Three Cat Moonshine
July 24, 2009 8:01 AM   Subscribe

Like Keyboard Cat? Like Three Wolf Moon? Now they are TOGETHER AT LAST.

However, that the T-shirt was submitted and printed within a week has led to Threadless being accused of selling out to capitalise on two very popular memes - particularly after the 'British T-Rex' didn't get printed, despite decent scoring, due to accounts being created from the forum from which that meme originated.
posted by mippy (48 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
A tshirt?
posted by OmieWise at 8:02 AM on July 24, 2009


I love Threadless so much. I have 5 of their shirts so far. My favorite so far, that I own, is Runnin' Rhino.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:05 AM on July 24, 2009


Jesus is Christmas.
posted by The Straightener at 8:06 AM on July 24, 2009


Eventually, all of this self-referential Internet humor is going to implode, and all that will remain is a smoky ruin dotted with scraps and shreds of ironic t-shirts. Then the evil clown overlords will rise up, and soak the terrified masses in Diet Faygo.
posted by jbickers at 8:08 AM on July 24, 2009 [8 favorites]


I thought about posting this, then thought better of it.
posted by slogger at 8:09 AM on July 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


If anyone can explain British T-Rex to me I'd be grateful. I'm in Britain RIGHT NOW and I can only see pigeons. None of those suckers are wearing no top hats, I can tell you.
posted by mippy at 8:13 AM on July 24, 2009


Threadless is nice. And then they stopped making XS t-shirts. Bastards. (Also, Fuck You MetaFilter for not making XS tshirts. This ain't over.)
posted by chunking express at 8:14 AM on July 24, 2009 [5 favorites]


Please buy my t-shirt.

Does it come with a mix CD?
posted by Leon at 8:14 AM on July 24, 2009


Can I get it in t-shirt blue?
posted by netbros at 8:15 AM on July 24, 2009


Can I get this printed on a nice, fuckable pillowcase?

ok, that's gotta be my last nisan joke
posted by orme at 8:19 AM on July 24, 2009 [2 favorites]


I don't get how this is "selling out". Threadless has millions of jokey tshirts.

Also, I'd love British T-Rex, even though he isn't British, just very wealthy.
posted by DU at 8:19 AM on July 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


>> Threadless is nice. And then they stopped making XS t-shirts.

Hey, at least you can take a small and shrink it in the dryer. Us 4- and 5-x'ers are just SOL.
posted by davelog at 8:23 AM on July 24, 2009


Yeah, to me it looks like a simple case of supply and demand (lol capitalism). It's not for me, but the design is pretty well executed.

I like their own-brand shirts - they're long enough for me, the AA ones didn't have bust room. (Also AA make me very uncomfortable.)
posted by mippy at 8:26 AM on July 24, 2009


I just ordered one for my wife. In 5-8 business days, I'll be having cool, PBR-fueled, ironic sex. I will rub my hands along the length of those sleek American Apparel fibers and she will coo. The passion will build until I cannot take it anymore and I hurl my Ray-Bans aside.

If they make a noise as they shatter against the wall, we will not hear it.

Afterwards, we will lie back in bed and talk about indie music, bacon, or anything besides the weird turn our foreplay has taken.

We are the modern couple and we shirk and revel in it.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:27 AM on July 24, 2009 [20 favorites]


capilolism
posted by DU at 8:32 AM on July 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


It's no "Never Forget"
posted by crashlanding at 8:40 AM on July 24, 2009 [4 favorites]


I'm new here. Where is the link I click on to advertise my product?
posted by digsrus at 8:42 AM on July 24, 2009


In 5-8 business days, I'll be having cool, PBR-fueled, ironic sex.

Ceiling cat will be taping you for Youtube.
posted by explosion at 8:42 AM on July 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


And keyboard cat will be there, bringing a whole new meaning to "play him off."
posted by exogenous at 8:47 AM on July 24, 2009 [2 favorites]


And your home will be foreclosed due to the lack of funds from your terrible, filthy, t-shit buying habits.

Keyboard cat will just keep playing... perhaps wearing the shattered raybans.
posted by LD Feral at 8:51 AM on July 24, 2009


What were they thinking, seriously?
posted by mippy at 8:55 AM on July 24, 2009


I have a special place in my heart for the three wolf tshirt because it's exactly the kind of cheesy wolf-themed products that I got for Christmas every year from when I was around 10 years old to when I left for college. In one of the biggest mistakes of my young life, I at one point told my parents that I thought wolves "were cool." My aunt and uncle (who I only ever saw at Christmas) took this idea and ran with it, finding a different random object with wolves plastered all over it to give me every year. I never had the heart to tell them that I didn't really even like wolves in the first place, so every year I would unwrap a mug with a pack of wolves running through a moonlit snowscape printed on it or whatever and say "Thanks a lot, this is great." I always wondered what they imagined my room looked like, and how shocked they would be if they ever saw it and noticed that it wasn't decked out in wall to wall wolf paraphernalia.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:56 AM on July 24, 2009 [11 favorites]


Also, Fuck You MetaFilter for not making XS tshirts.

