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Tag: Matthew Inman

  • Elon Musk Gives $1M to Nikola Tesla Museum

    Elon Musk Gives $1M to Nikola Tesla Museum

    In 2012, popular internet comic Matthew Inman, better known as The Oatmeal, published his most-viral comic to date – an ode to Nikola Tesla, who he called “the greatest geek who ever lived.” In it, he argued that the only thing Edison ever pioneered was douchebaggery, and that Tesla was the real hero who should be championed.

    Shortly after, Inman announced that he was spearheading an effort to buy back Tesla’s old laboratory and repurpose it as a museum. The lab, located in Shoreham, New York, is known as Wardenclyffe Tower and had recently gone up for sale. Inman felt that it was his duty to preserve this final workplace of the unsung hero who “drop-kicked humanity into a second industrial revolution.”

    He started an Indiegogo campaign, seeking $850,000 to outbid the current buyer and help a non-profit organization erect the Nikola Tesla Science Center.

    The campaign garnered over $1.3 million.

    Here’s the thing – that money raised via crowdfunding is amazing, but it’s only enough to save the location. To build the museum and fully realize the Tesla Science Center, it’s going to take millions.

    Naturally, Inman thought to ask the decidedly not poor founder of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk, for help.

    And today, on Nikola Tesla’s 158th birthday, Musk delivered.

    From a blog post on The Oatmeal:

    Earlier this week I got to speak to the man directly, and he promised two things. 1. He’s going to build a Tesla Supercharger station in the parking lot of the museum. 2. He’s donating $1 million dollars to the museum itself. Elon Musk: from the deepest wells of my geeky little heart: thank you. This is amazing news. And it’s Nikola Tesla’s 158th birthday.

    That’s awesome. What else can we say?

    Images via Wikimedia Commons, (2)

  • Webcomic Raises $100,000 and Posts this Image of a Lawyer’s Mother

    Matthew Inman is the writer of a unique webcomic called, the Oatmeal. He was having a great time creating content for his comics when he began to notice them appearing in various places on the web without his permission. One of those sites was FunnyJunk.Com.

    Since he wasn’t being credited in any of the posts he looked at, he contacted the site administrator and asked that the images be removed. Of course, he got no response. After months and months of being ignored, he began to notice even more of his work being stolen with no mention of him as the creator whatsoever.

    Finally, in the middle of last year, he took action and published the following blog post:

    Here’s how FunnyJunk.com’s business operates:
    1). Gather funny pictures from around the internet
    2). Host them on FunnyJunk.com
    3). Slather them in advertising
    4). If someone claims copyright infringement, throw your hands up in the air and exclaim “It was our users who uploaded your photos! We had nothing to do with it! We’re innocent!”
    5). Cash six figure advertising checks from other artist’s stolen material

    I first contacted them about a year ago after I found a handful of my comics uploaded on their site with no credit or link back to me. They took down the offending images, but since then they’ve practically stolen my entire website and mirrored it on FunnyJunk:

    After quite a bit of hubbub stemming from the conflict with FunnyJunk.Com and their fans, the site’s administrators finally agreed to remove all of Inman’s work. He considered it a victory, more or less, despite his not wanting to be a watchdog for copyright infringement. He though the matter was closed.

    More recently, Inman received a letter form an attorney claiming to represent FunnyJunk, who was suing him for Defamation, and demanding $20,000. ARS Technica featured the letter in their coverage of the story. Take a look at what this guy wrote:

    lawyers-stupid-letter

    Naturally, this really pissed Inman off. He immediately rendered this drawing (featured as the lead image) of the lawyer’s mother trying to solicit sex from a poor brown bear. While contemplating how to get the picture into the hands of the attorney, he came up with a great idea. He would raise the $20,000, take a picture of it, give it to charity, then deliver the image and the photo to the lawyer’s doorstep.

    This spawned operation, “BearLove Good. Cancer Bad“. The slogan he used, “I’m trying to raise $20k to donate half to the National Wildlife Federation (for the bears), and half to the American Cancer Society (because cancer is shitty)”. He raised the $20,000 in just over an hour and went on to raise $100,000 for the charities in two weeks.

    A job well done for sure. I can’t believe FunnyJunk even had the audacity to hire someone to write that letter. Lawyers can be shameless, but it sounds like the people administering FunnyJunk are worse. Regardless of where you stand on the copyright issue, it’s a great story that ended up benefiting cancer research and the Wildlife Federation. Good deal.

  • The Oatmeal’s Tips For Getting More Facebook Likes

    Matthew Inman, otherwise known as the guy who created and updates The Oatmeal web comic, has an awesome ability to condense things down to the nitty-gritty, cutting through the weeds to get to the good stuff. Take his latest creation concerning how to get more likes on Facebook.

    Inman naturally, and rightfully so, skewers the attention seekers, reducing them to attention whores who define their self-worth based on how many likes their Facebook posts receive. An example of his biting observation starts with a helpful tip:

    Don't Do This

    While this should, perhaps, be common knowledge, clearly, it is not. Can you not feel the desperation coming from requests like these? Inman did, and to him, such requests make the person look like this:

    Oh God
    Inman also offers the following public service announcement for proper Facebook etiquette:

    Don't Do It On The Internet

    To avoid such embarrassing moments concerning your hunt for Facebook likes, Inman suggests something people apparently aren’t considering: Create something awesome. Create something that makes people laugh, cry, or inspires them to do something other than peruse Facebook, trolling for likes. To find out the comic’s suggestion for these kinds of posts, be sure to check the rest of Inman’s creation out over at TheOatmeal.com. Trust me, you’ll be a better Facebook user for it.