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 27, 2014

T-shirt #312 - Centrals 2001

T-shirt #312 - Centrals 2001

Today's blog entry features another Ultimate tournament shirt, one I designed, one featuring a Calvin knock off drawing, and a collection of content in the entry that has nothing to do with the shirt, the great sport of Ultimate, or Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame.

I have more than one of these shirts, so I can post another one. In fact, I stuck at least one of these shirts in a drawer when I made them back in 2001, thinking that a time would come that I would want a crisp, clean, new version of the awesome shirt I made. not even realizing that I would strive to do color Calvin and Hobbes for the next two tournaments.

Instead of dwelling yet again on the sport of Ultimate, making shirts, and all that, I have for you the next installment of my "WHY T-SHIRTS?" series during my supposed "hiatus" and some random links and things that have been cluttering up the old desk space and noggin. Not much rhetoric on those just fun stuff to explore.


WHY T-SHIRTS EXPLANATORY BLURB
I am doing a series of snippets that will add up to a larger whole answering the "Why T-shirts?" or "What's with all the T-shirts?" question. I have also decided to include the previous items in an ever growing list, hence the "previous items" section next.

PREVIOUS ITEMS
#1: T-SHIRTS ARE COOL
#2: I BE BRANDED - CHOOSING TO ADVERTISE
#3: It's my tattoo
#4 PRIDE AND STATUS - "It's my thing."

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS #5 -  "LET ME GEEK FLAG FLY!!"

Most people reasonably educate in music of the 1960s and after will recognize my swipe and modification of a lyric from the  song "Almost Cut My Hair" from the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young album Déja Vu, which I listed on my top ten albums of all time list in T-shirt #292 - SPRINGSTEEN.

Wearing T-shirts is exactly like Neil sings, though he sings "letting my freak flag fly." I changed it to "geek flag" for obvious reasons. This has been what wearing these T-shirts has always been for me, though I have come more out of my geek shell in the last 312 days than ever before.

It's a geek flag. It's a freak flag. This is me in all my resplendent dorkness.

'Nuff said as the Great Stan "The Man" Lee always says.

RANDOM STUFF

The rest of the text in today's blog is dedicated to random stuff. If you like random stuff or glimpses into what's been pulling at my attention lately read on.

To start random stuff, I would like to share a blog entry called RANDOM UPDATE. My friend Walter Curley just posted this blog with pictures of t-shirts. What's the deal Walt? No selfies? Though COVET, especially the WONDER TWINS shirt.

Today I discovered a new web site for techie news. This may be old news to a lot of you.
re/code NET

I was drawn to Re/code after learning that Google bought the AI company Deepmind, which gave me all kinds of ideas.

If only I had stuck with computers. In 1978, I was programming on the high school Altair 8800 computer with a whopping 4K of RAM compared to the 6 gigabytes I am currently using (my laptop has 8 GB).

*SIGH*

Stephen Hawking has some new ideas about black holes. He's Stephen Hawking, so you have to take him seriously, though many physicists are scoffing.

Stephen Hawking's new theory on black holes


Some BITCH MAGAZINE fare, starting with a great comic about comics (and I may have to do more than post the link). Oh cool, I can post the whole thing...
A comic explaining the lingo people use when describing comics

"Don't be a dick!" A comic about how to talk about comics

Also, this next thing from BITCH MAGAZINE.

An Epic Feminist Edit-a-Thon Takes Aim at Wikipedia's Gender Gap
It's well known that female artists are underrepresented in art museums, but what about in our more modern and malleable institutions?
Next week, groups of artists and tech-savvy folks around the country are taking aim at gender imbalance in representation of female artists on Wikipedia. The "Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon" being held in New York on February 1st has inspired simultaneous editing marathons in 17 other cities, all focused on adding more female artists to the public encyclopedia and fleshing out the meager entries of existing women artists.
The exciting thing about Wikipedia is that it's a cultural institution with very few gatekeepers. Artists don't have to impress a curator or strike it big at a fancy gallery show in order to get their work on the site. Instead, they or one of their fans just has to have the tech skills to create a Wikipedia entry. The huge number of people adding information to Wikipedia should theoretically mean that the ever-changing encyclopedia can present a more accurate and diverse portrait of American art than, say, the Met. But while anyone can edit Wikipedia pages, surveys show that the vast majority of people who actually do edit the site are men: less than 13 percent of people who create or change Wikipedia entries are women. 
Read on at the link above...

a photo by krystal south shows a woman wearing a shirt that says "never log off"

The photo (above) comes from multidisciplinary artist Krystal South's internet-exploration project Identify Yourself: IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

What has identity become, now that our social selves are laid bare online? How is identity established within the form-fields of Facebook? Our connections are tagged and bound to our profiles. These digital networks have not only transformed our societal structure, they have also re-shaped our internal selves.
Read more from IDENTIFY YOURSELF. Awesome STUFF.
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updating from 2023 with new content to make up for unavailable content.

The Psychedlic Experience short film 1965

Introduced by Timothy Leary with music by Ravi Shankar.


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"The Psychedelic Experience" a beautiful 1965 short film that was so controversial the filmmaker had to leave town



"The Psychedelic Experience" is a beautiful short film created by San Francisco art teacher Jean Mayo and filmmaker Allan Willis in 1965. It includes contributions from Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and music from Ravi Shankar.

The film won a prize at the San Francisco film festival that year, but caused such a big controversy because of its title, that Mayo had to move to another town. 

This film begins with Timothy Leary saying "'Psychedelic' means 'mind expanding.' The psychedelic experience is a voyage inside. A trip into the countless galaxies of your own nervous system. For thousands of years, philosophers and poets have told mankind that there's more inside. That the reality of the external world is only one of millions of reality within the human nervous system."  Leary's visionary ideas are more important now than ever before. 

From Youtube:

"in 1965 san francisco art teacher jean mayo (now millay) and her good friend film maker allan willis set out to make a short experimental film and used materials close to hand to help the effects (soap bubbles etc…) but once completed it needed a name so they came up with 'the psychedelic experience'….Timothy leary/Ralph metzner were asked to contribute along with music by ravi shankar and his always brilliant tabla player alla rakha…it won a prize at the san francisco film festival held that year & then the troubles began….hippiedom was in its infancy and certain people were upset with a film named 'the psychedelic experience' so mayo had to leave her job and move along to another town!..when you think that two years later it was very passe to mention such words!..rare to find for many years and unseen it now makes an arrival here for your viewing pleasure.."



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David Bowie - Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)

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Also, see I GUESS I KNOW ABOUT ORIGINAL SIN for bloggery committed in regards to this rare and unreleased Bowie cover.

Listen: Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde's Band Snowbird: "All Wishes Are Ghosts"

Listen: Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde's Band Snowbird:


And lastly, Bully's Comics at Blogspot is doing a 365 Days of Kirby Tech, as in the far-out and freaky technology from comic books drawn by Jack Kirby.

Here's two bits. This stuff is great!!

DAY 9 -The Growth Machine






DAY 10 - Reed Richards' Heat Image Tracer






Read more at the links.
Classic stuff.

That's enough for today.

Almost caught up. One outstanding post to finish and than getting ahead as the hiatus was designed to help me do!

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.

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 53 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.27 - 20:09