Category: Super Sweet Shirts

Stay Strong. Treat Yourself. Treat Someone Else, Support Small Business

This stay at home thing is really getting old. Every day is the same, the concept of time no longer exists, and we’ve never watched so much television. One thing is for certain though – every day starts with a hot cup of coffee.

I had a woman contact me last week to make her a men’s shirt design on a women’s tee. In her conversation to me, she expressed genuine excitement for the shirt, but felt an underlying guilt purchasing an item like this while millions are suffering. I totally understood her and often felt similar while buying “non-essentials.”

Being stuck in your house for this long has extreme negative effects, one of them being mental health. People deal with it in different ways depending on severity. The truth is, if you can afford to and you are fortunate enough to be able to, purchasing something for yourself is a good thing. Or you may consider buying for someone else who might be having a tough time, especially if you buy through a small business.

While corporate giants like Amazon have stopped delivering non-essential items quickly, small businesses are eager and motivated to get their products out to you as soon as possible. You are able to help yourself or someone else with a fun, thoughtful gift, while helping struggling small businesses stay alive.

I write this not so that you order from us. We are fortunate enough to be doing OK during this pandemic. I write this so that you order from any small business – both local and online.

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New Mad Max Onesie

During the next few weeks, I will be putting out a bunch of new designs.  Last week was super busy as I had put out a few new shirts and a new onesie.

After numerous requests, I have taken my Mad Max design and put it on a onesie.  The result was totally awesome:

This is now available in our Etsy Shop, eBay Store, and at supersweetshirts.com.

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Action Movie Watch: "Skin Trade"

 

Action fans, the scene has been dull as of late.  Unless you are a fan of comic book movies, the only action films you might see these days are probably from your own collection.

Last night I was surfing Hulu, taking a look at the new trailers that were added, and one caught my attention.  The film is called, “Skin Trade,” and is staring Tony Jaa, Dolph Lundgren, and Ron Pearlman.

Detective Nick Cassidy’s (Dolph Lundgren) family gets killed by gangster Viktor Dragovic (Ron Pearlman.)  Cassidy heads to Bangkok for vengence and teams up with Thai detective Tony Vitayakui (Tony Jaa) to hunt down Dragovic and destroy his human trafficking network.  Meanwhile, FBI Agent Eddie Reed (Michael Jai White) is sent to bring Cassidy home.  But as the crossfire ensues, Cassidy has to determine who his true allies are.

Dolph Lundgren wrote the script for this, starting it in 2007 after reading the news about a van “full of girls” being smuggled into the United States from Mexico.  The van was left at the boarder by the smugglers along the boarder, and all the girls inside died of heat stroke and suffocation.

The film is set to be released on May 8, 2015.

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New Bodysuit and Toddler Shirt

   If you know a wrestling fan that’s having a baby or has a toddler, this would make an awesome gift.  Let’s face it.  The toddler you know might be headed to daycare where he will be around other kids.  Let it be known as soon as you walk through the door….No Jibronis.

Like all of the products at supersweetshirts.com, everything we make is screen-printed on environmentally friendly water-based ink and 100% guaranteed.  These are now available in our Etsy Shop, eBay store, and at supersweetshirts.com.

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Two Shows Coming to Netflix That Should Get You Excited

    The over-saturation of comic book adaptations has not really done anything for me.  I’m a comic book guy.  For some reason, the whole mega-blockbuster Marvel movie thing got away from me.  I’m not quite sure why.  The actors they get are fantastic, the effects are visually stunning, the sound is incredible – there are so many reasons why these things make hundreds of millions of dollars.  I just don’t seem to care about them.  When it comes down to it, it basically has more to do with the fact that I like a good series better than a movie.  These days I rarely sit down and watch a movie, but I’ll binge watch an amazing series.  They just have way more time to tell a better story.

    April 10, 2015 will be the date that Daredevil comes to Netflix in a 13 one-hour episode series.  “Marvel’s Daredevil” will follow the journey of Matt Murdock who became blind as a kid but had extraordinary senses, fighting injustice during the day as a lawyer and at night fighting crime in Hell’s Kitchen as Daredevil.  The show will star Charlie Cox as Dare Devil, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, with Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple and Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk.

    I have to admit, after the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie disaster, I had pretty much given up
 all hope that we would ever see “the man with no fear” ever again.  Getting to see this in a 13 hour long series is going to be awesome and will hopefully breathe new life into one of Marvel’s most fascinating characters.

    The second show coming to Netflix that has me excited is “Sense8” a new sci-fi drama by the incredible Wachowskis’.  “Sense8” will follow eight characters around the world who, in the wake of a tragic death, find themselves linked to each other mentally and emotionally.   According to Andy Wachowski, “They can not see and talk to each other as though they were in the same place, they have access to each others deepest secrets.  Not only must they figure out what happened and why and what it means for the future of humanity, they must do so while being hunted by an organization out to capture, kill or vivisect them.”

