Side Projects

In addition to the regular merchandise/donation cycle, Breadpig also engages in special projects to help his friends out (and for the lulz). Follow along on his misadventures!

Hack Club

Hack Club is an occasional gathering where geeks can meet each other and bond over the sheer joy of dreaming big, learning, and creating. A semi-underground enclave moving from hideout to hideout like in the movies, where making badass stuff is celebrated above all else. You won’t get any fancy cheese platters here, but you won’t get any business cards or slick-talking recruiters either. We want to help take you back to the weekends you spent in your parents’ basement, madly coding on a constant drip of energy drinks.

KHAAN!

KHAAN! started off as a campaign to get Salman Khan, the magnanimous genius behind the Khan Academy, to the TED stage.  Having accomplished that, the KHAAN! project continues to milk this fortuitous opportunity to make Star Trek jokes by selling t-shirts and mugs and giving the proceeds to the Khan Academy, which continues to educate the world about everything from math to world history with its 1800+ videos (and growing!)

It's the Climb

The Khandaker sisters, Mitu and Maherunesa, wanted to build a women's education center in a poverty-stricken area of Bangladesh through their nonprofit Arohon. To fundraise the 5000 pounds they needed, they did what every video game researcher and law student would do in their situation: they prepared to CLIMB MT. KILIMANJARO, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. Breadpig was so impressed by their gumption that we offered to match all donations to their cause. When all was said and done, they climbed the mountain, raised £6,205, and even put a Breadpig sticker on the summit of Uhuru peak.

 

WTFCNN?!

Tired of seeing the vast disparity in quality of content between CNN.com and AlJazeera.net, Breadpig commissioned our talented programmer, Chromakode, to create WTFCNN?!, an easy, real-time way to compare the front pages of news sites and highlight the glaring failure of “The Worldwide Leader in News.” Within 48 hours, WTFCNN received more than 200,000 visitors and lots of accolades from the blogosphere. The code has since been open-sourced and is available on Github for further experimentation.

ROFLDNA

At ROFLThing NYC, Alexis shadily asked a bunch of internet famous people for cheek swabs and took the resulting samples to DNA11, who created a composite DNA mini-portrait to auction off. The auction ended up raising $455 for ScienceCommons. The DNA samples were collected from: AJ "HatPerson" Mazur, Jay "Tron Guy" Maynard, Ian "Chuck Norris Facts" Spector, moot "moot" mootkins, Irina "Geek Entertainment TV" Slutsky, Jason "TextFiles and Sockington's Owner" Scott, Charlie "Improv Everywhere" Todd, Damian "MC Frontalot" Hess, Vincent "Comic Sans" Connare, and Jamie "Rocketboom/FFFFF.AT Lab" Wilkinson.

ROFLaptop

The year was 2008, and Alexis had been invited to speak at the first incarnation of ROFLCon. Breadpig was only in its infancy, but Alexis already had plans: he got his hands on an XO, got a ton of internet celebrities to sign it, and auctioned it off on eBay to raise $521 for OLPC. Not bad for a day's work in a room full of geeks!

Breadpig: the Band

Before Breadpig was a world-fixing operation, it was a band on the verge of changing the definition of music forever. It seems that the band has split up for now to pursue their solo careers, but I think I read on Pitchfork the other day that a reunion could happen at any time...