U mad?

It seems just yesterday that Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman was one of the most beloved men on the Internet, having converted a generation of readers into fans of the turn-of-the-century scientist Nikola Tesla and spearheaded an Indiegogo campaign to get the man an American museum.

Nowadays, between the rape joke and the angry screeds, he's starting to look like a guy who just can't quite learn when to keep his mouth shut.

The trouble started last week, when Mr. Inman made a tasteless, offensive rape joke--revolving around how his F5 key is a perpetually violated rape victim--in a comic. His response to the backlash landed him in even deeper manure: He replaced the offending panel with a pissy note claiming "anytime a comedian says the word rape everyone jumps out of their seat in protest" and alleging censorship. He finally took that down, too.

Buzzfeed contributor Jack Stuef followed up on the controversy with a lengthy profile of Mr. Inman, exposing his history of work as an SEO spammer and suggesting that Mr. Inman is more hit-generating viral machine than artist. It seemed pretty sure to knock the man down a peg:

Inman’s work was not originally a labor of love, a slow process of honing one’s voice, developing an original perspective and take on the art form, and eventually building an audience. It was always business, always a play to known sources of Web traffic, whether for clients or for himself.

(Let us pause, however, to appreciate the irony of Buzzfeed lecturing anyone on content propelled by built-in virality.)

Mr. Inman responded in a fashion that's become typical: by reproducing the offending article and annotating it with his own responses. On the matter of the rape joke, he basically pleads a bad day and says that, "at the time I genuinely felt like I'd done more good in the world than bad, and I acted like an asshole when I saw myself being vilified for making one bad joke on the internet."

He also goes into a long digression about how the money from his comics has allowed him to buy a house for his sister and her six kids. "You didn't find this in your 'investigation' of my finances because I never talk about it." (Except this once, of course.)

It all builds to a grand finale:

Yeah, u mad.

He proceeds to republish a tasteless comic that Mr. Stuef drew while employed at Wonkette, poking fun at Trig Palin. (Yes, the one with Down's Syndrome.)

Uh, when do we get our 32 pictures that will renew our faith in humanity?

However, amid the angry red writing Mr. Inman also pointed out a pretty glaring problem in the profile, which is that Buzzfeed's article took a fake profile on something called "SodaHead" at face value, suggesting that Mr. Inman was, in fact, a Republican. (OH NO THEY DIDN'T.)  The piece has been edited to remove the portions of the article based on the misattributed SodaHead profile, with a note at the bottom admitting the error.

In the final accounting, the successful creator of The Oatmeal comes off, frankly, as overly defensive and even as a bit of a whiner. Nobody likes being called a Republican, but the merits of Mr. Inman's work are certainly fair game for criticism. From his response, though, we can't help but conclude that he's used to hate mail from Internet trolls he can dismiss as dummies. But he struggles with how to self-edit (hint: when you start to make a rape joke, don't) and handling legitimate criticism (like maybe you shouldn't make rape jokes).

All we know is, somewhere Thomas Edison is chortling to himself.

(Photo: Matthew Inman/The Oatmeal)

Deja vu? Matthew Inman, creator of the popular comic series The Oatmeal, is being sued again, this time for trademark infringement.

A greeting card company called Oatmeal Studios didn't take kindly to Mr. Inman's decision to collaborate with Recycled Greetings to turn his web comics into greeting cards, available for purchase in his online store. Ars Technica reports that the Massachusetts-based company has sued Mr. Inman for trademark infringement, arguing that his crossover into the ever-competitive greeting card market will confuse potential customers, who might not know The Oatmeal and Oatmeal Studios are different properties.

Mr. Inman must be getting rather sick of legal recourse by now. It wasn't so long ago that FunnyJunk lawyer Charles Carreon mounted a rather frivolous lawsuit against the Oatmeal creator for allegedly making defamatory statements about both him and FunnyJunk. In typical Oatmeal fashion, Mr. Inman responded by raising over $220,000 for charity and drawing a photo of Mr. Carreon's mom humping a bear.

We look forward to any obscene drawings this new lawsuit might bring.

Homestuck cosplayers converge on NYCC.

"What is... going on here?" asked Betabeat's confused cab driver, as we bore left onto W. 37th street and the entire block began to fill up with people in costumes.

Since we had never been to ComicCon before, we found ourselves at a loss to explain to him the scene that was unfolding before us. Halal carts and hotdog stands swathed Lolita cosplayers and superheroes in heavy meat smoke. Girls in thigh-high boots stumbled out of an event hall decorated with Pokemon characters. Homestuck fans, cosplaying as trolls with orange horns protruding from their heads, scurried across 10th Avenue towards the Javits Center.

