Don't jump my shark, bro!

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:58pm

I think CafePress and its ilk have jumped the shark.

Oh, sure, I realize that using the phrase "jump the shark" jumped the shark a while back. It has become such a cliche that Googling for the phrase "'jump the shark' jumped the shark" produced 824 results as of this writing. Yes, it's all so clever and helical, an ironic snake eating its own tail ... while water-skiing over a shark, which is also eating its own tail. Yes, even though snakes can't water ski — such is the power of irony, it can even make it rain on your wedding day.

Ahem. But enough of that — this is about CafePress.

Remember the first time you heard about blogging and how you thought it would revolutionize the world, truly putting publishing into the hands of the Everyman and ushering in a new era of people-powered media? No? Well, do you at least remember someone saying that in the first article you read about blogging in a magazine or newspaper?

And then, like, six months later, there were 83 quadrillion blogs, half of which were about what their author had for breakfast that morning, and the other half of which hadn't been updated in over eight months?

Remember how disappointed you were in humanity for ruining the opportunity they had been given?

Okay, never mind what you remember. My point is that I feel the same way about CafePress.

Don't get me wrong — the theory behind the site is nice enough. People can create their own designs and have them printed, on demand, on t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, and so on. That way, they don't have to invest in large runs of materials up front. Hooray for the common man!

Of course, the downside is that you get middling production levels at high prices. Ah, but you get middling production levels on products related to cutting-edge news and memes, and therein lies the advantage of CafePress.

It's also what makes it — or any of its ilk — really, really annoying.

This all came to a head when I saw the "Don't tase me, bro!" video. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then there's no need for me to provide a link for you, since you wouldn't know how to click on it anyhow, much less how to operate the video at the subsequent page.

Anyhow, not only was the blogging world suddenly full of the tase/bro video and discussion of it, but everywhere I went, someone was flogging some poorly conceived t-shirt on HastilyDesignedMemesploitation.com. Er, that is, CafePress.com.

Depending on how you spell "tase" (derived from the trademark Taser, but often misspelled "taze" by bleeding-heart gun-control pinkos or mouth-breathing paramilitary gun nuts), there are at least 352 designs on CafePress right now related to Taser-related imperatives. Hilarity.

Furthermore, a Google search on "'don't tase me bro' shirts" turns up 172,000 knee-slapping results. (Again, more hilarity can be found with alternate spellings.)

I guess what irritates me is just the sheer crapulence of most of these shirts. They're terrible. They're not meant to ever see the light of day — following their ill-conception, they will be forced to gestate forever in the CafePress womb's, um, lame-niotic fluid (?).

They are, in short, a sort of blog for those people who think they're clever but don't really have much to say except the occasional, "Hey, remember that funny thing?"

And I'm angry because that's my shtick.

Except it takes me thousands of words to say what their one hastily uploaded picture says. And I probably get fewer hits than their CafePress stores. Which is so not fair.

Or maybe I'm grumpy because no one has bought any of the clever t-shirt designs from my own line of CafePress products.

Fig. A: Do you like dinosaurs? Do you like shirts?

Oh sure, it could have something to do with the fact that I've never actually linked to that URL before now, in part because I just remembered it existed. Or that I never intended the products to be created for and purchased by anyone besides me*.

But enough about me. The point is that I'm so full of ironic rage that I'm considering buying a "don't tase me, bro" t-shirt, just to bring me that much closer to a quadruple ironic apoplexy. That's right, I will call your memesploitation bluff!

Also, CafePress has "jump the shark" designs available.

*They were made for Julia's birthday last year, designed by me, but ironically based almost completely on dinosaur doodles drawn by Julia herself. I loved their (intentional) naive simplicity. Julia loves that they're about dinos. She seems to particularly enjoy the "Oh no! Metric system!" raptor design, for reasons I can only guess at, since I don't know what it means myself. Is it a koan on the nature of change? A timely meditation on the waning of the customary unit system? Or is it cheap surrealism with a cute dinosaur? Who can say? If the designer can't, then it's probably the one about cheap surrealism.

Update: I added pictures of the t-shirt designs. Because I need more pictures on my blog.