Egg-Laying Dude, the Dude What Lays Eggs (…for some reason), has been the official site mascot for over a week now, and yet I still haven’t changed the picture at the top of the page. What’s up with that? Well, remember when I said that my copy of the image is just a crappy old transparent gif I kludged together from a poor scan? That’s still true. Now, we could spend all day arguing about whose fault that is,* or we could take constructive action. And by we I mean you, plural, could take constructive action.
Indeed, two of you plural have already gotten the ball egg rolling by producing two amazing images of egg laying men–and completely without any prompting or begging from me whatsoever. Those of you who are fans of this blog on Facebook have already seen one, made by Nanina D’Onofrio, which she posted there not eight hours after the official announcement of the mascot. But in case you’re not a Facefan, here it is again:
That’s some fine historiation, I say. (Oh, and if you’re not a fan of the blog on Facebook, it is your solemn duty to now become one.)
The second image arrived in my inbox care of Bethany Myers (its creator), and it is similarly impressive:
I know, I know, it’s like you’ve already lost the contest and you didn’t even know it was happening. Wait, did I say contest? Come to think of it, I didn’t, but I typed it. Here, I’ll type it again and longer: Got Medieval is having a contest to create an image of Egg-Laying Dude, the Dude What Lays Eggs (…for some reason) suitable for gracing the top margin of this humble page. Consider the gauntlet well and truly thrown, artists, by these two outstanding submissions.
I suppose it’s possible that some of you have been waiting until an actual contest was announced to submit your entries, and don’t you look stupid now. But others, I imagine, are waiting because they want to know what they get in return for doing my work for me. So a prize is in order.
Remember how I got a free Dante action figure with my Gamestop pre-order of the most boobtastic game ever derived from a work of classic literature?** Here he is again, from that triumphant midnight launch:
My wife told me when she first saw him that he would not be allowed to remain in our house. (We’ve been on a whole decluttering trip since the nightmare move from New Haven and it still took us two further moves to convince me to get rid of my big popcorn tins of miscellaneous worthless Star Wars figures.***) So this will let me kill two birds with one stone, getting rid of a useless piece of plastic while at the same time allowing me to avoid having to contact the Beinecke to beg for a high-quality scan. It’s a win-win (by which I mean that I win twice!).
The contest will run for two weeks, ending at midnight EST on April 20th. The determination of which image is the most awesome will be left solely up to me, and I will presumably use arbitrary and possibly dramatically unfair standards to calculate the awesomeness quotient of the submitted images. All submissions should be sent to gotmedievalblog@gmail.com. Or, if you hate email, you can post it directly to the Facebook page. Include with the submission the name or alias by which you’d like to be identified when I post the image, but don’t include an address or anything–we’ll get to that once you’ve won.
Also, I’m not sure what legal mumbo jumbo I should put here to indicate this, but if you submit the image to the contest, you’re basically saying it’s OK for me to post it, talk about it, and if it’s picked as the winner use it however I want after that.*****
So let’s see us some eggs and dudes sitting upon them, people! Chop chop!
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*And there are lots more of you than there are of me. I’m just sayin’.
**And yes, I’m including in my claim Super Moll Flanders Brothers (the embarrassing Commodore 64 Pitfall clone), Tiresias Topsy-Turvy (the short-lived pack-in game for the GBA tilt sensor accessory) and the Atari 2600 classic Custer’s Revenge (which, as you know, had a very limited console release solely to qualify for future Internet gaming websites’ sexy game top ten lists).
***Yet, ironically, selling the valuable half of my collection is what paid for our wedding rings. But my wife says that irony is not a good excuse for hanging onto boxes of Yakfaces, Dengars, and Tatooine Flashback Tatooine Lukes.****
****OK, so she didn’t actually use their names when she told me to get rid of them. She couldn’t tell a Flashback Tatooine Luke from an Antique Force Detail Tatooine Luke if her life depended on it.
*****Like, say I were to hypothetically write a screenplay starring a streetwise egg-laying cop who’s partnered with a rookie wise-cracking ambulatory vulva cop. I could send George Lucas a copy of the winning image and say, “Make me a plastic this in 3/4″ scale, pronto, and make sure it fires missiles” and you’d just have to shrug and curse your poor judgment when you saw it warming a peg at Wal-Mart.