It's My Christmas Thing

Back in April, I did a post about how shirts with Sasquatches on them had become my thing. I particularly like this shirt that had the inspiring message double entendre included. (Is it a double entendre if it's not sexual? Or is it just a double meaning in that case?)

Well, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that, while we were at the store the other day and the kids stopped to look at Christmas ornaments, they pointed this one out to me.

It's got the similarly fun double meaning as well. Every stupid Christmas movie is all about belief in Santa Claus, but what about Bigfoot. He needs belief a lot more than Santa does. Maybe I need to get this ornament for my tree. After all, it's my thing...

So Much More Of Those People

I said in the end of my last post about this that it would certainly be something that got out of hand quickly. I, who had aspirations of filling my back windows with stickers of the places I'd visited in my life, was able now to make my own stickers at any time. What would I do? Well, go overboard of course.

The first thing I did was take scans of the stickers that Temu sent me in grossly over-exaggerated proportions. Then I asked my daughter to make versions of those in a normal size. So, I now have a normal-sized version of my Grand Canyon sticker along with my St. Augustine, Florida sticker.

That St. Augustine one, I think, is my favorite. I loved that freaking lighthouse, so I couldn't resist getting the sticker. I was so sad when it was way too bug, but now I get to use it after all.

My daughter also made me the Mesa Verde sticker that came too big. The normal-size one looks good.

But that certainly wasn't where I stopped. I could make my own freaking stickers if I wanted to! So, of course, I was going to do that. There was a spot on my window that was likely to remain empty unless I made a sticker that fit it perfectly. It had to be tall and skinny, which seemed like the right place for a tree-shaped sticker. I just did that with the Muir Woods sticker from my last post though, so I tried to come up with something else. I figured, a lighthouse would work. 

I love lighthouses. When I was in my early-twenties, my family took a trip to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they had a lot of lighthouses there. We went to a few of them, including the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and the lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. 

I asked the AI that I usually use to design my book covers with to make me a picture of the two lighthouses, and was surprised to find that the Ocracoke one looked pretty close to correct. So, I cropped it, and created this sticker.

I measured the spot on the window to make sure the sticker would fit, and my daughter printed it out for me. Now, that empty spot is filled in nicely.

While I was at it, I couldn't find a good sticker for the Bahamas, which I had visited on a cruise once back in the nineties on that same trip where we went to the Outer Banks, but also just this year in February. I'd ordered a sticker from Temu that I didn't really like that much, but now, I could make something much better.

I again had the AI make me a picture, this time of a white sand beach with palm trees. I sifted through the various options, and settled on this picture that I designed into a sticker.

We printed it out. We didn't even have to worry about making it fit in any little nook, so it could be a normal shape and size if we wanted. I like how it turned out.

There was one more place I thought I ought to put on my window. I had a sticker for Cancún, San Diego, San Francisco, Park City, and New York City—all cities that I've seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so. One big destination that I didn't have, though, was New Orleans. We visited that city for the first time not long after coming to Houston, and have been back a few times since. I love that place, despite the fact that I lost (or was pickpocketed) $100 out of my shorts pocket and also dropped my off-brand GoPro camera into the swamp while I was there.

I had looked for good NOLA stickers on Temu, and come up empty-handed. But I could make my own now, folks! I found a sticker that had a good bit of art, but had a crappy design. I cropped the crappy design elements out, and redesigned it for myself, coming up with this look:

If you're wondering, yes, that's the same font I use for Rish Outfield's name on all of his book covers. It's a good looking font. We printed out the sticker, and now, it's on my back window.

So, I added another six stickers to my window. This can't go on for much longer. This is what it looks like now.

Not a whole lot of space left. I can probably fill up both of the side windows, but the middle one needs to remain sticker-free. That's where the rear-view mirror looks. As much as I love covering my window with stickers, I need to be able to see what's going on behind me more.

There are still some places I'd like to do stickers of, though. One place I loved as a kid was in far Northern California called Lava Beds National Monument. It was a network of caves carved in prehistoric days by lava flow. It was so fun exploring our way through those caves. I'd like to do a sticker for that place. I'd have to make my own, though, because I can't find any place online that has one for sale. Maybe the AI can make me a cave that looks good enough. We'll see.

More Of Those People

When my daughter got her Cricut machine a few years ago, she had a pretty distinct purpose to fulfill with it, but as time went by, she learned more and more about the other things she could do with it as well. There are so many things you can do with vinyl. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime soon we could start cutting our own records using the thing and become a world famous band...oh, wait, people don't do bands anymore. It's just idiots with no talent singing like they're the winner of the voice and then processing the hell out of their music until it sounds nothing like themselves to make it listenable. Maybe not.

Anyway, one of the things my daughter discovered is that you can make window stickers using her machine. She wanted to try it out, so she asked me if there was something I'd want to put on my window. Maybe a Minnesota Vikings sticker? 

