The Null Device

Some hackers in Germany have automated the process of generating semi-random T-shirt designs. The result is Zufallsshirt (“chance shirt”), a sort of Borgesian infinite library of quasi-ironic T-shirts. It generates a huge number of combinations of phrases (mostly in German, though with quite a few in English), words and clip-art. Some look like the sort of thrift-store attire hipsters wore 15 years ago, others like miscellaneous ravey wordmarks pumped out by T-shirt labels, and others are rectangles of acrostics of random words.

Some of the results are more presentable than others; one might believe that “Budapest Bicycle Flux” was a semi-obscure math-rock band whose gig the wearer happened to catch in some college-town bar back in the day, and there are situations where one might plausibly wear a T-shirt reading “I Reject Your Reality And Replace It With Cupcakes”, which, alas, cannot be said for some of the outputs, such as “your vagina is a wonderland”, or a grid of words including “Hitlerponys”, “Mörderpenis” and/or the decidedly euphemistic-sounding “wurstvuvuzela”. There are no permalinks and no way of keeping a design other than by buying it (i.e., getting it printed and shipped, which is done by a Leipzig-based mail-order T-shirt printing company). Or by saving the .png file of the image from the website. Anyway, I suspect that the creators have made a fair amount of money, and quite a few people have drawers full of odd-looking shirts from a parallel universe.

Interestingly enough, after clicking through the site for a while, a reader with a limited grasp of German may find their German comprehension improving slightly; perhaps the flood of meaningful (if nonsequiturial) sentences exercises the language pattern-matching parts of the brain in some kind of process of combinatorial fuzzing, reinforcing plausible word sequences.

(via MeFi) ¶ dadaism détournement germany hacks language random text t-shirts 0

Unicorns have been taking a bit of a pasting from the hipsters recently; First there was the Threadless "Afternoon Delight" T-shirt, and now this delightful design. Beware of bad embedded MIDI files and/or permanent scarring of childhood memories.

Along similar lines, there are apparently T-shirts reading "DOLPHINS ARE GAY SHARKS".

(via dreamstooloud) ¶ humour irony t-shirts unicorns 0

Jumping on the bandwagon, only 3 or so years too late; Your humble narrator's blog now has its first pieces of CafePress merchandise, offering a positive, life-affirming philosophy in the classic old-skool Macintosh user-interface idiom. I got mine in the mail a few days ago, and was impressed with how well the printing came out. (I had been a bit skeptical about the quality of those print-to-order places, but CafePress's quality seems top-notch.) I wore it to the blogmeet tonight.

Anyway, why pay $120 for a Japanese-robot-glyph/ironic-retro-porn T-shirt on Chapel St. when you can have one of these for only US$15 (plus exorbitant shipping from the other side of the world, of course)? Or something like that.

¶ cafepress mac retrocomputing t-shirts 0

Japanese T-shirt of the day, from the very amusing engrish.com. Wonder if there's any way to get them in Australia. (via bOING bOING)

¶ bizarre japan juxtaposition t-shirts 0