Work harder, you fools! The HATESHIRT shop must open!
We’re excited to announce that Frank G., our founder (pictured above, in snarling selfmeme) and a team of eleven thousand offshore small furry coders, are working tirelessly, day and night, to get the HATESHIRT store open and online!
Frank is stacking t-shirts in his basement. He’s sorting them, folding them, obsessing about them. He’s drooling, growling, and stamping. He does this late at night, after his cats are fed and his dishwasher is running. He works until 3 a.m. or later, every night. He’s obsessed!
Meanwhile, in a sweatshop halfway around the world, an enormous horde of captive, underpaid, cute and furry Lemmo-Morlocks are chained to their desks, hammering out line after line of Javascript. They’re editing product images, pixel by pixel.
Here at HATESHIRT we have harsh labor standards. We don’t hire anyone over the age of eleven. Childhood is for work! We keep the lights out in our development shop, to save on electricity, but also to Save the Planet.(TM) But there are a few windows and, in the darkness, sometimes you can catch a glimpse of a poster tacked onto the wall, by the light of a computer monitor. These posters are inspirational: they are images of endangered species of plants and animals; of Superfund sites; of toxic lakes in China that would be Superfund sites, if there were any EPA-equivalent in the Chinese bureaucracy. There are stills of destroyed coral reefs, oil spills, starving children, war-torn Ukrainian slums…
Why all the depressing imagery, you ask? Well, it’s a cinch that most people would rather be somewhere else, rather than work. But if all ten and eleven-year olds were allowed to just play in the sunshine in Kandahar or Port-au-Prince, how would HATESHIRT’s website ever be finished? It wouldn’t. So our inspired founder, Frank, came up with this tactic: use dystopic wall posters to make the outside world seem as undesirable as possible, so that children and elves will stay at their desks and code.
It’s been a long journey. HATESHIRT’s site has been in development since the early Holocene. However, we expect that at any minute, or week or month or year, it will be finished, and we’ll open for business!
At some point after that, we’ll be canceled by the Progressive repression apparatus. So get your HATESHIRT quickly! While supplies last.
In Hate,
Iota T. Lemm
(for the Founder)
