ThinkNerd origin
| Meta: | Origin | Source files |
|---|---|
| T-shirts: | Technology | Retro computing | Nerd culture | Love | Music | Miscellaneous | All |
What is ThinkNerd for? Why was it created and what is it all about? Partially prompted by a useful list of online geek/nerd clothing and accessories stores on Firesnake.net, I fancied buying myself some more t-shirts from these places, as one does. Computer error parodies, circuit board designs, usw.
I still felt, however, that some sectors of nerd interests are under-represented or not represented at all. The largest foci of existing geek and nerd t-shirt designs seem to be on workplace humour, programming, US leet/hacker subculture and hardcore gaming. You won’t, however, find much on the subject of retro computing (Amiga, Acorn, Amstrad CPC, ZX 80/81/Spectrum, Apple etc), Macintosh, or any other areas that are non-mainstream US geek and nerd on the well-known online stores. A circuit board t-shirt is about as close as you will get to Jen’s PIC programming and homebrew electronics, hardware and robotics. Science and mathematics are a touch better represented, but there are subtler and more intriguing and beautiful ways to express a love for mathematics than a bright blue t-shirt with a π on it. The most obvious example are designs based on fractals (e.g. Julia and Mandelbrot sets) but one can go far beyond that.
ThinkNerd – originally titled Too Nerdy For My (T)-Shirt – initially represented a way to demonstrate the sorts of things that I might personally wish to see on a t-shirt that I would like to wear; the first design – a BBC Micro start screen – was actually stolen from an MSN buddy icon I had made previously. That said, I was sitting on a mental fence somewhere between “these designs represent me well and are cool” and “ugh these are so terribly sad that even I would never been seen dead wearing one”, hence the amusingly self-deprecating approach to the page to begin with, and the very non-serious note on ordering, reproduced here for your continued edification:
To order:
- Screenshot desired shirt(s)
- Download and install the GIMP and the Ultra-Magick-Megascopic-Zoom plugin to generate 8″-wide 300 dpi copies of the shirt designs
- Go outside into the realm of blue up-there and the Big Light and buy some real, plain t-shirts
- Print out the megascopically-zoomed shirt images onto transfers and iron them onto your plain shirts (for anyone who knows how to iron that is; I would say, consult your girlfriend otherwise but that is not applicable to the target audience)
Et viola.
Either way, I had a huge amount of fun coming up with and drawing the designs. On moving the page from Firetrack to Telcontar.net, I have revisited all the designs and made a lot of improvements. One notable such improvement is the appearance of the t-shirts used in the designs, but I left them slightly misshapen for posterity.
As time went by, I also made the range of designs more diverse and some of them are by far not as extreme as BBC Micro start-up screen. Even so, I still cannot see myself actually wearing most of these designs!
Random aside
While clearing out all the junk from my inbox going back months, I turned up an auto-reponse from a mail I sent to ThinkGeek. My original message contained this fragment:
hm... on a totally unrelated aside, I think that ThinkGeek should set up a British spin off and have such shirts as:
BBC Computer 32K BASIC >and maybe a "tribute" (though she is not actually dead yet!) to Sophie Wilson, who amongst other things designed the instruction set for the original ARM CPU (the successors of which power the likes of the iPod, my Psion Revo Plus PDA and Apple's Newton). I feel that the classic 80s British home computing arena is a bit under-represented ;)
There, I even gave ThinkGeek a chance. Of course, they took no notice of me; I guess the design was too nerdy for their t-shirt ;)