Militant Geek Custom Shirts

I hope your week of stale television reruns and forced family frivolity is… well… over. Time to jump back in the swing of things with this lovely shirt from ShirtADay.com. Whether its a bit of engineering green, an energy drink, or coffee caffeine is the cornerstone of geekdom. The logo features a clever reworking of some other rather popular beverage. What’s also great about this tee is that right now its on clearance - its yours for the low low price of $11.99.

Obviously running a tshirt blog on geek related items I’ve seen my fair share of shirts that capture breaking news. Wired’s Snack Culture Blog describes things as succinctly as a bite sized bit of blog can:

…companies like CafePress, Spreadshirt.com, and Zazzle have turned your sister into a T-shirt designer by making production and distribution simple and cheap. Result: T-shirts can create cultural memes, not merely follow them.

Spontaneous T-shirts for Nintendo Wii accidents and SNL skits have turned your humble Fruit of the Loom into a form of micromedia. T-shirts today broadcast the news: Less than 24 hours after Dick Cheney shot a man in Texas, satirical T-shirt designs were uploaded to CafePress. They predict it too: The STEWART-COLBERT ‘08 T-shirt anticipates our boredom with an election cycle that has barely begun.

In an age of media saturation, T-shirts are a tight-knit nano-statement.

In today’s Geek TShirt offering we have the Mathlete Jersey from FlippingSweetGear.com. It forces us to face a fundamental question inherent with geekdom: is this shirt clever because of the juxtaposition of something geeky on something athletic? Are harbingers of numerical dexterity athletes? And does pandering to a more sports related aesthetic mean that geeks will catch the eye of the opposite sex?

Meh. Maybe its just a fetching shirt at a decent price. Mathlete is $21.99 from FlippinSweetGear.

So this shirt, available appropriately by Giant Robot, depicts what appears an iconic moment from the great French Robot Wars of 1992. As I’m sure you’ll remember, that conflict was fueled by frustrated escargot automatons toiling under snooty Parisian chefs (redundant, I know). The chaos was finally settled when the humans agree to make regular cheese concessions. And then they all donned flannel and listened to Nirvana. Ah yes, I remember it like yesterday.

Robot in the City is $18 from Giant Robot.

AOL company moral has to be soaring. Rumors of a mid-December layoff where confirmed when a number of employees didn’t receive invitations to the company Christmas party - classy. Opportunistic photoshoppers (and these days, who isn’t?) spent the time between the initial discovery and the ensuing stuffing of pink slips into stockings working on a number of fake shirts now posted on Flickr. The ‘2007 Annual AOL Xmas Layoff’ collection doesn’t actually exist outside of images (at least not yet). But for those who’s perceptions that AOL was a good career choice have now been popped the shirts-that-could-be might be worth a look.

When I see “Top XX” lists trotted out I know its December. That’s because media outlets have to fill the holiday vacuum of real news with something. Usually these lists, especially with Tshirts, are nothing more than slightly warmed up rehashes of past archives or summaries of a five minute Google search.

That’s why the Switched site’s “Top 11 Geek T-Shirts” list was so refreshing. First off, it’s good. Secondly, they obviously took their time and did more than just scan the best sellers at ThinkGeek. Finally, they alerted me to this gem - “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” for $20 from Mule Design.

Granted, I don’t harbor the seething hatred that Ted from Uncov has towards Web 2.0 startups. However, when there’s enough silliness going on to warrant a geek viral video it’s time to check the enthusiasm brakes.

I wanted so badly (ok, moderately bad; bad like a Lindsey Lohan movie bad, not a Wayans Brother movie bad) to like this shirt featured predominately on Boing Boing today. Why?

1. It’s for a good cause: proceeds from the sale of the shirt go to help the emergency medical fund for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
2. The meaning behind the phrase is obscure and tenuous which sometimes enhances the uniqueness.
3. There simply isn’t enough props given to the SFWA.
4. Cory Doctorow pimped it and no one, no one opposes the Cory without unleashing all the pent up, sexual frustration waiting at the gates of geekdom.

But, despite those things going for it I simply can’t recommend this tee. I suppose the irony here is that a shirt that features fart humor would look like ass. If you simply can’t be bothered with style over your substance you can get yours from Zazzle.com for $22.95. And, if so, here is some entertainment you might be interested in.

Ok, so maybe this shirt is actually entitled ‘Music Connects Us Through Space’ but if you’re going to have a mouthful of jargon as a title might as well make it fun, right? Oh well, verbose name or not, this design featured on uneetee is a rocketride to awesome for a limited time. Like a launch, the countdown is on for how long you can get this awesome geek shirt. The way uneetee works is that every day one shirt is featured for $10 and then at 12:00am PST a new shirt is featured. At the time of this writing there is roughly 14 hours left on this celestial delight.

Congrats to designer yoshi andrian amtha for his good work on this tee. Hat tip to Shirts On Sale for the heads up.

So the Militant Geek has a pretty decent head of hair and likes to show it off before he becomes follicly challenged. However, he does realize that other geeks may not be quite as lucky to have such a coiffed comb over keeping their brains cozy on winter excursions for caffeine and Doritos. In such cases Tooks, or ‘Hats You Can Hear’, might come in handy.

Granted, the reason people like showing off their white iPod earbuds is the sense of aesthetic superiority they feel over their plebeian, non-Jobs worshipping acquaintances. And, unfortunately, the earbuds go inside these hats - rendering their white design purity moot. So why am I even bringing these $25 mp3 player accessories up? Because, just between me and your browser history, I can tell you’re not a douche.

However, I am a little concerned about the compulsive Perez Hilton refreshes…

Today is Monday, December 3rd which means there are only 22 shopping days left till Christmas. Of course, if you’re still struggling to find that perfect gift for someone that measly 528 hours is really a leisurely 31,680 minutes. And those minutes translate to a whopping 1,900,800 seconds - plenty of time.

If that little holiday breakdown leaves you tingly in your headspace then check out this shirt from QuestionableContent (they don’t seem to have direct links to any of the designs so you’ll have to go to the merch page and scroll down, the bastards). The shirts cost $18 plus an extremely reasonable $3 shipping. Wear with pride and let the world know what you crunch (numbers, not Wheaties) every morning!

Hat tip to The TShirt Blog for the spot.