Wear your character with pride!
Greetings! Some of the more observant of you will have spotted the cunningly hidden advert slap bang in the centre of the front page of the site warbling on about tshirts and barcodes.
TL;DR at the bottom!
"What is all this about?", I hear you cry in excitement and wonder.
I'm glad you asked! It's about the merging of three areas. Fashion, mobile phones and the internet.
Ok so fashion isn't my strong point. Anyone who's seen me at fanfest or meets with a pair of Farrah's and a beer stained t-shirt will probably know this. The rest of you won't so I'm gonna pretend in my head where the other cool people are that StarFleet Comms Leetware is totally the best most awesome thing ever. There.
And mobiles? We'll, we've all got one haven't we? I have and amazingly it is less like a brick than the one I had when they were first introduced. It can do pretty much anything, including read barcodes. It's a bit crap at being an actual phone though, I must admit. We'll, it's a Nokia 6500 Slide so what do I expect, right?
So getting back on track, it reads barcodes. Ok so what's the point in that? In Japan it's really big. I mean really totally hugely massive that your phone can read barcodes. They're being used for everything from a McD advert to porn site adverts. Yes, they are different. Anyway, barcodes.
So what barcode is of any use to you? Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch but it can be immensely useful to any MMO player or with anything that you have an online profile for....leading me to...
Internetz!
Yes, finally I get around to this. We all know that American who claims he invented the internet was a bit of a loopy tune. I mean come on, it's always the Brits that invent the cool stuff isn't it?
Fact incoming! You can have your character skillsheet on teh interwebz for anyone to view! Boast, get recruited, whatever. Use InEve or Eve Character Showroom. I could've slapped a skillsheet site together myself but why re-invent the wheel? These sites both work great on today's mobiles.
So anyway, there you are with your super duper uber character with skills popping out of your implants and the universe at your feet. But oh noes! You haven't got any way to slip them into a conversation without being seen as:
A) A nerd.
B) A nerd.
So what you need is a subliminal way to target those you know will be interested with a cool way of keeping the raw fact that you are a nerd hidden from everyone else PLUS being cool (negating nerdiness) and having the latest thing to hit the western hemisphere.
You need an Eve character sheet URL coded into a barcode and slapped onto your Tshirt, baseball cap, whatever. The non-nerds won't know or understand what it is but if you explain they will gasp in awe and wonder and the nerds will instantly recognise it and know you are a leader amongst men (or women or lgbt folk). Win Win! 
Stop! Forget doubt, you NEED this like you need an alt account to do the Jita price checks. NEED right?
So TL;DR ('cos I can be cool too)
1: Whoevers reading the code needs a mobile phone
2: We are l33t
3: You can code any text or URL into a barcode
4: You get this printed onto a T-Shirt
5: Friends/enemies/the apathetic and the curious can zap your code and visit the URL/read text using their phone.
6: You get a cool T-Shirt and a gazillion cool points in peoples heads.
To get yours or to find out more and experiment, click the barcode Tshirt linky below. Or if that's too hard, use this one:
http://www.starfleetcomms.com/content/barcode_t_shirts
Disclaimer:
This is not only available to Eve account holders and can be used for any purpose such as facebook, bebo, myspace, your own web address, favourite dingo recipes etc.
I actually like Americans. Couldn't eat a whole one though.
I don't really wear Farrahs.
