This picture I drew of white-winged vampire bats, from a photo by Dan Riskin, is up for voting on Threadless. For the next 7 days, if you wanna see it on a t-shirt, you can go there and rank it as yay! Cool! And if enough people do that, lo, it will appear on a Threadless t-shirt. Go, thou, and vote:
I found these little guys (technically, one guy and one girl) when I went looking for a name for my laptop.
<Potentially boring technical data anecdote> I decided that the easiest way to synch my writing between desktop and laptop, was using one master folder for each machine, with both folders stored on both machines and ported back and forth with the flash drive. So, if I edit a file on the desktop, it is stored in the folder for desktop writing. If I then edit the same document on the laptop, it gets pulled out of the desktop file, then saved with a new date name to the laptop file. Then, if I edit it on the desktop, it gets pulled out of the laptop folder and saved to the desktop folder. This works perfectly if I save both folders to the flash drive every single time I finish working, less perfectly if I don't. Either way, it creates redundancy and version control without too much mucking about. </Potentially boring technical data anecdote>
My desktop, a white eMac, was already called Stella Luna, after a white bat in a kids book. So I figured the laptop should also be named after a bat. I studied names of different types of bats, and when I saw that there was something called a "white-winged vampire bat" I thought it was perfect, since my laptop is silver on the outside and black on the inside. Also, their official species name is Diaemus Youngi, which I thought sounded like a cool name for a computer. So, the desktop folder is "words_stella" and the laptop folder is "words_youngi."
Then I went searching for images of that particular type of bat and found the photo by Dan Riskin. I absolutely fell in love with it. I thought it was the cutest bat photo I had ever seen. I mean, bats are cute anyway, but this particular photo captured them looking so amazingly sweet, with their bright eyes and little smiles and tufts of fur.
Also, it was from an angle that really emphasized the lovely curves of their inner ear ridges. After a while, I decided that I had to have it on a t-shirt. I sent e-mail to the photographer and he gave permission for me to create t-shirt artwork based on his photo. He wanted as many people as possible to know these bats exist, and are seriously endangered.
Now, I suppose it's naive to imagine that you can save the planet with a t-shirt. But any cash prizes that I might win are slated to go to Bat Conservation International. And, well, you've got to wear something.
