And of all the turtles they could have picked, why Raphael? I realize that printing the handles of Leonardo’s katanas wouldn’t have made much sense, but I’d much rather have a purple tee with Donatello’s bō staff printed across the back than Raphael’s stupid sais.

Especially in the TMNT III: Manhattan Project, Raphael was the worst character since you had to be right on top of an enemy to attack them. No one wanted to be Raphael, no one.

But, if Raphael is all they’ve got, then I’m game. Plus, it’s a good excuse to work “Cowabunga” into every day conversations.

$26 | Mens Womens | Credit | M: S – 2XL, F: S – 2XL

"Blue Steel" Wearing "Elliot's New Friend" from Go Ape Shirts

I do want to tell you a little about how I ended up running the shop here. First of all, I’ve been in the Preshrunk audience since almost the beginning. I’ve been a bit of a t-shirt fanatic my entire life, and buying awesome shirts online was an expensive hobby to begin with, let alone having to sort through all the crap out there. Preshrunk introduced me to flat-out awesome original shirts and to some amazing shirt companies.

I even commented twice. Once to agree with the idea that Preshrunk should have a MySpace profile (Don’t look at me like that. It was 2006, we were all doing it back then.) and a second time after I donated $5 to get rid of banner ads on Preshrunk. Mostly though, I just kept coming back for the great shirts.

It was a tough relationship though. Sometimes months would go by without even hearing a word. Then suddenly a post like this would make my heart go a-flutter in anticipation of new awesomeness.

When Andy from HideYourArms posted that Jason was putting Preshrunk was for sale, I had the sinking feeling in my stomach — I just knew that whoever bought it would ruin it, post a bunch of stupid shirts, plaster ads all over the place and generally take a big crap all over the site I’d loved for so many years. I knew what I had to do. I spent about an hour writing an email that wouldn’t make me sound like some crazed fanatic who was going to show up and lay down in front of the bulldozers. Which I would have done. In. A. Heartbeat.

Thankfully, it worked. Jason and I have spent the last month or so getting everything moved over, so that he can push his baby out of the nest and, with the help of fellow diehard fans, we can make it fly.

When I started the site, I was in my mid-20′s working in a boring office job with a lot of downtime.  After an afternoon of dicking around at work and looking at tees with my pal Frazier, I realized that there were no blogs dedicated to finding and reviewing t-shirts.  So I started Preshrunk.  And until I lost my boring office job a little over a year later, I could keep up with posting almost every day.

But then I couldn’t.  My job and personal life sucked the will to stay on top of posting out of me.  I had other things to pay attention to.  Much more important things.

I kept feeling bad about walking off and ignoring the site for months at a time, so I’d come back — but it was never the same.  Besides, so many other t-shirt blogs had popped up since I’d started that it was hard for me to link a tee that someone else had found and covered weeks (or months) before.

Eventually, my heart stopped being in it.  So I decided to sell Preshrunk to someone who would take care of it.

Now don’t think for a second that I’m flipping the site to make bank off of it.  The buyer — who’ll introduce himself in a later post — is paying a modest but fair price.  In fact, he wasn’t even the highest bidder.

So why did I agree to sell to him?  Well, he sent me a pretty compelling mail that convinced me that the site would do well under his watchful eye.  And I bought it.

We’re working out how to get everything transferred over now.  Hopefully, nothing will go sideways on us while that’s all going on — but if it does, you can bet your ass that it’ll get sorted back out quickly.  I’m going to do everything I can to make this transition as smooth as possible.

No matter what tho, please be patient and stick around.  I mean, if you’re reading this, you’re still checking this blog out after years of neglect — and bravo for that — but don’t bail on us now.  The guy taking over the site is totally intent on returning this old bucket of bits to its former glory — and I seriously think he can pull it off.

Anyhow, so long and thanks for all the hits!

P.S. If you want to keep up with me in my post-Preshrunk life, feel free to check out my just as seldomly updated personal blog or follow me on Twitter.

It was our 5th year as a blog and I only managed to do two posts in April and the one that you’re reading right now. For something that started out with so much promise — and content — that’s just embarrassing.

The fact of the matter is, when I started Preshrunk I was at a dead end job with a lot of downtime. Enough to spend my day combing the internets in search of some really epic tees. And I think I did an alright job for the first year or so.

But then, for whatever reason, the people providing me with my goldmine of downtime stopped doing so. So I had to find myself a new gig. Fortunately, DreamHost came along and scooped me up.

And just like anyone at a new job, I wanted to make the people that hired me happy that they did so. Work became my primary focus. Needless to say, the free time went to a trickle. Furthermore, since I was spending a lot of my time at work troubleshooting WordPress sites, the last thing I wanted to do was spend more time staring at it when I got home. My motivation was sapped. In turn, Preshrunk started to suck. Like a lot.