"It's... a convention for people who like comics?" we offered by way of explanation. Our cab driver shook his head with a mixture of bemusement and disgust.

"Enjoy?" he called after us, as we stumbled out of the cab and into the street, immediately sucked into the hoards of costumed convention goers.

This was Betabeat's first time attending New York ComicCon. Though we admittedly own both Wonder Woman and Sailor Moon costumes, we had spent the better part of a week fretting over what to wear. We were going to don those Necomimi brainwave-reading cat ears, but a fellow Betabeat reporter who has attended ComicCon before gave us a stern warning: "If you wear cat ears to ComicCon you'll get creeped on by the dudes who are into lolita anime girls & they're the WORST."

We eventually decided to just wear our normal clothes, much to the chagrin of our boyfriend, who failed to keep himself from drooling the entire time we meandered through the convention center.

Mr. Inman

Upon entry into ComicCon, we could not stop saying "OMGOMGOMG" under our breath. 90 percent of attendees--old, young, big, small, "nerdy" and not--were dressed in costume. We immediately wished for our cat ears, if only to help us blend in. "Do you feel like you've found your people?" we asked our boyfriend, whose history with video games and old Macintosh computers and science fiction extends far beyond our own. "Kind of, yeah," he said, a smile creeping onto his face.

Mostly, Betabeat just felt overwhelmed, worried that we might trip and be trampled by people in Ghostbusters costumes. Like ComicCon vets had warned us, the whole event was pretty commercialized. We stumbled past some video game booths and a book publisher selling copies of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Sauntering by the Hi-Chew table, we sated our budding hunger with free sour apple candies as the droves of costumed kids descended on the table like vultures picking at a rotting carcass.

A gangly college-aged kid with a machine gun laugh attempted to engage us in conversation about a Stormtrooper's costume. "He has the VOICEBOX!" he exclaimed, accidentally elbowing us really hard in the boob. Paralyzed by the awkward interaction, we just laughed and popped another Hi-Chew.

Some well-dressed zombies.

We stopped by a booth selling My Little Pony t-shirts to take a picture, then headed over to The Oatmeal's booth, where Matthew Inman was dutifully signing copies of his new book, How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You. Since we're admittedly pretty clueless about comics, he was the most "famous" person we could pick out of the crowd.

"I like your costume," an adorable little kid dressed as one of the doctors from Doctor Who said to an old steampunk with stringy hair walking behind us. "Thanks! Take a picture with me and I'll put it on my blog," the dude said, as the kid's father hesitantly raised the camera handed to him.

A ComicCon noob, Betabeat didn't realize until we got there just how integral photo-taking is to the whole experience. Everywhere we turned people were approaching others and asking them to take pictures of their awesome costumes.

"I kind of get it," we said to our boyfriend as we picked our way through a family dressed as the Ghostbusters. ComicCon is kind of like going to a gigantic family reunion, where every family member shares similar interests and enjoys dressing up in wacky outfits.

People at home or at school or at work might not get you, but at ComicCon you can be yourself--even if "yourself" is this guy.

The property, in more glamorous days.

For decades, Nicola Tesla was the quintessential forgotten hero, largely neglected as everyone sung the praises of Thomas Edison. But we seem to have reached some sort of nostalgic tipping point, because suddenly the internet is falling all over itself to build a monument to the man.

Why? Betabeat talked to the instigator behind the movement, The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, and he explained it pretty simply:  "I thought, It's a travesty. There should be a Tesla museum."

A longtime Tesla fanboy, Mr. Inman has previously expressed his devotion with a comic titled, "Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived" (and could have been subtitled, "And Why Thomas Edison Was the Devil in Human Form"). Many of Tesla's newfound admirers, he says, were brought into the fold by that very comic, to the point that, "I sort of felt like I was this unofficial leader of Tesla fandom," he told Betabeat.

And so yesterday, he launched an Indiegogo campaign to help a small nonprofit scrape up the cash to buy one of Mr. Tesla's old laboratories, with the intention of eventually building a museum.

As of this very minute, the campaign has raised $443,955, more than halfway to its $850,000 goal. Would-be Martian Elon Musk--who, it must be noted, named his electric car startup after the inventor--has even pledged to make a donation. Fans' enthusiasm temporarily crashed the site earlier this afternoon.

The lab in question, grandly dubbed Wardenclyffe, is now a dilapidated property in Shoreham, N.Y. But once it was home to Mr. Tesla's perhaps most mad science-like experiment, his ill-fated attempt at free wireless energy transmission (something his investors weren't actually too keen on). The property was eventually sold to a photographic film manufacturer, and by the late 20th century, it was a Superfund site.

