In the spirit of Million Dollar Homepage, I will soon be selling pixels on a Million Dollar Beach Towel. Actually, it’s more in the spirit of always wanting to make my own towels, sweaters, socks, and anything woven from my own original (or unoriginal) bitmaps.

Guthrie found this webpage, truWest.com, that allows you to order your own custom beach towels. Wow, the color combinations are impressive (black/white, navy/white, royal/white, purple/white, hunter/white, red/white, red/black, jade/black, black/gold, royal/gold, maroon/gold), the price is right or at least affordable ($30 a towel), but… you have to order at least 24 towels (at least $720, not including shipping or whatever else they might charge). This is a total bummer but led me to an almost more important idea. The towel could be divided into squares that different notable and notorious bitmap artists could buy in exchange for one towel (aka one edition of the collaborative artwork). Each participant could henceforth, ha, exhibit their edition of the towel locally. Thus, the towel would be seen all over – another bonus of collaborating.

Another extra thought – what if the tiles were individually designed to intentionally continue from the design of the previous or surrounding tiles. How cool and unimaginable that would turn out to be.

Now for the specs (I got this informative reply from truWest.com):

The towels measure 64 inches x 32 inches.
Any 2 to 1 ratio will work.
Send art in a 6″ x 3″. at 150dpi

This kind of leaves more possibilities open that I wanted to deal with. Should we treat each thread as a pixel and have a high resolution image with tons of contributing squares (aka 900 x 450 pixels) or represent a pixel with many threads and just get the ratio right (and thus nice and bold like 256 x 128 pixels aka 8 columns x 4 rows of 32 x 32 icon size bitmaps)?

I need to figure this out before opening the call for $$$ and black and white bmps, but let me know if there’s anyone I should ask to do a square. I would like to kind of curate it, but how could anything be out of place when the medium is so restrictive.

Also, I hope I don’t send off a thousand dollar order and have the company totally send back low quality beach towels… I thought about asking if I could send a sample bitmap and get a swatch back or something.

Plus, if this first try works out, I would like to do more towels collaboratively (one for every color combo, of course) and maybe some myself – like my favorite black and white icons ever… in a towel.

This is a bulletin that I received in myspace. I am sure it is not the first of these things, but the first I have recieved.

TNG/pop singer semi-erotic crossover fanfic

More TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY smut fanfic here

eating w/ the ghost of the colonel…

Dear Friends,

My name is Dave Rhodes. In September 1988 my car was
reposessed and the bill collectors were hounding me like you wouldn’t
believe. I was laid off and my unemployment checks had run out. The
only escape I had from the pressure of failure was my computer and my
modem. I longed to turn my advocation into my vocation.
This January 1989 my family and I went on a ten day cruise to
the tropics. I bought a Lincoln Town Car for CASH in Feburary 1989.

I am currently building a home on the West Coast of Florida, with a
private pool, boat slip, and a beautiful view of the bay from my
breakfast room table and patio. I will never have to work again.
Today I am rich!!! I have earned over $400,000.00 (Four Hundred
Thousand Dollars) to date and will become a millionaire within 4 or 5
months. Anyone can do the same. This money making program works
perfectly every time, 100% of the time. I have NEVER failed to earn
$50,000.00 or more whenever I wanted. Best of all you never have to
leave home except to go to your mailbox or post office…

-Dave Rhodes

“The original “Make Money Fast” letter was written in 1988 by a person who used the name Dave Rhodes. Biographical details are not certain — in fact, it is not clear that this is the person’s actual name — but it is often said Rhodes was a student at Columbia Union College, a Christian college in Maryland, who wrote a text file chain letter titled “Make Money Fast”, and uploaded it to a nearby BBS. The scam soon reached the Internet, where it was forwarded over e-mail and Usenet although it was not until spamming became a major problem in 1994 that “Make money fast” exploded. It is rumored that Rhodes was eventually convicted and that as part of his sentence he had to create an anti-spam Web site, but no evidence of this has been found. ” -wikipedia

Archive of the Letter
Fake Anti-Spam Site