The T-Shirt Review Update

I started this blog a little over a year ago and although I didn’t really start blogging regularly until March, there have already been 358 posts which I am pretty happy about. Google awarded my efforts by promoting me to Page Rank 4 a few days ago and I just found out that I have exactly 100 subscribers to my feed. (If you haven’t already subscribed, now is  good time to make sure you don’t miss out.)

If I keep up this pace I should have no problem doubling the number of posts by the end of the year and hopefully I can double the number of subscribers too. In celebration, I have opened a new area in the forum where you are free to post and promote t-shirts and t-shirt stores. You can post pics and links. Enjoy.

Forum: Check out my Tees

Yokohama Marathon T-Shirt

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the 28th Yokohama Marathon. To be fair though, the Yokohama Marathon is not really a marathon. They have a tendency in Japan to call anything longer than running to catch the train a marathon. The Yokohama Marathon is a half marathon but I didn’t even run in that race. I ran in the 10km race. I know that 10km isn’t very far and I didn’t run very fast but I was happy enough with my performance. I had never before in my life ran 10km in one day, as far as I know. I mean I played rugby and hockey in school and we had to do a lot of exercise in training and participate in other sporting events too but it is a little different from running. I finished the race in just under 56 minutes. I was hoping to finish in less than an hour so I was pretty pleased. I hope to get better time or perhaps participate in the 21km next year though.

At the end of the race we all received t-shirts (pictured above). They are not something I would really wear when going out, or even to the shops for that matter and it is not because I don’t want to be seen as a braggart bcause that doesn’t bother me. I am proud of my achievement and I don’t mind telling you how great I am. It’s simply because it is not the coolest t-shirt. The design is nice enough but it simply looks like a Yokohama souvenir at first glance and I live in Yokohama so that would be pretty ridiculous.

The t-shirt is nice quality though, made by Adidas and has an Adidas logo embroidered on one sleeve with the Yokohama Port Opening 150 year Anniversary mascot printed on the other sleeve. (At least that’s what I think it is. Somebody told me what kind of animal it is supposed to be the other day and I would never have guessed. I have already forgotten what he told me it was.) The blue print on the front is a simple graphic containing recognizable depictions of Yokohama landmarks.

You probably can’t get your hands on one of these as I expect the tees change each year. I am a fan of souvenir tees and used to collect (and wear) band and event t-shirts but I have been trying fairly successfully to stop doing that recently. This though is a sign of my achievement though and I am happy to have it. Next year I will show it to my daughter (she is due in March) and she will look at it and poop her pants. There may be no connection between the pooping and the t-shirt though, but I have heard that babys poop their pants a lot.

Upgrades

I know. It has been a few days since my last post. I’m pretty busy at the moment but I hope to have a few new posts soon. I am also currently working on a POD review which is taking longer than I had expected but it will be comprehensive. Stay tuned.

This is just to let you know that as of today I have upgraded my forum to the latest version of Wordpress (very sleek) and also updated the theme. Most of the changes are behind the scenes so you shouldn’t notice any real differences except for the fact that we now have threaded comments. That’s right. You can comment on other peoples comments. Pretty cool right. There might be a few bugs though so if you notice anything that doesn’t seem right please let me know. Thanks.

Mr. Rude Retro T-Shirt

This t-shirt came up in a search for Rude Retro t-shirt and I was a bit surprised to find that it wasn’t connected to me. Of course this Mr. Rude t-shirt is retro, rather than it being a Rude Retro t-shrit. I do like this shirt though so I thought I would share it. Unfortnately it is sold out. You can find out more about it at Burton.

Obama Yes We Did T-Shirts

In my life time I don’t remember such excitement about a new President and this excitement still continues today. Of course Barack Obama doesn’t officially hold the title of President yet but it is just a matter of months. I saw this video this morning on youtube and it inspired me to make a post about the new Obama T-Shirts that have been produced (some by me) since his election victory. These are all from Zazzle and there are many more to choose from but these were some of my favorites.

I think that we can thank Will.I.Am for his contribution to the campaign as his two previous songs in support of Barack Obama are surely to thank for getting young people out there to vote. You can check out those videos below.