Asked about his decision to support the project, Mr. Inman cited both his hymn to Tesla and the runaway success of "Operation Bearlove Good, Cancer Bad," his revenge-inspired fundraiser for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

"When I heard about this Wardenclyffe project, to save Nicola Tesla's old lab, I thought, I kind of had a practice round in with the Bearlove campaign, the one where I got sued, and combine that with my Tesla comics and all the stuff I have for Tesla on my site, I thought I'd be the perfect person to give this campaign a swift kick in the butt."

It was actually Reddit (naturally) that alerted him to the existence of the effort to buy the property. "I was getting some tweets, but I didn't know how realistic it was until there was a Reddit post sort of saying, hey, someone should get a hold of The Oatmeal, I know he's a Tesla fan, he might be able to help. That's what started it," he told Betabeat.

Between being based in Seattle and the fact the property is privately owned, he hasn't actually seen the site yet. Nor has he met the folks behind the Tesla Science Center. "We've been talking over phone and email for the last two weeks, but that's pretty much been the extent of it," he told Betabeat.

"This all came about really quickly, and we agreed to rush this whole idea because there's another offer on the table to buy the land, and so what I heard about this, it seemed like there was a sense of urgency," he added.

America's conspicuous lack of a museum devoted to Nikola Tesla seems to genuinely peeve Mr. Inman: "Tesla was Serbian, but he stated many times that he considered himself an American. He was a citizen. He felt American in his beliefs and a majority of his career was spent in New York City," he said.

He added, "Edison's got tons of museums and monuments, and I feel that Tesla's achievements were much more impressive and revolutionary than Edison's were." That's up for debate, but Mr. Inman's point is well taken.

The Indiegogo campaign is merely to purchase the property before someone else (like the developer said to be currently in the bidding) can. Turning the site into a fully functional science museum is probably "more of a six-to-seven-figure cost, like somewhere between $7 million and $10 million," but Mr. Inman does have a plan. He'd like to draw in a corporate sponsor like General Electric or J.P. Morgan, or perhaps a Tesla-loving tech entrepreneur, like Larry Page.

While the campaign hasn't even been up for a full day and it's already halfway to its fundraising goal, Mr. Inman would prefer not to count his chickens. "I noticed with my last campaign and Kickstarter that you'll have this huge surge right in the beginning, and then they'll just kind of die off. So I'm trying not to give this tone of 'mission accomplished' to anybody yet, because I feel like we're still getting there."

However, if they pull it off, he's excited to make the trip to the East Coast. "I will be the first person on the property, probably having a barbecue or camping," he said. Well, in that case, let's hope they did a good job of remediating all that cadmium contamination.

Hey girl. (Photo: Tumblr)

Google Maps updated its transit layer and now has scheduling info for more than a million public transportation stops, but that still won't make the F train come any faster. [Google]

Speaking of Google, its Mountain View campus has a 3D pasta printer for its employees. We're not jealous or anything... [TechPP]

What's the deal with Obvious Corporation's new publishing platform, Medium? Nieman Lab breaks it down for you. [Nieman Journalism Lab]

Fresh off the heels of his amusing lawsuit debacle with Charles Carreon, The Oatmeal is putting his efforts into building a museum for Nikola Tesla. [The Oatmeal]

People pirate because it takes three years for Avatar to come out on 3D Blu-ray, apparently. [Gizmodo]

(Photo: Game Informer)

The Oatmeal is finally free of Charles Carreon's bizarre legal machinations. Mr. Carreon decided to drop his case against Matthew Inman, who apparently was represented by the EFF. Everything about this was weird. [EFF]

Porn producers are all about Project Glass. We're sure you can guess why. [PC Mag]

Apple is reportedly planning to debut a smaller, cheaper iPad--terrible news for the Nexus 7. [Bloomberg]

Kim Dotcom has a grudge against vice president Joe Biden. [TorrentFreak]

Airport security apparently stole the Nexus Q used at Google I/O. [Dan Ellis]

Discourse. (Photo: The Oatmeal

We're not going to lie: We've enjoyed following every single development of the FunnyJunk/Charles Carreon-versus-Oatmeal/Matthew Inman fustercluck. But at this point, with a lawsuit targeting the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society, it's getting a little ridiculous. And if Mr. Carreon digs himself any deeper, he's going to pop out in Beijing. That's probably why Mr. Inman just addressed Mr. Carreon's eyeroll-inducing legal antics with a blog post informing him as gently as possible (well, for the "ptero-you-a-new-asshole" Oatmeal) that he is making matters worse.

