(ding) Gnus Commemorative T-Shirts

I had planned on making the next Gnus merchandise a coffee mug, but by the time I had pulled myself together, it was summer (1998), and I decided to keep my promise and make some more t-shirts. Since I had my thirtieth birthday that summer, and release 500 of Gnus came landed in the vicinity of that date, as well as the 20,000th bug report, I decided to create a t-shirt to commemorate my first Gnus release, (ding) Gnus 0.1.

The front of the shirt is, as we can see, a sideways Gnus logo superimposed over a spiral -- ideal for hypnotists. "Look into my shirt. You are feeling sleepy. You will obey all my commands and remember nothing."

Well, it works for me.

The back of the shirt is a foggy, rasterized view of genuine source Gnus source code. (From nnoo.el, I believe.) In the upper right hand corner is the first draft of the Gnus logo from designer Luis Fernandes. I've never had an occasion to use it anywhere else, but this seemed an ideal opportunity. (The final version Luis arrived at is the familiar, more stylized logo that is used all over the Gnus documentation and, well, everywhere.)


There were more colors than you can shake a stick at. The ink was black, and the shirts were white, blue, red, yellow, orange and green. In total, 220 shirts were made, and most of them were sold immediately. However, I had promised to sell some off in person in Oslo, but I never got around to it, so (as of this writing, December 1998), I still have about twenty left.

The first two hundred were a breeze, though. I think I'm getting the hang of this.


1998-12-09 04:05:51