No, seriously. If I reviewed podcasts instead of t-shirts, I’d go on about YLNT all the time. So go listen already! You won’t be sorry, I promise.

Adam’s also keeps a pretty rad tumblelog, starts dance crazes and drops gems on the Twitter every now and then.

Okay, enough of my yammering. Let’s let the guy do a little show and tell…

I’m a simple man. I like a shirt that fits. Form takes precedence over content on almost any day. I’m also a beefy man. This means, as many of my beefy brothers can attest to, most of the t-shirts out there, having been printed on American Apparel stock for the starving orphan, do horrendous things to my self-esteem. It’s rare to find a shirt that doesn’t either hug the shoulders, upper arms, pits and belly for dear life or drape half way down the arm to the elbows and obliterate the crotchal region. But when it happens, I’ll wear that shirt until someone tells me not to (which happens).

It wasn’t until after I started wearing my KUBRICK t-shirt a lot that people started to comment on how I resembled him. Having decided that removing my beard would never be a good idea, I had no choice but to own the resemblance. Once, somebody asked in earnest why I had a picture of myself on my t-shirt.

My friend Raza once remarked that he’d like to see a similar t-shirt printed in honor of a more marginal, lesser known or respected filmmaker, somebody obscure and without any discernable following. So for his next birthday, I went to zazzle.com and had a shirt printed up in tribute to the unheralded Ed Zwick. Why Zwick? I don’t know.

When I guest posted at kottke.org last December, I linked to a new energy drink called Brawndo, based on a fictional drink from the movie ‘Idiocracy’, and the post ended up starting a little discussion of what we came to call Defictionalized Goods. But strangely, it wasn’t the first time kottke.org had connected me with a Defictionalized Good in the form of a t-shirt. He and I have a shared worship of the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest, so when he linked to an online shop selling a t-shirt for the Enfield Tennis Academy, the academy of the novel’s hero Hal Incandenza, I absolutely had to have it. It’s printed on American Apparel stock, but it’s a rare instance where the fit doesn’t make me want to cut myself.

This one’s off the beaten path for a t-shirt blog, but my go-to shirt for form over content will always be the Fruit of the Loom crew neck in white, which I buy in packs of three at Target. They’re best once they’ve been allowed to ferment for a while and begin to develop a delicate patina of yellowy pit stain. And they bring out the Stanley Kowalski in any man. That is to say, you’ll drink too much and method act all over the place. But God, you’ll look good doing it. I mean, look at me! (Pictured.)

Alternate to the white Fruit of the Loom is my other favorite, the black crew neck t-shirt from Banana Republic, which can be had for a little more money in economy packs of one, but they’re Banana, so you know the workmanship is quality. At one point, I figured I’d simplify my life and go all Steve Jobs by wearing one of these every day. Problem is, they are not kind to a dry scalp, my friend.

This last one is a one-off I did for my private collection. It’s intention is to convey the excitement and anticipation I get in the brief moment before a movie trailer starts. And the trailer, itself is a brief moment of anticipation, so really the MPAA certificate is metamoment of metaanticipation, which is, you know, pretty deep stuff. Film school. I designed versions for Red Band and DVD certificates, but never printed any. It was a pet project from another time.

You can see that none of my favorites are particularly design-oriented. I’ve never been much of a connoisseur of design. The period of men’s apparel where it was impossible to find a shirt or coat without shit scribbled all over it, that was a difficult time for me. I was one of those fuddy-duddies complaining that you can’t find a plain t-shirt anymore.

Design oriented or not, that Enfield shirt is pretty sweet. Considering the recent news about David Foster Wallace tho, I really wish I’d ran this feature on Friday as I’d originally intended. *sigh*

Thanks for playing along, Adam!

