FAIL Shirt

I love writing for this blog and I love discovering new and awesome T-Shirts every damn day. What can I say, T-Shirt art inspires me. However, one of the side effects of being a prolific (yes, prolific) T-Shirt blogger is that in my never ending quest for the world’s most awesome T-Shirt, I occasionally stumble upon its worst.

Enter FAIL Shirt.

FAIL Shirt is my newest blogging venture and to say it started on a whim is a gross understatement. A few weeks ago I registered at Posterous just so I could snag my URL of choice: cotygonzales. And that was that, I didn’t think I’d make much use of this new platform since I am already a Wordpress power user (yes, power user) and have grown adept to using the very simple Tumblr (check out Tumblr Trends) on a regular basis.

This all changed last Friday night. You see, for the longest time I’ve been wanting to incorporate a section on this blog that showed off some of the Internet’s worst tees and ones that I encounter in the offline world. The problem was that I didn’t know how to incorporate it into this blog. I didn’t want to clump the awesome stuff with the not-so-awesome stuff. Enter FAIL Shirt (again). That got me thinking about Posterous and how it’s so easy to use with email being the only requirement to use it. In less than 5 minutes, I had the FAIL Shirt blog up and running on Posterous. A few minutes later I snagged matching Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook accounts. And a few minutes later I purchased the domain name.

Now, whenever I see a tee that I consider to be a FAIL Shirt, I simply email the photo as an attachment to the designated email address with a brief description and BAM – it’s on the FAIL Shirt blog, Twitter, Flickr, and anywhere else I want it to post to. Posterous is so easy a caveman could use is it.

So, if you’re a Posterous user I recommend that you check out the new FAIL Shirt Blog over at FAILShirt.org (yes, the .org is in homage to the original and still awesome FAILBlog.org). If you’re not a registered Posterous user that’s OK because you can still view the blog and leave comments by using either your Twitter or Facebook account.

FAIL Shirt is not just about featuring OMG BAD T-Shirts but it’s also about suggesting T-Shirts that are less tacky than the FAIL Shirt as an alternative. OK, sometimes the alternative might be just as tacky but the execution will be much better.

I’ve also set up a FAIL Shop store! At the FAIL Shop you’ll be able to find excellent alternatives to the FAIL Shirts and in some case, exact replicas of the best FAIL Shirts. Feel free to browse the FAIL Shop. I’m using Skreened for the printing service so you can have the designs printed on your choice of T-Shirt and T-Shirt color (they use American Apparel).

And finally, if you’ve come across shirt that you think is worthy of being a FAIL Shirt or spot one in real life (snap a pic!) then please send it to FAILShirt at gmail dot com.

Thanks a million for reading and for supporting this blog! I hope to see some of you over at FAILShirt.org some time soon!

I’m not sure what the worst part about this T-Shirt is, the god awful slogan or the fact that you can see the incredibly tacky iron-on. FAILShirt!

The Tcritic To Collaborate with Hide Your Arms

According to ongoing Twitter conversations, It looks like the Internet’s number one t-shirt blog will be collaborating with the author of another hot tee blog. Karl Long, better known in the tee community as the Tcritic has invited Hide Your Arms author Andy Bowness to be a guest poster on his blog.

The Tcritic has been around since 2006 and has over 4000 subscribers according to his Feedburner stats. Although one of the most prolific tee bloggers around, he has slowed down a bit, producing just one or two post every week or so. Hide Your Arms, on the other hand has been busingly pumping out content like a mad man. Fellow tee blogger, Taddict, even pronounced Andy as the “heir” to Long’s t-shirt blogging throne.

Needless today, this is a great thing for both Andy and Karl. It’ll help to feed the thirsty palettes of the Tcritic fans looking for more content and it’ll boost Andy’s credibility in the community and help to bring in more traffic to the already popular Hide Your Arms blog.

Is this the beginning of a passing of the torch from one top blog to another? Only time will tell.