"You're upset, I get it," grants Mr. Inman, before doling out a little real talk: "My advice: take a few weeks off, stop saying crazy shit to journalists, and come back when you've calmed down. Write an apology to whomever you feel is appropriate, or just don't write anything ever again." (This is actually pretty solid counsel for anyone who ever incurs the wrath of the Internet.)

He even says that, were Mr. Carreon to launch his own fundraiser to appease the Internet, he'd chip in.

Of course, lest Mr. Inman endanger his reputation by appearing too civil and mature, he signs off with "Hugs and sexy bear kisses."

But it sounds like Mr. Carreon might have bigger problems than a few mean emails from overly devoted Oatmeal fans. His Wikipedia entry points out that,

In October 2005, Carreon was suspended by the Oregon State Bar for 60 days for the unlawful practice of law and failing to deposit or maintain client funds in trust.^[11] In September 2006, Carreon was also suspended for two years by the State Bar of California, stayed, and placed on two years of probation with an actual 60-day suspension for violating his duty to maintain client funds in trust, and for practicing without a license in Canada.

In the meantime, in case anyone still cares about the original issue here, FunnyJunk has apparently removed all the infringing content to which Mr. Inman initially objected.

(Photo: The Oatmeal)

Late Friday afternoon, the legal dustup between popular Oatmeal webcomic creator Matthew Inman and FunnyJunk lawyer Charles Carreon careened full-speed into OMGWTF territory. Mr. Inman initially launched a campaign on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise money for the National Wildlife Foundation and the American Cancer Society in response to a trademark complaint filed by FunnyJunk. On Friday, Mr. Carreon, who is representing FunnyJunk in the case against The Oatmeal, filed his own lawsuit against Mr. Inman, alleging that he incited "cybervandalism" and initiated an "Internet jihad."

In the suit, Mr. Carreon alleges that Mr. Inman's campaign unleashed a swath of cybervigilantes who have fraudulently impersonated him and harassed him. But the thing is--Mr. Carreon is also suing the charities that were unwittingly dragged into this mess, as well as Indiegogo.

As far as we know, the charities have yet to issue any statements about the fracas. But Indiegogo did have some choice words for Mr. Carreon, and they ain't pretty. "As the largest crowdfunding platform operating in nearly 200 countries Indiegogo exists to provide crowdfunding opportunities worldwide, and a frivolous lawsuit doesn't change Indiegogo's commitment to this creative and popular campaign," Indiegogo said in a statement emailed to Betabeat.

It's impossible to identify the troll in this situation: FunnyJunk, for its laughable trademark claims; Mr. Inman, for his inspired, but immature, response; Mr. Carreon, for suing not one but two charities; or Indiegogo, for continuously responding to Mr. Carreon's bait. It's like a middle school boys' locker room fight. Last one to the courtroom gets a swirly!

Not a terms of service violation. (theoatmeal.com)

Round three of The Oatmeal versus FunnyJunk isn't looking so great for the latter.

For those just tuning in: Earlier this week, accused of defamation and faced with a demand he immediately fork over $20,000 in damages, Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise the money. However, he proposed to split it between the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. FunnyJunk's lawyer then alleged that the campaign was a violation of Indiegogo's terms of service and that he would be petitioning the crowdfunding site to remove it.

Well,  it turns out that Indiegogo does not agree with that assessment. The company just sent us the following statement:

"Indiegogo has not seen any behavior to cause us to believe that this campaign doesn’t comply with Indiegogo's Terms of Service.”

We take that to mean that Indiegogo has no intention of removing Mr. Inman's fundraiser, which has, as of this moment, raised a whopping $170,012.

Mr. Inman's lawyer has also released a formal response to FunnyJunk's charges, which is available in full on Scribd.

(Photo: The Oatmeal)

Earlier this week, Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal webcomic, responded to a lawsuit threat by FunnyJunk with an Indiegogo campaign to raise $20,000 for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. The campaign hit its $20,000 goal in an hour, and has accrued over $144,000 to date, with 14 days still left to go.

But--not content to settle for just one asshole move--FunnyJunk lawyer Charles Carreon has responded to Mr. Inman's campaign by trying to get it pulled from Indiegogo. Because egos are more important than cancer research, obviously.

According to NBC, Mr. Carreon:

believes Inman's fundraiser to be a violation of the terms of service of IndieGoGo, the website being used to collect donations, and has sent a request to disable the fundraising campaign. (The fundraising website has only responded with an automated message so far.)

Apparently some Oatmeal fans did take the whole fracas a step too far, though: Mr. Carreon claims that he has been the target of "obscene emails" following Mr. Inman's campaign, an unfortunate consequence of becoming an Internet punching bag.

Trying to cancel a charity campaign, though? Not exactly the best way to engender sympathy from the Internet masses.