Rob has also done a metric crapton of rad shirts and print work for bands, taken fantastic photos of New England Ruins and mocked pretty much every lameass scenester out there. In celebration of Fullbleed’s 7th series — as well as an effort to bring back this feature — we asked Rob to share some of his favorite shirts with us. Fortunately, he was more than happy to do so…

iso50 – waterfall tee

i always liked scott hansen’s work, i own a few of his tees and a few of his prints are hanging in my wife’s sewing room. something about how simplistic his tees are gets me everytime. that same style is something i strive for in my own designs and his line was always a big inspiration to me in terms of color / simplicity / iconic imagery.

the one am radio – streetlight tee (appears to be out of stock)

The first time i saw Hrishikesh Hirway (aka the one am radio) in 2002 i was blown away. I picked up this shirt at that very show and despite the fruit of the loom tag claiming it is the “BEST” it feels kinda like cardboard at this point. i still wear it every now and again because i am a sucker for asphalt tees with simple white designs.

invicid – skull astronauts (store appears to be on a break)

much like iso50, mark’s little line was one i always looked forward to when he had new releases. his designs usually featured skulls and bugs but most of the time i was really into whatever he was making. this shirt appealed to me because it almost looked like a post hardcore band had their name removed from the tee, speaking of which…

since by man – distressed logo tee (band has since broken up)

I saw since by man play a few shows when i was in college, i was never their biggest fan recorded, but i thought they always put on a great live show and had some great merch as well. The sheer amount of black tees i bought around this time from post hardcore / screamo bands was enough to fill an entire goodwill dumpster but this one still sticks around in my drawer for whatever reason. the distress on the tee is only getting better with age.

Thanks for sharing, Rob!

From June 11th to July 9th his afformentioned gallery is playing host to the pixeltastic tile and Rubick’s Cube mosiacs of french artist Invader. If you happen to be in the greater LA area, it’s definitely worth a visit.

We asked Sean for a peek inside his closet and he was more than happy to indulge us…

I was in 8th grade and I got a Bones Brigade t-shirt and remember the moment very clearly because I realized that finally I had a drawer full of t-shirts that I liked and had picked out myself and could finally get rid of the old t-shirts family members had given me for birthdays and holidays for the last few years. I remember how sacred those shirts were to me and I think about it every time I package up a load of shirts to drop off at Salvation Army or Goodwill which I have to do pretty regularly since I get so many all the time. A few years ago I got the idea that I didn’t want to be a billboard for anyone and tried to get rid of every logo shirt I had, and bought a ton of plain colored shirts to wear in their place. Of course there were lots that I couldn’t get rid of – ones I’d designed myself, ones friends had given me or just plain favorite designs. Since then the filter has gotten tighter but I’ve also gotten even cooler shirts. Trying to pick favorites is rough, I’ve got 4 drawers full of shirts I wear all the time so this is really more like 4 shirts that are on heavy rotation right now.

The Mid-West

I don’t know why I like this shirt so much, I’m not from or particularly fond of the mid-west but something about the “it’s in the middle” line makes me smile every time I read it.

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Ecology Flag

I’ve wanted a shirt with this flag on it since I was in High School and first saw it. For one reason or another I never made one, luckily my friend Glen just did. I got this shirt about 2 weeks ago and have worn it probably 4 times since then. The only thing better than the shirt is the puzzled looks I get from so many people – one guy even asked me if it was some anti-american thing, I had to respond “depends on how you look at it” and walked away.

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10 Points

I love Space Invaders. I love Invader. I love this shirt.

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The Model Sons

I’m not sure how I ended up with two of this exact same shirt but I have two and I wear them all the time. My friend Scott plays in this band. I know he gave me at least one of the shirts at one point, I know they are from Boston and I have the CD, but other than that I couldn’t tell you much about them. This shirt on the other hand outright rules. I love everything about it and if I had 7 I’d wear them every day.

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That s a bit of what’s in my closet right now. Check back in 6 months and it will be completely different.

Thanks for sending those tees along, Sean!

Besides writing for BoingBoing, Wired and Make, Cory has a new novel, “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” that drops on July 1. He also happens to be the jet setting European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an obessed, yet socially functional Disneyphile.

