Militant Geek Custom Shirts

If you’ve been following the emergence and mainstreaming of customized tees you’ve probably just having a killer design does not make shirts equal. The process of getting the image onto a shirt is almost as varied as the type of designs themselves.

Pop Culture Tees has a great overview of the different ways of creating the apparel we know and love. They cover heat transfer, digital printing, screen printing, and vinyl. It’s not comprehensive - for example, reading through the Spreadshirt FAQ one sees that digital printing can be further broken down into Flex, Flock, Specialty Flex, Writable Flex categories. However, Pop Culture does give some good pointers when evaluating various offerings.

It is a process that makes so much sense its a wonder I haven’t seen it before:

• geeks wear a lot of tech company shirts
• scifi flicks have a lot of tech companies
• make tshirts of the firms in the movie
• PROFIT!

That’s exactly what Last Exit to Nowhere has done. While they aren’t specifically focused on tech their collection includes an awesome assortment of movie homages that any geek would be proud to wear. Whether its Aliens 3, Terminator, or Robocop (and several more) you can now proudly display your favorite corporate oppressor!

There simply isn’t enough ASCII art anymore. Sure, you may have your pixels and your high rez images. But lost along the way is an appreciation for the mind numbing tedium involved in making art from QWERTY missives. Combine that insane means of production with iconic Star Wars and, well, you’ve got a great shirt.
This shirt is available on KeyStrokeTShirts for $17.99. Seen via Fashionably Geek.

What you see here is either a promo still from “You’ve Been Served 3: We’re Really Phoning It In Now” or a killer tshirt from Go Ape Shirts. As you can see when it comes to irrational flopping about on a cardboard stage the primates still pwn bee-atches. No comment on what happens when both contestants are asked to do the robot.

This design is available from Go Ape Shirts for $18. First seen on Fashionably Geek.

First off, this is a fantastic TShirt from Allmightys, a Berlin based printing shop that uses only American Apparel (just to prove that tees are truly a global phenom). It sells for 21 euros.

All that shop stuff is great but I wanted to get to the second part: of those robots shown how many can you identify? It’s one point for every correct answer. Test your knowledge of geekdom and revel in this completely arbitrary point system:

• 0 points - Sorry friend, I believe you have us confused with another site.
• 1-3 points - Congratulations! You’re a wannabe who’s only geek cred comes from pop culture.
• 4-5 points - The force is strong in this one.
• 6 points - When geeks inherit the earth you will be sought out as a sage for your historical depth.

How did you score?

Every week I get a number of TShirt vendors contacting me with their latest and greatest work. When their tee is a great match for the site I try to work it in. Often, however, I either have the entire weeks worth of content planned, I’m in the midst of a theme run or, frankly, I get lazy and take some time off.

Sometimes there are also moral ambiguities. A vendor may not have the most relevant geek apparel but they’re willing to send over samples (for the record I’ve never accepted freebies in exchange for a blog post - I never want the reader to wonder if I’m running something because TEH BOMB or because I’m getting a kickback [which is why the shirts posted with affiliate links are also paired with clearly posted non-affiliate items]). Other times a struggling college student is trying to get his store off the ground and I never get around to featuring his wares. Project Wonderful helps in both those cases. Project Wonderful is a neat online ad service that lets advertisers advertise on only the sites they want to, lets publishers accept only the ads that are worthwhile to their audience, and introduces a good heaping of transparency to the process. If you’ve got a tshirt store you bid and your ad stays there until someone outbids you. It separates out editorial content from site sponsorship - rather than sending me tees for a plug I’ll just refer you to the above-the-fold sponsor block. Tees sites get a way to get involved with Militant Geek on their terms and in their own time, the readers get ads that are relevant to them, and I get money (hopefully) to continue the site.

Got an experience with Project Wonderful? Is this just a crass capitalistic play? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

By way of Fantastic Bonanza comes this incredible homage to George Orwell’s dark future. For the kiddies, 1984 was more than a decent Mac commercial. Published in 1949 it chillingly predicted a number of our current bugaboos - surveillance, terrorism, and just what people are willing to endure in the name of ’security’. Oh, and how to sell out your girlfriend to keep rats from eating your face - really, its lessons are timeless.

‘1984′ is available from Enclothe for $19. Get yours before Eurasia attacks!

I have to admit that I kinda liked the Michael Bay Transformers movie last year. Sure, the script came out of a 7th grader’s writing class in a school for juvenile delinquents. But everything else - the robots, the shots, the acting was tolerable. They’re shiny new casings, however, didn’t remove my archetypal vision of what good and evil are. At 80’s Tees they’ve got the version of Autobot and Decepticon leaders that I’ll always prefer. And right now you can get this fantastic shirt, normally $22, for a very cybertronion friendly $12.01.

Speaking of exploded views what should we have but an exploded view of quite possibly the greatest controller of all time! Drawn to scale and featuring every nuance from start/select switches to the rubber pads this is a wearable tribute to classic Nintendo gaming goodness. The ‘model no. NES-004′ is available from huzzah apparel. It may cost a bit more than the standard tshirt ($25) but for this level of geek detail and sophistication it is worth it.

I have a real soft spot for technical illustration - be it blueprints or exploded diagrams a savvy illustration of a complex topic gets me every time. That’s probably the reason that I glommed onto this infographic tee from Let’s Be Awesome entitled ‘Stereo’. But don’t let the titular naming modesty underwhelm you. The front features a lovely retro image of how a number sequence is strained through an orange box to produce a lovely interstate off ramp… or something.

Stereo from Let’s Be Awesome for $15.