Preshrunk

I'm not much of a sweets person, but I loves me some cupcakes. My gal has a recipe for these awesome peanut butter ones that could convince a lesser man to give up Atkins for the wonderfully sinful world of carbs. With any luck, I can get her to share it.

Actually, cupcakes seem to be the big thing right now. I'm not sure why, but my tummy doesn't seem to mind all that much. Johnny Cupcakes seems to be at the forefront of cashing in on the trend by making poppy, fun apparel featuring cupcakes. The cupcake and crossbones tee to the left is a great take on the pirate gear still making the rounds. Maybe I'm a minimalist, but I like the black on black design. *shrug*

If the crossbones design isn't your thing, be sure to check out their Statue of Liberty, Wu-Tang and Say Anything tees. All of them are wonderful little pop culture riffs that are very closet worthy.

Update: My girlfriend's gone ahead and posted her cupcake recipe. Yay!

$24.99 | Credit | URL

Just like most video games based on a movie, Friday the 13th for the NES was a big, steaming pile of crap.

Well, maybe that's not very fair. It's not like the game took it against the back of the throat and gargled. To be perfectly honest, my hate springs from the fact that I wasn't very good at it. But the game didn't play fair... Often times, Jason ambushed me mere pixels away from a badly needed power up. Dick move, Voorhees.

Sadly, it was the closest my parents would let me near the Friday the 13th series of movies until I was 13. So needless to say, my opinion of the series was forever tarnished by the game.

If you couldn't tell by now, I'm sort of a masochist... It should probably go without saying that I love this tee from Nostromo Design. It's a pretty faithful recreation of one of the many banes of my childhood existance.

$15.00 | PayPal | URL

Those of you who read this site via RSS/Atom/LiveJournal syndication may have missed our latest site feature, "IM to a friend".

As of this last Friday, there's a tiny AIM icon next to the title of each entry. When it's clicked on, most AIM clients should give you a new message window containing the URL of the entry you'd like to share with a friend. After you enter their screen name and send the message, feel free to chat about what you've sent their way. It works transparently and is loads easier than a standard copy and paste.

Yeah, we're trying to harbor conversation about our site and drive our traffic up. We're also trying to make sending URLs to friends a bit easier. We stole the idea from our friends at blogging.la. If you don't like "IM to a friend", send them hate mail. Sean loves reading hate fueled diatribes that have nothing to do with him. Honest injun...

Note: Trillian doesn't seem to install handlers for "aim:" links. If you run Trillian and click on the link, there's a good chance that nothing will happen. iChat and the official AIM client seem to be all good tho. Sorry Trillian users.

Here's one for the ladies. The fellas are just going to have to sit this one out, I guess...

We'll admit that most of Coop's shirts fall firmly in the "Not Safe For Work" category. That's not a damnation of his work - it's more of a warning, really. We don't want you to get in trouble for browsing around the site at your 9 to 5 gig.

This jersey style tee is perfect for the budding roller derby queen. Since the number is already affixed to the back, all you'd need is a pair of skates, some protection and a pair of hot pants. Mmmm, hot pants... *drool*

$24.00 | Credit | URL

Nullsleep tipped us off to this tee that contains a wonderfully subtle nod to scrolling shooters. In fact, it's so subtle that if you have no idea what scrolling shooters are - or why a TV is on its side - this shirt is probably not for you.

Sorry... I'll try harder to be more inclusive next time.

$15.00 | PayPal | URL

Preshrunk reader Neil Forrester sent us an email which I felt compelled to run. I know we don't open the mail bag all that often, but you'll hopefully understand why we made an exception in a minute...

I know this isn't really your problem, but I thought I'd pass on my experience.

I'm a big fan of your site, right from the start, and have managed to pick up some really cool shirts.

However, I placed an order with zeroboutique - the guys behind your very first post about the 'ape-o-naut' t-shirt - on the 1st of January, and am still waiting...

I've managed to get through to them a couple of times via email, and have got some pretty lame excuses.

It's now the middle of April and I'm nowhere closer to seeing a return on the significant amount of cash I laid out in good-faith to these guys.

Like I said, not really your problem, but I did find them via you, and you might want to consider whether you want to recommend their service to your readers in future...

Since we recommended them to our readers, I'm going to make it our problem. I feel horrible when a company that we send traffic and sales to turns out to be nothing more than a bunch of shady twats.

By posting his letter, I'm hoping that we can shame ZeroBoutique into providing our boy Neil with some actual customer service. Who knows, maybe they'll even send him his order. While we won't hold our breath on either thing, it does feel refreshing to help a brother out. Keep your fingers crossed for him, okay?