Asking someone as t-shirt obsessed as Cory to jot down his top 5 shirts was a task. How can you choose when there are so many that you adore? So we broke from our usual format and let him send us an inventory of his the shirts that are in his heavy rotation. A few of the tees in his collection were either one-offs, limited runs or not available online. With that in mind, we’ve tried to provide URLs where we could find them. So without further adieu, here’s your peek inside Cory’s closet…
Well, I’m at home now long enough to change suitcases [which is practically the only reason I ever come home], so here’s a quick inventory. I have too many tees — more than I can wear for sure — and every month or two I take 20 or so to the local charity shop and drop them off.

Currently Wearing

• A long-sleeve Disneyland tee that’s all distressed and worn looking, with torn pieces of cloth sewn to it.

Top Drawer [not black, not white]

• A chocolate-brown Blogger/Google shirt from SXSW two years ago
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• Navy blue shirt from monochrom.at: OH MY GOD THEY USE A HISTORY THAT REPEATS ITSELF
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• Navy blue shirt from downhillbattle.org: PEER-TO-PEER KILLS PAY-FOR-PLAY
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• Kermit green shirt from FxxxPxxx: [THIS IS GOOD]
• Khaki Fantastic Four tee from Spitalfields Market
• Olive green Wonder Woman tee from Spitalfields Market
• Red tee from engrish.com: I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE, with a rainbow. I usually can’t bring myself to wear this.
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• Red Walt Disney World tee A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME with Goofy’s hat being blown off by a pirate’s cannonball. I can’t BELIEVE they offer these for sale!
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• Light brown Blogger/Google shirt also from SXSW two years ago
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• Chocolate brown shirt from spamshirt.com, with orange writing: FWD: VEDOXHERABAL VIAGRASUPP
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• Orange tee from monochrom.at, featuring a man in a tophat saying: UFO-Beobachtungen muB man skeptisch gegenüberstehen Nur dann er-kennt… …man bösre Fälschungen”
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• Khaki B * A * S * H tee
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• Grey downhillbattle.org tee: HOME TAPING HIS KILLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY AND IT’S FUN
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Bottom Drawer [black and white]:

• Black eff.org tee
• Black Disneyland Paris Pirates of the Caribbean tee
• Black tee from monochrom.at: DER DOW JONES IST DAS WICHTIGSTE VON DER WELT
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• Black Michael Moore as Che Guevara tee
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• Black tee from EFFi (EF Finland), take off on Trainspotting
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• Black Second Life tee: PLAY IN THEIR WORLD LIVE IN OURS
• Black NTK.net tee: I [heart] MY VT-1OO
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• Black Campaign for Digital Rights tee: CORRUPT DISC INFERIOR AUDIO KEEP THE RIGHT TO COPY
• Black doombuggies.com tee: TOMB SWEET TOMB
• Black long-sleeve Pirates of the Caribbean Disneyland Paris tee with skulls down the sleeves
• Black ntk.net tee: Pic of Ben Franklin and THEY THAT CAN GIVE UP GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTERS FOR THE SAKE FOR A LITTLE EYE CANDY DESERVE NEITHER COMPUTERS NOR EYE CANDY
• Black downhillbattle.org tee: BRAM COHEN SEEDED MY TORRENT
• White Cafe Press long-sleeve: MY NGO WENT TO WIPO AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS INFRINGING T-SHIRT
• White tee red-circle-slash-over-ID from no2id.net
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• Black tee my mom brought me from Tokyo: WHILE IT DOESN’T KNOW RADIOACTIVE DANGER REAT AT HAND IT ITSELF OF YOU AS WELL.
• Black lenticular anime tee from Cyberdog
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Crap, man… That’s one helluva collection. Thanks for indulging us, Cory. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re afraid the site will collapse under the weight of this post if we let it go on much longer. Cheers!