The T-Shirt Review News

I just thought I would let you all know that I have changed the RSS feed over to feedburner and that you can also now subscribe by email if you want to be sure not to miss any posts. Just check the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

Other news is that in the latest Google shakeup The T-Shirt Review moved from Google Page Rank 2 to PR3.

After my lengthy post and review about Springleap not only was I contacted by Springleap but also by Skyrove who kindly offered to send me the Skyrove voucher that Springleap didn’t give me. I checked their map though and there is no Japanese coverage yet. Springleap also said there are some changes coming. You can see more in the comments for that post.

Also our forum is open and ready for posts so feel free to start a discussion and if you have any ideas about what you would like to see in the forum or in this blog for that matter just let me know.

Thanks for reading.

This is totally going in my blog

I received three tees from Zazzle yesterday and I am pretty impressed with the quality. After constantly hearing about the poor quality of POD t-shirts I guess my expectations weren’t all that high. Even if they were high though I wouldn’t have been disappointed. That said I was always pretty impressed with the shirts from Cafepress too. Anyway back to the t-shirts. The t-shirts I received were all from my own store. Sorry fellow Zazzlers and they looked just like they do in my Zazzle gallery. The only criticism is that the print area looks smaller in real life than on the screen. I have included photos so you can compare them yourselves.

The first one here is one of my newest creations and bears the same name as the title of this post. This is totally going in my blog. This is a line from sitcom How I Met Your Mother but I made it because I found myself saying this line (to myself) many times. It is printed on a 6.1oz Hanes Beefy Tee. I have heard many complaints about white printing on dark tees but this is exceptional. It could easily be mistaken for a silkscreen print.

The next one is my Obama 8 T-Shirt from the Rude Politics Store. It is a parody of the Superdry Osaka 8 t-shirt made famous by Beckham. Again the print is very clear and it could also be mistaken for a silkscreen print. Of course it is a simple one color design. It is printed on a 6.1 oz Hanes Tagless tee. A little warm for Japan summer. Definitely night time only.

The final one is one of my favorite designs and one that took me a bit of time. It is a flashback to my childhood when this type of image was very common for toys for young boys. Something as simple as a yo-yo was sold in packages just like this design. It’s on a lightweight American Apparel Tee.

T-Shirt Review Forums

We are happy to open up our forums here at the T-Shirt Review. If you have any questions about the t-shirt biz or just like to talk about them then this is a great place to do it. There is even a special section for PODs where you can discuss and compare various PODs without your opinions being censored. Yes, at the PODs, you do got censored occasionally. Of course we won’t tolerate personal attacks or some bad language.

I tried to install this forum a while back as some of you may have noticed but I couldn’t get the layout right. When our friends at Color Overload installed their forum I was re-inspired. I was able to fix the forum layout issues with a little help from the forum creators and voila! Here is our brand spanking new forum. It is of course empty as I write this post so please feel free to be one of the first to post in the The T-Shirt Review forums.

If you have any ideas about what you would like to see in the forum just let us know either by posting a comment below or in the new forum or by using the contact form.

Threadless Submission Ended Early

Well, after just one day of voting my Threadless submission was removed from the voting process with no explanation given. A little bit of research told me that the the reason is probably that votes over the first day were too low. Out of 209 votes the average was only 1.5 which is pretty bad considering that zero is the lowest vote and five is the highest.

I do have another submission still pendng which I think is more suitable for Threadless. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Threadless Submission Accepted

Hot on the heels of my winning (kind of) submission to Springleap I decided to try Threadless once again. This time I went to whole way and not just a critique. I submitted it to the voting and hoped for the best and luckily it was accepted. It is now in the running so please, if you get a chance head over to Threadless and place your vote.

I love the way they provide the banner that updates when people score it. 139 people have voted on my design by the time I made this post and their are just seven more days. I came up with the concept for this design about 8 years ago and jotted it down in a little notebook. I didn’t even have a PC then. It’s kind of strange to see it on a t-shirt. I must pull out that notepad and see what other wonderful ideas I had in there. LOL.

After submitting this design I remember that I had submitted a design to Threadless a long time ago as well. It was rejected though. I also have another design pending approval though which, depending on how old this post is, you can see in the top corner of this page.

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