I’ve finally started to earn a semi-decent living, and I thought maybe the smartest thing to do would be to start buying things. I’m very practical in that way. So my idea was that I should start spending a ton of money on t-shirts. But where to begin? I feel like I know a lot of people who work in web design and graphic design who are super into t-shirts and always have cool looking t-shirts and things. But you can’t ask people where they get their t-shirts, or else you’ll both be wearing the same t-shirt, and as my friend John Zentgraf used to say, “Matching shirts spells geek.”

I had to do some serious investigating in my search for t-shirts. Even so, I feel that I am just on the very cusp of the cool t-shirt world. There is much left to explore, but I will give you a few places to get started, because that is the kind of person I am.

The first site I found was Tcritic.com. Dude posts every day on a new t-shirt. This site led me to etsy.com, where I bought this dope Bill Murray T, and Beautiful Decay, where I picked up a couple of other cool shirts. A few days later I found T Junction, a site listing t-shirt sales. Okay, so that’s not much. Four sites. But hopefully it’s enough to get you started, should you have any interest in following me down the path of conspicuous consumption.

I discovered that I’m pretty picky when it comes to t-shirts. I’ve learned a few difficult lessons. Number one is that t-shirts from Threadless suck. I went on a shopping spree when I first discovered Threadless, and I’m done. All of the shirts I have from Threadless fit weird and have annoying iron-ons on them that look kind of cheap and crappy after awhile. Number two difficult lesson is that shirts that are designed to make people laugh are universally lame. There are an awful lot of t-shirt companies that exist primarily to serve this m.o. like The Tee Party, Cotton Factory, and Vintage Vantage, to name a few that I just found after about 20 seconds of research. I refuse to wear a punchline on my shirt. Unless it’s a giant picture of Bill Murray, of course.

And now you know! Go forth and consume!