Since Drew is a self-confessed t-shirt junkie, he’s got a whole bunch of great tees floating around his closet. Fortunately for us, he was nice enough to send us some of his favorite shirts for our readers perusal.
Here Comes A Special Boy

This is from Achewood, my favorite comic strip, online or off. It has been my favorite for years, because Chris Onstad is a raw comic genius. This shirt is great, because it has a creepily-optimistic message, and then a little otter running around, and I think sometimes people mistake the otter for a weiner running around, and that makes it even better.

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Hot Dog

I bought this shirt off a guy in the netherlands, who posted on a messageboard that he was making these shirts. Sight unseen, I paypalled him some euros, and got this shirt a bit later. If you are addicted to weird t-shirts like I am then sending ten or fifteen bucks out of the country in exchange for a t-shirt is not much of a stretch at all. As it happens, the screenprinter [Probably high, that's the idea most Americans have of the dutch] printed the design upside down and I got the shirt at a discount, and it is even weirder to have a shirt with an upside-down hotdog. If you are reading this, thanks Neils.
Ming & Ping

Ming & Ping are a synth-pop duo from California. They make new-new-wave music and they are twins. This shirt was too
awesome for me to even think about passing up. I don’t really even listen to this sort of music much, but theirs is strangely compelling. Their website is mingping.com, and their album is called mingping.com. Huh.

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Optigan

The Optigan was a home organ manufactured in the 1970s by Mattel. It used these twelve-inch clear acetate disks, printed with amplitude-modulated sound loops – the same idea as the sound stripe on film, but in a circle. These organs were basically failures, prone to electrical and mechanical problems, but were built at a factory in Compton [yes, that Compton] for a few years.

I had an Optigan a few years ago. I bought it at a thrift store for $12 in 1998-ish near my parents’ house, and my dad helped my tie it into my old Honda with bungee cords. I drove it half sticking out of my trunk back to my ghetto apartment in Cincinnati, where I played it for a couple of years. Then I discovered eBay and promptly sold the thing for three hundred bucks to some cats from New York. Now all I have is this t-shirt, which I bought on a lark from optigan.com at the same time as a huge packet of service manuals I needed to restore the thing to playable condition. The shirt, thankfully, has not required hours of maintenance every few months to remain wearable.

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Thanks for giving us a peek at your favorite tees, Drew! For those of you that care, we’ve got another great “What’s In Your Closet?” coming up on Friday from one of our favorite weblogging sci-fi authors. Hope to see you then!

Jason was nice enough to set aside a few minutes to help us launch our latest irregular feature, “What’s In Your Closet?” Yeah, we loved Gizmodo’s “What’s In Your Gadget Bag” so much that we had to make it our own. So without further adieu, let’s take a look at some of J.Ko’s favorite tees…

Flowers In The Attic

The version I have isn’t pictured on the site, but it’s red on red, which makes the design somewhat hard to see unless you’re really looking hard at it in good light. That cuts down on the casual on-the-street mortification which is good because people usually don’t react very well when they realize I’m wearing a tshirt picturing a little girl blowing her head off with a pistol. I’ve worn this shirt twice now when going through security at the airport and have gotten no comment either time, a lucky streak which I will try not to push to three.

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Design is a Good Idea

Classic shirt from Emigre. I’ve had mine forever now, probably 8 years or so, and I still wear it often. I don’t know what brand of shirt and printing process they used, but I wish all my shirts held up this well…unless you look closely, you can barely tell it’s been worn.

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Oral-B

This is a sentimental favorite, given to me by an old girlfriend of mine. It’s an employee shirt from the Oral-B factory in Iowa City, probably purchased from a Goodwill or Salvation Army. I don’t wear this one very often because the fabric is so thin (but soft!) that I’m afraid it’s going to dissolve in a stiff wind one day.

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Wow, man… All of those were very choice tees. Then again, they’re also totally sold out or hard to come by. Way to induce t-shirt lust, Kottke. On the flip side, thanks for helping us get this new feature off the ground. Mad respect to you.