will proudly wear one, even if people give me strange looks.

I'm looking forward to the Mid-Atlanticon! I'll check back to see what the details are. If the National Zoo is to be part of the festivities, it'll need to be Saturday, since I have to meet my cousin at the airport on Sunday.

[bourbon babe]

Perky Bird, I was figuring the same thing, because I think our out-of-town 'mudges will be leaving Sunday. So maybe a little prehensile erotic show in afternoon (which now makes me think of the current "dangling mucus" thread), followed by festivities in the evening?

[Ecureuil Ecumant]

A prehensile erotic show? It appears the Washington Zoo, alas, has no bonobos among its ranks of primates. Does that mean we'll have to settle for tree sloths? Perhaps the squirrels will be more accomodating, though we may miss the show if we blink.