I guess I could try that, so I sent her a logo and she made me a sticker. It looked amazing, exactly like a sticker I'd pay handsomely at a sports store to be able to own. I stuck it on my truck and started driving around with it. My daughter made a few more stickers for my wife and for my other daughter, ones that she'd even designed herself. Soon, we all had a sticker on our cars that she'd created.

Unfortunately, the stickers didn't handle the weather very well. They were printed off a computer, and the color began fading out pretty quickly. It only took a few weeks for my Vikings logo to become a plain white sticker in the outline of a Vikings logo. That happened to all the other stickers she'd created as well. We had to peel them off and call the experiment a failure.

Fast forward to very recently, when I decided to turn my truck into one of those trucks that is covered with window stickers. I talked about how I'd become one of those people in a blog post a week ago if you want to know the whole story there. After taking that leap, but being thwarted by the proliferation of oddly oversized window stickers on Temu, I started thinking of other inexpensive ways to go about it.

I noticed that somebody I work with has a sticker for Yosemite National Park on their Jeep that was just a one color thing. It was a white sticker, and the rest was negative space, that became the black of the tinted window. It looked pretty good, and I wondered if my daughter could do something like that. After all, she'd already made me several national park shirts using designs we'd found on the internet that were just like this—one color designs using the color of the shirt as the accent color. She could probably use one of those pre-made designs and print a sticker out.

She sure could, and in no time, I had a new sticker.

It might have been better had it been in a light green, but we didn't have that color of vinyl. This sticker cost us absolutely nothing to make, so it was an upgrade from the ones that I'd paid for last time and then discovered they were just way too big.

Asking my daughter to do this for me, however, got her mind going. Ever since the original failure of the Vikings sticker, she'd been brooding ever so slightly. She didn't like to lose. There had to be a way to make it work. She'd heard that if you laminated the stickers, then the colors wouldn't run off, and when I asked her to make a window sticker for me, she was motivated to give it a try. She ordered some laminate sheets from Amazon...which negated the whole we-didn't-pay-anything-for-the-Everglades-sticker thing. It led us to blow money elsewhere, so we paid in the end.

My daughter told me she going to try the laminate stickers now, and this got me thinking about what kind of sticker I could have her make for me. I sat down and messed around with stuff I could find on the internet, combining things until I came up with this design for a Muir Woods sticker, a place that I've visited several times over the years, but most recently back in 2018. 

I was still in the one-color vinyl line of thinking though. I wanted to make something that we could print out that way if we had to. My daughter had moved on. She wasn't going to make a simple one color design. She asked me if I liked this new version of my design she'd done for me with a gradient that made the trees more tree like.

I had to admit that it looked pretty darn good. She printed the sticker, did the lamination thing, and that night, I had a new window sticker waiting for me on my keyboard. I put it on my truck the next morning, and here's how it turned out:

I have to say, as a creative person, that there's nothing better than seeing your own ideas go from an inspiration to a physical manifestation like they can in this modern day and age. That goes for stickers like this to my stories and novels too. It's just so amazing what we can do now.

Of course, you can expect me to go overboard, and have my whole window filled with stickers in no time. If I can make my own, then of course I will. I think I'll start by having her make some of those stickers that I got from Temu in sizes that are way too big. We'll remake those in sizes that are more appropriate.

From there, the sky's the limit...

I Guess It's My Thing Now

In 2019,  we were at a Buc-ee's, and I saw a shirt there that I liked enough to buy for myself. It had an image of Sasquatch with the words "Into the Woods We Go" over the top of it. I love camping and hiking, and a sasquatch is kind of an avatar of the woods, so I thought it would make a fine shirt to wear around, so I bought it.

Later that year, after I lost a bunch of weight, I even bought a new, smaller version of the shirt that I could fit at that size. I regained the weight, and the shirt remained in pristine condition with no use until now that I have relost the weight. It has remained one of my favorite shirts through all that time, and owning it in two different sizes meant that I was able to wear it continueally even through my covid-depression induced weight gain and my determined second weight loss.

Well, the other day, and I blogged about this one though I don't usually talk about clothes on here, I found another shirt with Bigfoot on it. This time, it was a shirt with Sasquatch and the words "Believe in Yourself, Even If Nobody Else Does." It reminded me a lot of the days when The Anklecast was all about inspirational quotes and music to get myself to write (of course, none of that worked, and I almost never wrote, but still...). With Bigfoot and an inspirational quote like that, I had to grab it.

So, fast forward about a week, and I go into work yesterday. I'm even wearing that white Bigfoot shirt you see above. My friend, Murray, comes in and tells me that he was at Marshall's and he saw the coolest shirt ever. He had to have it. He looked everywhere for one in his size, but they just didn't have it, and he was bummed. The did have a size large, however, and he thought, "Big Anklevich would love this shirt too."

He pulls it out and hands it to me. He bought me a shirt just because. He's like that. He's a really cool and very generous guy. I look at the shirt and can't help but laugh.

