Let me talk you through the history of the image.
It all started in 2007, when I was explicitly baiting romance scammers. The site I was on at the time had a Christmas avatar competition, and I decided to go all out on it by getting a scammer to pose with a Christmas message. Now, my thing at the time was getting romance scammers to send me photos of themselves with underwear on the head. Why go with that choice? Other baiters were getting scammers to pose for photos with stuff on their heads, and I was mainly dealing with scammers from the Philippines at the time who whould go on webcam. The only things they had with them were the clothes they were wearing, so I had to work with what I had. Anyways, I decided for the competition to get a Russian scammer to pose with underwear on their head and make it some kind of a Christmas theme, so after a lot of hard work I managed to persuade one to pose with not only underwear on their head but a sign that said "Panty Claus". The day after the competition ended I got the images I wanted. Not just one, but three of them!
Unfortunately she couldn't spell Panty correctly, but it still worked out well
Not long after I decided to make a website showcasing some of my scams and needed a logo. I figured Panti Claus would be a perfect logo for it, so printed out a zoomed copy of one of the faces from the images, put it and a piece of blank paper on the top of a tupperware box and used my phone's camera as a backlight to trace around it. Some eyes found using Google and a bit of colouring in using Photoshop later, I had the image I wanted. Here are some stickers I've recently made using that design:
Now jump forward to 2020. I was working on the first book for our site, having written some for a site I was on previously. When it came to the front cover, I wasn't sure what to do, but Firefly suggested using Panti Claus. And so the cover of the first book was created.
Let's jump again to a few months ago. I had the new book finished, and it's title was "The Baiting Bibble" after something a scammer said to me once - "It is said in the Bibble" - than had stuck with me all these years. My original idea was to make it look like a Bible, but with the letter T as the cross and a B on either side. However, TLJ suggested I go with a halo instead. Some wings and a halo made out of a letter O twisted and distorted until it was the right size and shape, the cover of the second book was made.
At the end of last year I managed to injure myself, meaning I had to spend a lot of time in bed resting up. There's only so much TV you can watch, so I would turn off the TV, close my eyes and let my mind wander. I came up with some weird stream of consciousness stuff doing that, but also pondered on the idea of making a book that combined both of our books. But what to do for a cover? First thoughts were to have both logos with a line between them, but as one was a more vertical image and the other horizontal it didn't really work. Then it hit me. The Bibble logo kind of looked like a butterfly or moth, and I knew a movie poster that featured both a woman's face and a moth. Trying that idea gave me an image I really liked, so I decided to run with it. The big problem was that the quality of the Panti Claus one wasn't great as I'd long since lost the original version. I tried a lot of things before finally getting it where the lines looked right when zoomed in on. Then it was just a matter of adding in the colours to make it look more like the movie poster, finding the font the poster used, getting the exact colour the text used and voila! One final touch was to put what we call a "Red Seal of Truth" into the image where the age certification would be and it was complete. Scammers love their RSoT, seemingly thinking it makes their fake documents look more authentic, so we absolutely had to have one in it.
I also made it into a poster, but as the image would show up any minor mistakes when blown up that big, I decided to add some "noise" to it. The posters look cool, and the preview copy of the book should be arriving in the next few days. Maybe I need to spend more time just letting my mind wander.
I will say though that not all my ideas worked, and some of them were just plain weird. I wrote a children's book, tried to come up with weird ways to kill a vampire and pondered whether those of us with a speech impediment have an "inner monologue" with the same impediment. For the record, my inner voice also has a lisp and it's a little worse than my actual one.
by Wayne » Fri Jan 03, 2025 4:15 pm 
