365 T-shirts - the reasoning

This blog should be sub-titled: a journal of my life in geek.

I get my geek on with things about which I am geeky: comic books, Baseball, Ultimate, science fiction, my favorite bands, books I have read and loved, and Jungian psychology to name some of the most frequently traversed subjects.

I began this project simply as a way to count my T-shirts. I own a lot of T-shirts. But how many do I have? Do I have 365? We shall find out.

When I started this blog, I thought about how each T-shirt means something to me. I bought it for a reason, after all. I set myself the task to post an entry about a new T-shirt every day as a way to simply write something every day, a warm up for writing fiction, which is my passion. Writing is like exercise. Warm ups are good for exercise. But after completing a month of blogging about T-shirts, I have learned that this blog serves as a journal; it documents my life in geek, sort of a tour of my interests in pop culture. The blog serves as a tool for self-inventory, for assessment and analysis of self and the origins of self, for stepping through the process of individuation in catalogues, lists, and ranks.

The blog also made me aware that I have some serious gaps in my T-shirt ownership, and I am in the process of collecting some new T-shirts for several of the great popular culture icons that I truly love. Stay tuned.

I was also a bit surprised that people checked out my blog and continue to check it, read it, and even comment on it. I am very appreciative of this readership. Please feel free to share your thoughts in my comments section. I will respond.

Also, please note that I have moved the original introductory text to the side bar. And now, I present to you the most recent entry of 365 T-shirts: a journal of my life in geek. Thank you for reading.
(Second Update - 1310.24. First Update - 1306.05 Originally Posted - 1304.25.)

Monday, January 20, 2014

T-shirt #305 - Michigan Sectionals 2002 (NO PLAY)

T-shirt #305 - Michigan Sectionals 2002 (NO PLAY)

Today's shirt looks just like the shirt for T-shirt #165 because it is an identical copy like all the shirts in print run with no print errors.

As I have discussed before (T-shirt #168), I have PLAY and NO PLAY shirts. In other words, one that can be soiled in the often messy playing of Ultimate, and one that I wish to keep nice and unsoiled as often soils do not wash free of the fabric.

The long and short of what I am trying to tell you is that I have two of these shirts from the Michigan 2002 Sectionals Tournament, a shirt I helped design and guided through to the print and sale stages. In my previous post, I gave Kent Elliott design credit formerly and the printing (and final layouts) were done by Artwear Apparel of Kalamazoo.

HIATUS

I am taking a partial hiatus from the blog, but I want to explain what that means.

There is no real "hiatus" from this blog. I dedicated myself to one post ever day for 365 days without interruption or break. And so far, I have not missed a day.

But what that means, "not missing a day, " is that some days I have posted incomplete blog entries. You may not realize this is happening if you follow me on Google Plus, Twitter, or Facebook. I do not post to any of those social media sites until I have finished an entry completely. But I do publish the unfinished work to the blog.

Before this month, I was at most one day behind, and I usually finished the unfinished entry early the next day. But this month, I have fallen several days behind, and I have needed multiple days to finish entries that I have already posted. As I type these very words, I am two days behind, with T-shirt #304 from Sunday January 19th (my birthday) and T-shirt #303 from Saturday January 18th still unfinished.

Now some of you may be wondering why I do not just wait and publish when I have the entry done. Well, if I have not been clear before, I can have no skip days. Also, I sometimes have an entry planned, and I have nothing else ready to go. Other times, I intend to finish the entry soon. It's only recently that I have been multiple days and multiple entries behind. So, there can be no skip days. I have to post something, and I do always post SOMETHING. I have never published a blank page. And so, I publish what I have, and I make readers wait for the finished product. I apologize if this screws with your sense of order in the cosmos.
some of the new stuff
Birthday gifts stacked
yes, shaving cakes

There is a "publish back in time" button. Okay, not really. But Blogger has a "schedule to publish" feature. One day, I discovered how to use it like a time machine. I was working on a blog entry I had not finished. And to get the "save" button, I reverted the entry to draft, which "unpublishes" it. (Is my use quotation marks growing annoying?) Since I was a day or two late with the entry, when I re-published it, the date was for the current day and NOT the day I had originally published the entry, which is not how I thought it would work.

I was devastated. I might have just screwed up my consecutive days of T-shirt publication. And then, I wondered about the schedule feature. What if I scheduled the entry to publish, but I scheduled it to publish the day before? Guess what? You can do that. Or at least I did that one time. Unless I have lost track, I have no skip days, though I have made errors in the consecutive numbering of the shirts, though this is something I can fix more easily.

I have not used the "back in time" publishing since. I do not wish to tempt fate.

Also, while I am on the subject, I learned how the schedule feature worked after it failed to work as I thought it did. I scheduled the post to publish during my surgery. Later that day, when I was awake enough, I checked and the post had not published. I did not understand. But eventually I figured out that I had to click publish, like I normally do, and Blogger will release the post at the scheduled time. Makes sense, right? I am sure there is a help page that says as much somewhere that I did not read.

So with all that long-winded explanation out of the way, which may be only interesting to me, I have standard hiatus text that I plan to post in all of the forthcoming shirts that I considered hiatus shirts (I also made a category).

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

JUST FOR FUN, here's a few comic book covers that I have saved in my downloads folder. Because what's a 365 T-shirt blog entry without comic books?

If you want to know more about the comics, click the links! Isn't that a great blog?

COVER GALLERY


There are several entries in which I have "borrowed" images shared originally on the wonderful blog PENCIL INK: Vintage Comic Book Art & Artists 1940s-1990s by a Blogger user known only as Teddy, as explained HERE. All the covers here are attributed with the links to the pages in which he shared them. If you love comics as much as I do, then add his page to your reader, subscribe, or whatever you do to keep track of blogs you like. Thanks Pencil Ink blogger. Your blog rocks!!


Amazing Adventures v3 #27 - Jim Starlin cover - today's posts


Fantastic Four #80 - Jack Kirby art & cover 


Apr 03, 2012




Metal Men #45 - Walt Simonson art - today's posts - Blogger






Superboy #154 - Wally Wood art, Neal Adams cover - today's posts


Mar 07, 2013

Hint: some of the comic covers above preview soon to be featured shirts! :-)

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 60 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.20 - 19:33