Never Too Old to Fret
It's been birthday central here at Fretshirt HQ this week as our manager had one of those events that makes your age end in a '0'.
You know, those where the first couple of times you feel all grown up, but from then on just seem to make you old.
Naturally, I'm not going to tell you which one it was - although I may have just given you a hint - but it did set our designer off to create some new designs.
Okay, so it doesn't take too much to set a designer off - anyone who knows one will attest to that - to a point where you have to be careful what you say, or else they'll end up designing something around it.
Still on this occasion he's done some very cool designs, although we had to stop him at two, or else he wouldn't have been able to do all the other new stuff we have lined up for you lovely fretters.
Speaking of which, we have some new designs added to the Mashinky range which have been duly approved by the wonder that is solo indie developer Jan Zeleny.
Both feature a wonderful trio of hi resolution captures of the in-game action from different eras of the transport tycoon game.
We start, naturally, at the very beginning of both the history of train and Mashinky, with a Steam Powered montage, that clearly shows the depth of Jan's vision, not to mention the his skill at rendering just a perfect landscape.
Then, it's into Diesel Powered times where the locomotives may not have been as pretty, but were still majestic as they ran down their metal rails through three of the four seasons depicted in the game.
Leaves brown on the trees in autumn, snow covers the ground in winter, and the sun causes shadows to lay across the land as Spring turns into Summer. How cool is that?
What else?
Well, you might have noticed, we tried a new thing on our twitter feed this week - of course you knew we have a twitter feed? - where instead of showing you four garment variations for each design - as you can see for the new Netflix Time sweatshirt to the left - we are just showing three, and the actual designs in close up.
These are the exact same files we print from, albeit much smaller and in the highly compressed .jpg format, as we figured you wouldn't want to wait for several multi-megabyte files to download before you could get your weekly fretness.
What do you think? A good idea? Or would you prefer the to see the designs depicted on mens & ladies T-shirts, hoodies and sweaters as we have done in the past? Just let us know, on twitter or here in the comments section below this post.
One thing about the comments section. Please note those of you with spam intentions, that comments are moderated, as we don't want to inflict any of your "growth" products, dodgy "financial opportunities", or, somewhat randomly, Russian Baby Buggies, (no really someone keeps trying to post adverts for pushchairs from Russia on our Contact Us page) on our beloved fretters.
Finally, good luck to all our merchandising partners who are starting - or have started - the yearly round of Trade shows.The floss dancing dog is just for you because it's cute, and you probably need to chill out.
Next week: It's feline time, as we launch our new "It's A Cat Thing" range but sadly no previews are available yet, as our designer is still "tinkering" (a technical term as I understand it!) with them.
Until We Fret Again.