Hey, just be happy we don't pick our teeth with you.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:07 AM on July 24, 2009 [4 favorites]


Lately the artwork-as-t-shirt designs seem to be migrating from just the Select tees into the regular Threadless offerings. I prefer the simpler get-it-at-a-glance type of stuff, so I've been less enthused about the more recent Threadless shirts, even though I have many older ones that I love.

This is the last t-shirt I bought, but it didn't come from Threadless.
posted by elfgirl at 9:14 AM on July 24, 2009


Uzbek kids sweated under a hot sun to pick cotton for a tshirt that has a perceived obsolescence so short it has to be measured by the half life of a transuranic element. I foresee it will be a big hit in Africa in about a year's time, and the people of Botswana thank you for subsidizing their new keyboard cat tshirts. Play em out piano katse.
posted by Sova at 9:16 AM on July 24, 2009 [4 favorites]


If anyone can explain British T-Rex to me I'd be grateful. I'm in Britain RIGHT NOW and I can only see pigeons. None of those suckers are wearing no top hats, I can tell you.

Whoa! You telling me you've never been to Norfolk? They've got dinosaurs everywhere. Just last week the mayor of Cromer was eaten by a ceratops. It will probably be on You've Been Framed in a couple of weeks.

posted by Sova at 9:16 AM on July 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


The wolf-cat t-shirt memeplosion is awesome, and Threadless is alright if you're into that sort of thing. I get my lulz from T-Shirt Hell (splash page link, since there's lots of NSFW inside), a fabulously wrong-on-pretty-much-every-level collection of torso pants (their now defunct "cleaner" sister site, and my favorite term for t-shirts ever). The only shirt I've bought from them (and possibly the only shirt I've purchased online at all) is this one.

I think I'll have to wait a long while for either dream to come true.
posted by yiftach at 9:41 AM on July 24, 2009


Ceiling cat will be taping you for Youtube.

And I shall doff my trucker cap to him. He will be intrigued, finally the 4th wall - no, ceilling! - has been broken! He will climb down from the ceiling on a rope made from bandannas and slink his way over to the bed.

"You had us at 'Mrowr?'" my wife will purr.

Then we will all dance to Thriller.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:46 AM on July 24, 2009


If anyone can explain British T-Rex to me I'd be grateful. I'm in Britain RIGHT NOW and I can only see pigeons. None of those suckers are wearing no top hats, I can tell you.

I don't actually think this is it, but it seems like there MUST be a Mark Bolan reference in there somewhere. But then the monocle part doesn't really make sense to me, unless I'm forgetting something.
posted by dubitable at 9:47 AM on July 24, 2009


If you like the T-Rex shirt, be sure to check out the shirts over at Sir Critter.

I will not say what my wife did when I got her one of those, just that it was AWESOME.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:56 AM on July 24, 2009


Uzbek kids sweated under a hot sun to pick cotton for a tshirt that has a perceived obsolescence so short it has to be measured by the half life of a transuranic element.

Actually, the best way to understand this t-shirt is as a monologue delivered to that poor Uzbeki boy by some irony-soaked semi-geek hipster . . .

"Well, you see, Yusuf, it started with this, uh, meme a couple months back - that's meme, em-ee-em-ee, like a trend or something that everyone does a lot of texting and twittering and blogging about for awhile . . . those are, on the internet, there's like a bunch of different interfaces? So you can post words and pictures on your blog, or there's Twitter now, and those are like really really brief postings, or you send a text from a mobile phone - I'm sure you've seen those in the bazaar, or, well or maybe you've got a cousin who smashes them with dull hammers to extract the cadmium . . . Anyway, so someone did this little series of films where they had their cat playing a keyboard - no, it was a real cat, but the arms were kind of like puppet arms, and it played this great little sort of Muzaky closing credits riff . . . Muzak, like the songs they play while you're on hold, or like in the background at the mall? Imagine the, you know, the town bazaar had a roof on it . . . Okay. So then people took a whole bunch of awkward, embarassing social situations - no, like movies of those situations they found on YouTube, is what I mean, because there's all kinds of crazy . . . so, okay, basically half the world's - well, not the world's, but like where I'm from, people take videos of themselves and weird shit they've seen all the time and then post them to the internet, and sometimes people start talking up one or the other, like some crazy religious nuts arguing . . . No, not like that, there's no explosions or anything, just like arguing whether Christmas is for Jesus or for getting stuff, that kind of thing, or like someone falls down and hurts themselves in a crazy way, and then the cat kind of 'plays them out,' you know? Hi-larious. Yusuf, seriously, you gotta see some of this stuff, it's fucking . . . do your hands stay like that all the time, by the way? That claw shape? 'Cause that might totally, like on one of the single-topic photo blogs, people might really dig . . .