Update: Neil sent this across the wire...

Whether as a result of my nasty emails, or the astounding powers of the blogosphere, I have now heard from Jason at ZeroBoutique, and he's filled me in on the situation.

Apparently my order was "royally shnazzled" - whatever that may mean - but shirts are apparently on their way.

At the end of the day, I'd still rather give my hard earned cash to a slacker printing his own t-shirts than line the pockets of the corporate fuckwits hawking their tawdry sweat-shop wares at me whenever I venture onto the High Street.

So here's hoping they fit after I've waited five months for them...

Our ego would like to claim that it was all thanks to us, but who's to really know how everything went down. Still, four months is a long time to wait for anything you order off the internet. Because of that, we still remain reluctant to list anything from ZeroBoutique again. Hope you see your stuff soon, Neil.

Update: And now in the interest of fairness, we're giving the chaps at ZeroBoutique a chance to respond...

This is Jason from ZeroBoutique and I thought I better write to put in my 2 cents worth on this issue. ZeroBoutique is a very small operation and up until 2 months ago I did everything myself. As a result, some orders do from time to time fall through the cracks and become late.

The order in question was supposed to be shipped by the end of February. That means that technically the order is actually only about 6 weeks late, not 5 months. I know, late is late, and I don't like making a customer wait anymore than they like waiting. I did stay in contact with Neil several times and was aware of the problems with his order. This week he wrote me 2 or 3 times and I was too busy to get back to him right away - I guess he (justifiably) got pretty frustrated by the whole process, as would I. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I work very hard to ensure people get their orders complete and on time - I have filled over 600 orders successfully since Christmas alone - but occasionally things like this do happen.

I hope you won't judge me or my line based on this one customer's experiences - though if you did I guess I couldn't really blame you. Anyway, I'm posting 13 new designs on the site today. Anyone who places an order and mentions the code "preshrunk" will get a 10% discount on their PayPal balance. Sorry again Neil!

I know how hard things can be for small businesses that are taking off. I've worked at my fair share of startups, so I have an idea of what they're going thru. I feel sort of bad for raking Jason and the rest of the ZeroBoutique folks over the coals, especially since they were nice enough to give us a discount code for our readers. How's that for blog justice?

We're going to break from form today with three shirts in one post. Crazy, I know! But when we get three great shirts on one site and we can't pick our favorite one, this is what happens. MEGAPOST AHOY!

P.S. Thanks for the links, Matt. You have impeccable taste in shirts.

My inner Star Wars geek is happy to finally happy to have a better option for the Episode 3 premiere than my airbrushed Darth Maul tee. Seriously, that thing is getting ratty. Besides, I have a stonewashed jean jacket with the same art on it...

$22.00 | Credit | URL

It's likely that I'm in love with this one because I spent a good portion of my arcade money on the Return of the Jedi game. I swear, that game and Tempest 0wn3d my childhood.

I'm also a real big sucker for vector art. So this shirt has that going for it too.

$22.00 | Credit | URL

Speaking of being a sucker for vector art... This light cycle tee makes me sorry that I used all of my erection talk up on yesterday's Monkey tee. *shrug* Oh well. I guess I only have myself to blame for that one.

But Tron, man... Damn, that's a dope shirt.

$22.00 | Credit | URL

Andrew Bell is teh awesome. I don't know him personally, but his art gives me a porno class erection. As big as a baby's arm holding an apple, I says. Veiny, throbbing and slobbering at the mouth like a rabid dog...

Jesus. What the hell am I saying? I've turned something as innocent as a t-shirt about a monkey into something much much worse. I need to see a doctor and figure out what's wrong with my head.

I mean, seriously. What the fuck is wrong with me?

$17.00 | Credit | URL

There's something about a basic tee with a lone camouflage tree that tickles my fancy. And I feel that if I pontificate on it's beauty and simplicty any more than I have to, I'll have missed the point.

$24.00 | PayPal | URL

Some of our female readers got all up on my nuts after I posted the Alice shirt yesterday. "Not every girl is into Disney and frilly pink shit," they said.

Keeping that in mind, I present you with Hold The Phone. It's a wonderful little something something for the gals who are into phreaking. New school VoIP h4x0rs and old school red/blue boxers are bound to love it. Of course, how many female phreakers are there? Twelve?

Well, uhm... I guess this shirt would be okay if you're one of those gals that talks on the phone a lot. Girls still do that, right? Most of the ones I know either IM or SMS me. *sigh* Whatever.

$32.00CAD | PayPal | URL