UPDATE: Want your own "Base" shirt? I've identified the guy's shirt as the one being sold by ThinkGeek here.
A rare sighting today: someone wearing an honest-to-God "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" t-shirt! I spotted it on a pretty typical looking example of the North American geek-boy. It wasn't immediately clear whether the shirt was being worn ironically or not, but after a quick examination of the specimen (Bat-Man tennis shoes, cargo shorts, etc) I got the feeling this was an actual geek, not a hipster posing as one.
I'm not sure what someone's motivation would be for wearing such a shirt in 2011. No clean laundry? Nostalgia? Some sort of retro-geek statement? "Man, internet memes were so much cooler back then. Bronies? Fuck that shit."
This spotting was not as cool as the time I saw a guy in an airport wearing a Big Johnson Surfing shirt which looked to be in pristine, brand-new condition. This was in the mid-2000s. Apparently, somebody still make those things.
11 comments:
Meh. I've always thought "Someone set us up the bomb" was a funnier bit of Engrish anyways.
So it wasn't a real dork or a hipster? What was it then? Or maybe that's a typo.
Seriously though, why would you choose to wear cargo shorts? In my generally cold neck of the woods there is an alarmingly high rate of young men who wear shorts in very inappropriate weather. Shorts just don't look good on guys. If it's just so damned hot that there's no other option but to wear them (this happened to me the past two atypically hot and humid summers) then sure; but come on. And I sure as hell didn't wear cargo shorts (I wore cut-offs like any self respecting redneck or thrift store chic hipster would do).
Meh. I've always thought "Someone set us up the bomb" was a funnier bit of Engrish anyways.
Me too!
I remember when Big Johnson was all people wanted to wear at my high school 20 years ago (and they did too since we had a looser dress code then).
Now perhaps I should start wearing those alligator shirts and see what happens. :-)
An "All your Base belong to us!"-Shirt? That belongs in an museum!
Though, todays memes suck pretty hard...a good (straight-male) friend of mine is a big fanboy of that new "My little pony" series. That can be...embarrassing.
^ hey, what's wrong with cargo shorts!
also: wow, big johnson.
i just googled them to see if they're still around and - yes, they are! that's awful. also the front page of their website includes a shirt with a picture of g.w.bush (... i think!) saying "miss me yet?" and also a guitar shirt (it says "guitars of the blues" and only has one acoustic guitar and that's bullshit - but i guess it is big johnson).
one time two years ago i saw some fat guy in a big dogs shirt that said "where the #@%! is my bail-out?"
Typo is fixed.
What's interesting about cargo shorts is how versatile they are and how they play a major fashion role in different subcultures. You can see them on geeks/neckbeards/sysadmin types, but throw in some Birkenstocks and you have the typical Cali laid-back broham look. A t-shirt and cargo shorts is a classic lesbian outfit, as well.
It seems Big Dog are still making those shirts, and Lacoste relaunched the alligator shirts sometime in the 2000s, though without Izod. One thing I haven't seen are those novelty shirts that had a couple dozen little illustrations of some animals (such as lizards) in different sexual positions. I saw those a lot around '92-'93? Also MIA: bootleg Bart Simpson shirts.
Although bootleg Bart shirts aren't too common these days, I noticed that vintage Simpsons tees (from the very early seasons, when Bart was essentially a catch-phrase machine) were something of a hip item a year or two ago... they're not too hard to find new, either. I don't imagine they're in short supply.
I've always been partial to the more obscure passages "You are on the way to destruction", followed by, "You have no chance to survive, make your time".
At first glance it is just a bit of Engrish, but it also sounds like a bit of zen poetry. One could almost imagine that CATS, the poet of ages, was commenting on the western civilization's consumer based economy, warning them of the unsustainable hedonistic philosophy at its core.
Indeed, Cats, we will take our time. That is about the only thing we are good at...
Now, if you really want to be a hipster print those two passages on a simple black shirt, and close it off with a "-Cats", quote marker.
Nothing more hip than referencing a long forgotten and unpopular part of an ancient meme which none but true connoisseur would recognize and everyone else would take as words of profound wisdom.
i was always partial to "you know what you doing" and "what you say !!" personally.
Also MIA: bootleg Bart Simpson shirts.
I can recall some 20-21 years ago going into a flea market down the street and looking at all the Bart Simpson pirated Tee's like the one of Bart being black or him dressed up in a soldier's outfit, or even one of him peeing on Iraq and giving the middle finger! It was something.
Hey Doctor Sparkle, this is the only way I know how to contact you. I hope you don't mind, but I used your banner on a blog post in reference to you. If you'd like me to take it down, just email to let me know. Thanks.
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