Militant Geek Custom Shirts

Other than Think Geek’s Classic Caffeine Molecule Shirt our Chemistry Haxx0rs don’t have walk-a-wear for their predilections. However, today I’m pleased to announce that apparel catering to their needs has doubled with this awesome shirt from Brian Wu. Like the best designs it combines a number of aspects: revelations of toxic chemicals showing up in Chinese-made toothpast and slavishly applying Chinese characters to things because it ‘looks cool’ despite not knowing what it ‘means’.

In this case the characters roughly say ‘two sweet alcohol’ - a reference to the diethylene glycol that wound up making people sick. How often do you get a political, cultural, and fashion statement all in one? For $19.99 from Cafepress, not nearly often enough.

If you follow T-Shirts for any amount of time you know that you know its Monday because Threadless drops another batch of custom Tees. In today’s batch there was the nicely done ‘Nerd 2-Squared’ Life T-Shirt. Personally, I think the designer got his geek and nerd labels mixed up (hey, don’t argue with Webster). It’s also irritating that the shirt is modeled by someone using an Apple - a fact that would make them more of a hipster/scenester than a nerd. However, three decades of cultural conditioning aside its a clever little shirt. Nevermind if the sentiment is incorrect - at least you get it.

Guys shirts start as $12 and girls shirts can be had for $14 on the Threadless site.

There is something to be said for the literal interpretation of a phrase - in this case its frakken awesome! The crew at Elsewheres have taken what would have otherwise been a dour sounding shirt and turned it into an eco-friendly weapon of mass destruction. Interestingly enough, the shirt design is said to be permanently bleached into the fabric. The result is an image that will never fade or crack.

Shirts are $25 and available at Elsewheres shop.
Hat Tip: Funky Duds

At MilitantGeek we’ve never liked the Segway - it always seemed to be a ridiculously complex and expensive solution in search of a problem. However, IndieTech - for the reasonably modest price of $15 - lets you buy into something worth supporting: geek hubris. The Segway Beta isn’t just a tshirt; its a reminder that ridiculous products are comedy gold.

Indie Tech - Segway Beta Shirt - $15

Hat tip: TCritic

Last week I briefly mentioned the pending launch of shirt.woot, Woot’s t-a-day site. The thought of applying Woot’s incredible Geek-centric deals with merchandise that one could wear was titillating.

This week they did launch and (so far) it is. Day one featured an extremely lovely gaming homage called ‘Sore Thumbs’. Day two featured an exploded-diagram view of a vaguely Transformers-like robot. If they can continue to keep the quality up (a challenge considering they are expected to induce geek-gasms every single day) they will go straight to the short list of favorite sites.

There have been some complaints that there isn’t a ’so-slow-its-free’ shipping option for the shirts. It will also be interesting to see if Woot’s approach - one-shirt-for-a-limited-time as opposed to a stable catalog - will attract more casual shoppers. But for now its exciting to see such a great resource for impulse geek clothing purchases take shape.

Campaign Monitor is an online email marketing service. Recently they had a T-shirt competition and had some rather clever entries as a result. While there are three entries in their online store the shirt I’ve taken a shine to is ‘The Counter’. It politely notifies people just how many times the shirt has been viewed so far.

Its available for $25.00 from Campaign Monitor. Now if only it was possible to update it in real time.

Seen on music videos, commercials, and even shoddily taped wedding receptions the Robot is the dance the refuses to die. Perhaps it is its emphasis on awkward movement that makes it accessible to the masses. Perhaps it’s a misplaced Jetsons-like future yearning that will never be. Perhaps its that damn Styx song that keeps the robot a rigid spasm away.

For whatever reason The Tee Party’s ‘Do the Robot’ captures our delightful cultural dementia one right angle at a time. Men’s shirts are printed on heavyweight cotton and start at $19.99.

Uneetee.com is have a great little sale. From the 9th to 12th of this month they were selling some of their better designs for a delightful $12. The design that caught this geek’s eyes was ‘World Circuit’ - or, the world as circuit board. The light green print against darker fabric lacks a bit of contrast to these eyes and the traces are most likely ink, not foil (which would really kick a Dalek). However, for $12 these trivialities aren’t deal breakers. Hurry though - sale ends tomorrow.

World Circuit by Daniel Gilbert from uneetee.com

Woot has long been the sterling pinnacle of geek impulse shopping. It has stripped the pretense from web savvy shoppers and exposed them for what they are: lusting technosexuals for whom a good deal is a Pavlovian bell. And when they have their famous Woot-offs its like the cacophony of ‘carol of the bells’ played out on geek wallets everywhere.

So, it is with much trepidation that I see Woot is building a T-Shirt shop at shirt.woot.com. In their most recent email newsletter the guys from Woot tease:

The chatter, rumors, and scuttlebutt are all true: Shirt.Woot will soon come alive, offering one exclusive t-shirt design per weekday.

Heavens to Betsy’s bottom. My closet may never recover.

Anyone with a midichlorian of geek experience in their past has probably had to deal with acronyms - those abbreviated version of gobbity gook that keep our fingers from falling off when discussing the transition from HTML to XML distributed with RSS and powered with AJAX while asking ourselves WTF?

If acronym excess is a facet of your life you may just be interested in this shirt from Vintage Vantage. Boldly advertising the ‘Anti-Acronym Association of America’ its for the geek who’s linguistic shorthand is MIA (or for the geek with an astute sense of irony). Price is $22.50.