"Anyway. So right around the time the whole keyboard cat meme was going on, there was also this website selling t-shirts - yeah, like a stall in the market, but on the internet and then they mail you the shirt you want . . . So they were selling these super-cheesy airbrushed type t-shirts with three wolves howling . . . like a graphic, people used to put this shit on the sides of their vans in the '70s . . . well, I mean, that's what we were doing, Yusuf, I guess for your parents it was mostly, I dunno, did the Soviets make vans? Was their airbrushing? Imagine a seriously ugly matrushka doll. Okay. So both of those memes were pretty much played out - like people just kind of get bored? Like maybe when you're working and the ache in your finger joints fades to a sort of numbness and you just zone out until - what is it the boss does? . . Jesus, really? Dude, that fucking sucks, you guys should . . .

"Anyway. So everyone was bored with the keyboard cats and the three wolves howling at the moon - I mean, this is what we do, like sometimes at work or at school or whatever, but also at home, you just kind of surf around, looking for . . . yeah, no, we don't, I mean we use cotton, but I don't think, I mean I don't know anyone who picks it. Okay. So we're all bored with that other stuff, but then someone got this idea to sort of merge them, like sort of draw the keyboard cats in the style and pose of the wolves. So fucking funny, big lulz, you know? Like the cat, and it's all dramatic and '70s cheese? And so I don't know what I have in my Paypal account, a couple hundred maybe, but I just, I clicked on 'order' - that's like buying the thing, I'll take it, you know? So I clicked and honestly, I mean, by the time the thing shipped it was kind of over, you know? I mean, I wore it once, but I was at this mojito place and some guy was like, hey, last month called, it wants its meme back, you know? So it's at the bottom of my sock drawer now and it'll probably wind up at Goodwill or something.

"Anyway, Yusuf, you remember three months ago, that cold day in the rain and you couldn't decide whether it was worse when the joints in your fingers made you wish you were dead or the pangs in your empty stomach made you wonder why a just God would create such a life? Like Allah or whatever . . . Yeah. That day. Shitty, dude. Really. Anyway, I think it was maybe two and a half hours of that day, that was my keyboard cat wolf shirt. Here's the twenty bucks. No, keep it. I don't know what I was thinking."

Forgive me, I've been participating in Infinite Summer . . .
posted by gompa at 9:58 AM on July 24, 2009 [10 favorites]


Not that there's anything particularly wrong with this, but are we really making FPPs for meme updates and evolutions?
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 9:58 AM on July 24, 2009




Runnin' Rhino makes me sad.
posted by djeo at 11:10 AM on July 24, 2009


I've apparently bought a shit load of t-shirts from them. I'm a computer programmer, so I wear t-shirts the way some men might wear dress shirts and ties.
posted by chunking express at 11:20 AM on July 24, 2009


Not as bad as I feared; not as good as I hoped.
posted by tommasz at 11:27 AM on July 24, 2009


This is me chiming in.
posted by swift at 11:33 AM on July 24, 2009


chunking, I am in a similar situation (my daily uniform is jeans, hoodie, tshirt), and I have something like 30 threadless shirts.

I'm amused that the only one in your list that I have is 'flowers in the attic'. They have an awful lot of shirts over there...
posted by flaterik at 11:54 AM on July 24, 2009


I feel as though I'm not living up to my MeFi potential.
posted by Sailormom at 12:00 PM on July 24, 2009


Just here to second robocop is bleeding. The Sir Critter shirts by MeFi's own JezzTek are a lot more interesting than that T-Rex one.
posted by rottytooth at 12:59 PM on July 24, 2009


Runnin' Rhino makes me sad.

Me too! It's a very bittersweet image.

Crazy rhino! You are beautiful just the way you are! I'd pet you if you promise not to gore me!
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 1:06 PM on July 24, 2009


so you can only see a bit of it in this picture, but it does show that a wolf shirt was actually worn to a mefi10 party
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:58 PM on July 24, 2009


I'll take The Madness of Mission 6, TYVM
posted by mwhybark at 3:28 PM on July 24, 2009


so you can only see a bit of it in this picture, but it does show that a wolf shirt was actually worn to a mefi10 party

"A" wolf shirt? Doesn't really compare to the wolf shirt.
posted by cillit bang at 4:37 PM on July 24, 2009


I always liked the live version of the wolves pretending to be keyboard cat better.
posted by mikeh at 5:01 PM on July 24, 2009


Well played, sir.
posted by chunking express at 5:04 PM on July 24, 2009


Christ, not again.
posted by Kinbote at 8:18 PM on July 24, 2009


Well feck. This shirt was a big topic of conversation at the Ann Arbor meetup but I see none of us managed to be the one to FPP it...pity.

FWIW I'm making a project with twelve wolves on it, and then I will be unstoppable...
posted by Tesseractive at 9:58 AM on July 25, 2009


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