It's another Sasquatch. Another camping Sasquatch at that. He's out int he woods sitting in a camp chair with a water bottle and his phone, a VW Bus in the background, chillin'. It is a pretty great shirt. And now, it looks like I'm starting to build a collection of Bigfoot shirts. I didn't mean to, it just sort of happened organically.  Maybe I need to make a Sasquatch BDA logo shirt. Something like this:

Eh? What do you think? That would look cool on a shirt, right? I think I could have my daughter whip one up in a minute. She has a vinyl T-shirt making machine. She made me a straight BDA logo shirt already. This one could be pretty rad, huh? I mean, since it's turned out to be my thing...

Harrison Ford's Grimace

It was Harrison Ford's birthday the other day, the annual holiday that Rish Outfield always celebrates. I try to get him a present each year on that day, although I'm almost always late. Anyway, Harrison Ford's birthday was creeping up on me this year, and I hadn't gotten Rish anything yet. 

I pretty much buy him some sort of nerdy T-shirt every year, and this year was no exception, but I was keen to make it better than usual. You see, I could do whatever I wanted for this year's shirt. My daughter got a Cricut vinyl cutter last year, and she announced to me that she could make shirts using iron-on vinyl a little while ago. When I discovered this, I started taking advantage of this great possibility.

I had her make me a Blink-182 shirt, a Glacier National Park shirt, a shirt based on the new Utah state flag, and a Foo Fighters shirt.

I thought it would be really cool to do an original shirt that Rish would really appreciate, something more personal than even any of those designs I had my daughter make for me. Something that he couldn't get anywhere else.

My first idea was to make him a podcaster shirt. I remember once, back in 2012 or 2013, whenever the last time we went to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, we got a shirt that said PODCASTER on its chest from Libsyn, because we ran our feed through their service. It was a really cool shirt that I loved, and I believe Rish was a fan of his too...then again, maybe he wasn't...I couldn't remember for sure, but I thought he did. I could make him a podcaster shirt with my own design. The first idea I came up with was this:

Then I thought, "Would he like this? Does this suck? Is this a shirt that he would ever wear?" I was thinking that he probably wouldn't. Maybe he'd like it, but probably not. I should probably think of something else.

Then I was listening to his Patreon address for July, and he talked about his love for Grimace and how much he appreciates the new TikTok meme where people try the Grimace birthday shake, and then it flashes to them dead on the ground with purple shake oozing out of their mouths. 

Rish and I both have long had a love for Grimace, and particularly the comical idea of Grimace being a profoundly evil character. Once, we planned out an entire student film that we wanted to shoot at the McDonaldland Playplace based on the urban legend of a kid being bitten by rattlesnakes that lived in the ball pit. The ending was based on the finale of Friday the 13th, where the girl is floating on the placid Crystal Lake and then Jason jumps out of the water to sink the boat and pull her down with him. Our ending would just be with a child in the ball pit Grimace jumping out of the balls to pull the kid down to the bottom.

Anyway, I realized I needed to make Rish a Grimace shirt. At first I looked to see what Grimace shirts were available out there, and none of them were very inspiring. I asked my daughter if she could draw a Grimace picture for the T-shirt design, and she took it as a challenge. I told her about the Grimace shake TikToks, and showed her a few of them, and that was enough to set her on the right path.

I went out to find a purple shirt to use, and a few days later, she came to me with three different designs.

Our favorite was the first one, but the second one...a close second, seemed like it would work better on the purple shirt. My daughter was out of black vinyl, though, so we had to run to Walmart last minute to pick some up. While we were there, we found a shirt that would work great with the other design, our favorite design. So, we bought that shirt too.

We made both designs, but the black on purple one didn't look as good. The contrast wasn't high enough, so it was really hard to see just what you were looking at. On top of that, while ironing the design, my daughter messed up, and munched two of the letters.

By process of elimination, therefore, we decided on the other design, which was our favorite to begin with anyway. I packaged it up and sent it off, and it arrived something like a week after Harrison Ford's birthday. I was on the phone with Rish, by chance, when he opened the package, so I got to hear his reaction, and luckily, he liked it.

Turns out that he's been looking for an evil Grimace shirt ever since seeing those TikTok videos. Luckily for us, he had yet to pull the trigger and buy one of his own. So, here you go, the man himself in his one of a kind, specially designed T-shirt.

Happy Harrison Ford's birthday, Rish Outfield. Many happy returns.

Got Some Talent

My thirteen-year-old daughter entered a fan art contest at her school. Here's her entry:

What do you think? Seems like she's got some pretty good talent. Better yet, she works on her art really hard, which means she's probably not going to end up like her dad.

Unsolicited Portrait

Over on Facebook, Henry Gaudet is doing a series of unsolicited portraits of his Facebook friends. He made this portrait for me. It's pretty nice, I have to say. Thanks, Henry.