Current location:	Anaheim CA
Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	Fountains of Wayne - "Halley's Waitress"
Entry tags:	ribbons

...She'll ask and you give her: lips like sugar, sugar kisses; lips like sugar, sugar kisses.
Part four in my ribbon write-ups.


At animeexpo in 2003, I handed out ribbons that simply said "Otaku" that I had the ribbon people set. By 2004, I'd used them up, and so I had the fancy ones made. These say "animé otaku" to satisfy the nitpicky people out there who take offense at the "otaku" term by itself. (I don't feel like getting into it right now, but suffice it to say that the english usage of the word is different from the japanese meaning.) I was handing out ribbons and animelosangeles flyers, trying to raise a little visibility for our little start-up convention.

Our toastmaster for the convention was going to be Tadao Tomomatsu. He was also invited to be toastmaster at demicon and had asked me to get "Shake-Hands Fan" ribbons printed for him; he and Christian paid for a few, 30 or 40 if I recall correctly. I decided to surprise him with something a little fancier than the stock style. Unfortunately when he said "Shake-Hands Fan" I didn't hear the hyphen! Oh well. I was out in Tulsa on a business trip the week before and after the convention, so I made arrangements to drop in on them, and bring some more ribbons. I'd figured they'd be a hit, so I brought a hundred extra ribbons with me.

They were a hit, and they took the concom by surprise. The Trans-Iowa Canal Company ("TICC") West Lock had cooked up a surprise for Tadao in the form of a "Grabs-Crotch Man" skit; had they realized we were bringing these ribbons, they would have had matching G.C.F. ribbons made. So on the morning after the show, a guy in the art show made some Grabs-Crotch Fan ribbons out of paper... a rare collectible indeed.

Typefaces; I used Marigold for the first one, and Blado and Clarendon Extended for the second. If you look carefully at the "a" and "n" the differences should jump right out at you.


I mentioned that in 2004, people started asking me to have ribbons made for them. colleency told me that she and obishawn would be meeting friends from Road Squadron (the small group of people with Star Wars-decorated cars) and Trade Federation (the large group of people who collect and swap around info on Star Wars toys) f2f when they went to the Star Wars "Celebration" in Indianapolis. I don't recall exactly -- was it my idea to make up ribbons because I thought Shawn would get a kick out of them? Or did Shawn and Colleen ask me for them? It doesn't matter much; in any event, I went around twice on these, because the prototypes I had made weren't the right color combinations. The art turned out nice though.

Typefaces: Star Jedi for the Road Squadron, Felix Titling for Trade Federation. I think Shawn asked for these, and then when he sent me the "Star Jedi" typeface I turned around and surprised colleency with a "Star Wars Chicks" ribbon using the same font. Maybe. That was two years ago and I didn't keep specific notes on the wherefores of these things.


Can anyone guess why the nifty-looking "Beefcake" ribbons were printed in 2004, while the fancy "Cheesecake" ribbons came along in 2005?

"Beefcake" was a suggestion that caprine made, in reaction to the "Cheesecake" ribbons I'd been handing out. Equal time, and all that. When I made the Beefcake ribbons with this art, I still had plenty of the Cheesecake ribbons made with the ribbon companies' stock typeface. I'd had some made by Parker Systems before I switched to RV Awards, and there was a big pile of them on hand.

When I see her a convention, I usually give Allison a packet of the "Beefcake" ribbons to hand out; they were her idea, after all. She hands them out as she sees fit.

Typeface: This is the Blado italic again. These ribbons show that I started using Blado for the "sexier" ribbon titles, ones with double-meanings, other slippery innuendo, or non-vanilla orientations. (If I had it to do all over again, and I was doing Gender Outlaw, I would have used Blado.)