Sure, I’d start to give a shit once or twice a year — but that isn’t enough to retain an audience. Even if most of my readers are “set it and forget it” RSS people, the lulls in posting probably aren’t all that fun for people who are used to the sort of rapid fire shit from Twitter and Tumblr.

So what does that mean for Preshrunk?

Well, I’ve considered killing this sad bastard of a site off and replacing it with a tumblelog, but that’d mostly end up breaking the permalinks and killing any character that we’ve ever managed to have.

There was also a recent offer of purchase from a high-profile party. And while the price was a good one, I couldn’t let someone else write for something that I’d put so much of myself into.

Right. I haven’t really answered that last question tho, have I? Where does that leave us?

Well, I guess at this point I can either let things continue to die a slow, painful death — or I can do my best to drag Preshrunk’s severely charred carcass out of the ashes and try to bring it back from the dead in 2010.

Considering the new theme and this somewhat long-winded post, I’ll let you come to your own conclusions about my decision…

I’ve been playing with a few plugins over the past day that might have caused this, so I’m going to shut them off for now and see if the problems clear up. *crosses fingers* This also started happening around the time the site was upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2, so I hope that has nothing to do with it. I’ve got a WordPress Support post that echoes this entry, so I encourage anyone else seeing this issue with their install to go there and talk it out.

I’ll monitor the site pretty closely, but if you see this article (or any other one for that matter) in your feed reader and clicking thru shows it not coming up on the site, please let me know right away.

Now, I’m no Jason Calacanis — and most of you are probably thankful for that — but I do think that the Preshrunk Twitter account could use some more followers. So I’m going to partake in a little giveaway over the next week. Want to play along?

I’m not looking to be the number one user on Twitter. I know the sort of hits I get and I’m a ways away from bringing that kind of thunder. I’d still like to reward my readers and pick up a few Twitter pals tho. So at random times between now and next Monday, I’m going to be dropping a few Threadless Gift Certificate codes directly to Twitter. As in the first one to grab it and use it, gets it.

That means you don’t necessarily have to follow us to win — but you do stand a better chance of getting something if you do. Also, I’m in talks with a few shops to do some giveaways in the coming months. So even if you don’t win anything in the next week, the stuff we’ll be putting out afterwards should hopefully be worth enough for y’all to stick around.

So follow us on Twitter, dammit! You won’t be sorry, I promise…

Update We gave the first one away earlier today — and there are more on the way. Spread the word and help Preshrunk get followers and I might have to up the ante with a few $50 ones.

P.S. If you’re on Twitter, I’ve added an account for Preshrunk that posts updates shortly after I do. Feel free to follow that account if RSS isn’t your thing.

First up is the home page. Quite a few of you were annoyed that only the most recent post was displayed on the front page and all the other posts were merely excerpts. To be honest, it kind of annoyed me too — but I couldn’t manage to find the part of the template where I could turn that behavior off until now. Once I managed to find it tho, I had a pretty routine forehead slap and decided to move on. What does this mean for you? The 6 latest posts are now on the front page in their full on glory. Hooray for that!

Next up are the comments. While Akismet and moderation do a great job of keeping spam from ever hitting the site, there are still a few questionable comments that fall thru the cracks. I can tell that they’re obviously spam, but Akismet has a habit of just passing things directly to moderation when they’re being hit too hard for spam checks. Lately, it’s been getting sort of annoying — so I’ve decided to enable CAPTCHA support by way of reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a pretty awesome project that digitizes books while preventing bots from hammering our comment script. So not only do I have things easier, but the Internet Archive also ends up getting digitized books at the end of the day. Hopefully y’all don’t find them to be too much of a pain in the ass.

And finally, there are the archives. In an effort to make the archives a bit more interesting to explore, I’ve implemented the random redirect plugin and dropped a link next to the search form. What this does is give you a random post whenever you visit http://preshrunk.info/?random. Since this is completely random tho, you may end up coming across a shirt that’s not even being sold anymore — or you might even get redirected to a boring site news post. But it’s all about the luck of the draw. So are you feeling lucky?

Okay, that’s it for now. We’ve got some more announcements coming soon tho. If you look closely enough, you might even notice something before I have the time to tell y’all about it. So keep your eyes peeled!

If you don’t like them, there’s really nothing stopping you from using an ad blocking extension. Well, you know, except for the fact that doing so will make me cry on the inside a little over the lost revenue. But what’s a buck or five a month between friends, right?

With that being said, I’d like to let those of you who have something to sell know that we’d like to help you get the word out about your stuff. And while I can’t be bribed to run your shirts, track jackets or hoodies on the site, we would be more than happy to sell you some ad space.

Because of this, I’ve gone ahead and launched a section of the site for interested advertisers to visit and figure out how you can leverage our readers into becoming their customers. I know that sounds a little dirty and nefarious, but that’s pretty much what advertising is. The nature of the beast, so to speak.

So if you have something you want to sell to a bunch of people and have some money burning a hole in your pocket, try doing it here. I’ve got a horrible t-shirt habit that I’m trying to feed, after all…