Ever since I got my Gatecon ticket, I'd been plotting about doing something with the LOLMacs for Gatecon. I thought it would be neat to pick out some of the best images and get them made into buttons, which I would then give away to people at the con, as a way of sharing the fun. (And possibly letting more people know they exist.) After Lothi and Grrl and I had arranged to room together, I asked them if they'd like to be part of the give-away as well, and they were cheerfully willing.
I reworked thirty of the images into the right format (they had to be square, and most of them are actually rectangles), and submitted an order to an online button-making site.
Then I got the email saying the order had been cancelled.
The images contained copyrighted material.
I replied to the email, saying the buttons were to be given away, and also saying that I was very glad that they were enforcing copyright. Which was true. I was disappointed, but they had no way of verifying that I wasn't going to sell the things, and copyright on the internet is generally violated far too casually.
Then I emailed Grrl and Lothi and whinged about the bad news -- and Grrl came back with a scheme to make the buttons ourselves. She did the printing and laminating, and I got pinbacks and made them into pins . . . and then the pins started to fall off, because the laminate was too smooth to work well with Krazy Glue.
Then, about Day Two of the con, Grrl managed to MacGyver the pins. It turns out that if you apply Krazy Glue to a laminated surface and
then apply a layer of tissue paper, and saturate the tissue with the glue, you can glue a metal pinback to a laminated paper square and it will hold.
So hats off to MacGyverGrrl, who MacGyvered the LOLMacs twice over!
