The Fail Whale Fan Club

I now hand the royal sceptor of the Fail Whale Fandom to @critter:

Here’s more detail on his new tattoo as well as pictures of other iconic internet tattoos! Thanks to @edrabbit & @tlimongello for the links!

Here’s an iPhone wallpaper image for those of us who just can’t get enough. Thanks Yiying!

Tuesday night’s FAILparty at Shine was a success. We had a capacity+ crowd and copious amounts of [pseudo] Fail Whale Pale Ale was consumed. My compliments to the organizers and everyone who participated in the event!

The photos above are just a sample from Flickr. Please click through to the respective detail pages for copyright information.

If you are in San Francisco on July 29th, you need to be at the FAILparty! Let’s remember and celebrate our FAILures and show our appreciation and support for others experiencing FAIL - including of course, the adorable Fail Whale!

• FAILparty art & schwag designed by Fail Whale creator Yiying Lu
• Music by John Adams (@netik)
• FAIL visuals and FAILbooth
• Fail Whale Pale Ale on tap!

Location:

Shine
1337 Mission St.

FAILparty details (Please RSVP):
Facebook
Upcoming

Special thanks to @mr_bill, @ChadScott, & @TimIsHungry for organizing this event.

Don’t forget the First Interplanetary Fail Whale Pale Ale Label Contest submissions are due to Jeff Sonstein, the contest organizer, by Midnight (UTC) on July 31, 2008

Contest Details can be found at: Tweet Hunt. Please use a hash tag (type "#fwpa" at the end of your tweet) when talking about the contest on Twitter.

NOTE: This is not a submission to the FWPA design contest. I’m confident that you can do a whole heck of a lot better than this, so get your submissions in soon!!

[UPDATE 2008-08-01]
By unanimous agreement amongst the judges, the Fail Whale Pale Ale Label Design Contest has been extended until October 1, 2008. There have been five excellent submissions so far and we’re looking for many more. Please see the contest website, tweethunt.org for more details.

This was a quick mashup… but just wanted to let our Apple brethren know that we’re here to help if you need us!

Yiying Lu opened up an additional online store for tshirts and accessories. There are lots of color choices, so check it out:  failwhaleshop.com

Originally, I was going to step away from my computer and completely unplug for the long holiday weekend here in the U.S. By chance however, I stumbled across some links for the Austin Blood Drive Tweetup and felt compelled to write about it ASAP. OK, it was not totally by chance. During the event the group presented a birthday cake to Mike Chapman (@mikechapman) with a fail whale on it. So I was all over this as soon as the tags showed up on Flickr. Happy belated birthday to Mike Chapman by the way. Your cake looked both awesome and tasty. But that’s all I have to say about the fail whale cake, because that’s not why I’m writing about this.

Austin Blood Drive Tweetup (ABDT) was organized, announced, and executed all within about 72 hours. Based on a recent post by Michelle Greer, one of the organizers, ABDT effectively doubled the donation center’s typical volume, and may have set a record for the number of first time donors. This is an amazing result, and an exemplary case of what online social networking can and should be. It inspires the rest of us to do better and to use our online social connections to do good in our offline social lives.

The motto of this club (and blog) is to make light of the growing pains that we are all facing as we push online social communication to the next level. However, I can’t help but take time to highlight the good that is being accomplished as we advance. I look forward to reading more about events and movements just like the ABDT, where offline social activities are enhanced by their online compliments. This event appears to be a glowing success, with or without the fail whale cake. So the Fail Whale Fan Club tips its hat to the 501 Tech Club of Austin, The Austin Social Media Club, and all of the individuals who literally put blood sweat and tears into this event.

[Photos courtessy of Omar Gallaga (@omarg) and SummerTX]

This morning Stella Met posted an interesting comment on the Fail Whale Facebook group’s wall:

“It seems romantic. What is the story of this whale? All the sites seem to have only the merchandising stuff and not the story.”

This is an interesting point and I think we should do something about it! Using what seems like the most appropriate medium, I propose that we all help to write Fail Whale’s back story using Twitter!  You can read what has already been written by searching for #fwh on summize.  And then post the next entry using your own twitter account and tagging it with “#fwh”

Please keep it clean, and let’s have some fun with this!

Yiying Lu has done it again. This time, it’s Fail Whale’s love interest, Eve Whale. She’s had a tuck here, a snip there, and she’s lookin…. HAAAAAWWWWWTTT!!!!