T-shirts for nerds

I recently started watching Game of Thrones, the smash hit show based on A Song of Fire and Ice by George R.R. Martin. I was looking around for T-shirts based on the show, to declare to the world my new fandom, when I discovered two things: People are really creative these days, and I now hate websites that only sell shirts for a single day.

See that image I posted above? That's a T-shirt design. Take a moment, drink in how awesome it is. It combines the tagline from the show with the genius idea of making Ned Stark, primary protagonist, a weather forecaster. Who thinks of these things?

What's more, there's all manner of shirts on websites. Ghostbusters as Victorian-era steampunk "Spectral Smashers?" Check. Shirts as fake advertisements such as the "Save the Clock Tower Fun Run" from Back to the Future? Check. Combining two different geek fandoms to form a Portal/Dr. Who mashup? You best believe it.

In fact, that last one is today's shirt. What? Today's shirt? What does that mean?

Head over to Teefury, and you will see the aforementioned shirt. But, it's only on sale today. Teefury, along with a few other websites much like it, sell a single shirt design each day, often for only $10. Sure, you can find some of the shirts sold at RedBubble, but the price is often double or more. The tradeoff is that you can't pick the color of the T-shirt at Teefury, while you can at RedBubble.

The problem also arises when looking at the archives of what Teefury has sold. The whole one shirt, one day thing sounds pretty neat, having a limited-print shirt, until you realize how awesome some of the old, never-going-to-be-sold-again shirts are. Too bad, if you failed to buy it on the one day last year when it was sold.

Much like Teefury, Ript sells a shirt design each day, but also offer hoodies, kid's shirts, and onesies for newly-created humans. Prices are a tad high for everything but the plain shirt, however.

There's one more model of geeky T-shirt buying on the interwebs that is out of the norm: The Woot Model. Woot, a family of websites that sells things at discount prices for a day, is somewhere between the fleeting Teefury and the more permanent RedBubble. It sells a shirt each day, but keeps a backlog of the 20 most popular shirts. Every week, numbers 11-20 are eliminated in what they call the Reckoning, voted on using your wallet.

Shirts in the Reckoning are $15 plus shipping, and only last as long as people keep buying them. There is a grace period for new shirts, but chances are, they will soon be gone. In this way, a shirt featuring a binge-drinking Cookie Monster - it's milk - has been sold for an amazing 110 weeks as of this writing.

All in all, it's become easier to show off a nerd's love of a TV series, movie, book or videogame - or a mashup of any of them - with T-shirts. The artists have made shirts that will make any fanboy or fangirl laugh and don the shirt, provided you are able to buy it in time.

Now, if you will excuse me, winter is coming, and I need some new clothes.