From the description of this, it sounds like its right up the ally of the Wachowskis’.  They missed completely on a few projects (especially “Speed Racer”) but if they can capture the feel that “The Matrix” had, this show could be awesome.

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New Music: Smashing Pumpkins -"Monuments to an Elegy"

Monuments to an Elegy

    I was never a Smashing Pumpkins fan in the 90’s when they were pretty much on top of the world.   Being into music in middle school and through high school, you usually go through a period of pretentious snobbery surrounding yourself with others who do the same, while listening to the most obscure things imaginable.  As you approach your late 20’s into your 30’s, you tend to just not care about being cool anymore.  I started listening to the Smashing Pumpkins when “Oceania” was released in 2012 and was blown away by how incredible the album was.  From start to finish, this album was a masterpiece.  So I started listening to the older albums and the band instantly grew into one of my favorites.

   When “Monuments to an Elegy” was announced, I was really excited.  I would scour the web looking for something leaked, just to get a preview of what the music was going to be like.  Billy Corgan is a weird guy who is constantly misunderstood.  I’m not going to pretend that I get him fully, but musically I understand his struggles as an artist.  If you listen to the Smashing Pumpkins, you know that each album released is different.  They each have a different sound which to me makes the band interesting.  It also explains why the band fell off the map.  The commercial sounds of “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”  didn’t carry over from album to album, in fact, it would drastically change.  On the Howard Stern show, Corgan came out and said he felt that bands like the Foo Fighters and Nirvana were good but overrated.  He stressed that the Foo Fighters have almost mastered a formula for their music, lacking innovation.  He’s right.  Every Foo Fighters song is the same.  Even fans of the band that I know will admit that.  It all sounds the same.  “Monuments to an Elegy” is an almost sarcastic take on “Mellon Collie.”  I won’t admit to knowing this myself, but Corgan revealed that the album was supposed almost be a tribute to the commercial sound that made them famous, basically hinting that it’s not “THEIR” sound but its for “US.”  The explanation he gives is awesomely convoluted, but that’s why he’s a genius. 

    The number one criticism I hear from this album is that it’s too short.  And it is.  With that being said, the rest of the album musically is outstanding.  The drum work in this album is totally awesome.  We basically know that there are only 2 original members of the band left.  Currently playing with them on drums on the regular is Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine, but on this album, it’s Tommy Lee.  I’m not a fan of Tommy Lee as a person and always thought he was a bit lame, but on this album, he blasts these songs out!  The story on how they got him was great.  He was in the recording studio doing something of his own when Corgan and the band came in to record.  They had approached him to see if he would play the drums for one song on the album.  He of course said yes, rocked the song out as if he were playing a stadium show, and then wanted to play for the whole album.  The drum work on the album is great.

  In the end you have an album that is above average by the Pumpkins, short in length, but solid in content.  The music is interesting to listen to and the songs are catchy like their old commercial hits.  I actually got this on vinyl for Christmas and it’s super nice.  Check out “Tiberius” below.  If you like it, you will love this album.

https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/UHMSDYtxsu4&source=uds

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Thank You and Happy New Year!

    Just a quick thank you to all that did your holiday shopping with Super Sweet Shirts this year.  It was an awesome year and I hope to have some really awesome additions to the catalog for next year as well.  Remember to follow us on Instagram for promo codes, and feel free to post pics of you or folks you know wearing our stuff.  I usually hook people up with a free shirt, so do it up!

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The Sony Incident

    Oh what a world we live in.  If you haven’t been following the most embarrassing story of the year, you probably are now with the recent announcement to pull “The Interview” from being shown on Christmas day.  I’m not sure anyone saw that coming.  Or maybe you did?

    With the incredible damages that have been done to Sony, one would wonder whether or not, the “Interview” was worth everything terrible that had happened to Sony.  Leaked emails burning bridges with major stars, medical records of every employee stolen along with a class action law suit to follow, racist conversations leaked from corporate leaders regarding the president, and 5 major films leaked prematurely including Brad Pitt’s “Fury’ which hadn’t made it to the theater yet before being downloaded over a million times.  This was truly a mega-disaster.  100 Terabytes is a breach unheard of.  To cap it off, today Sony announced that they won’t be releasing “The Interview” thus caving in to ‘Terrorist” threats.   
    With some time to think about this response, I decided that I wasn’t really surprised by it.  Sure, everything about the situation is unethical, but the contents revealed from this company is alarming.  Are we just supposed to pretend that we didn’t see it?  Howard Stern stated on his morning show, that this was a terrorist attack and that it was no different then 9/11.  He said that the media should be ashamed of themselves for reporting on the hacked information, an that we should all unite together as a country and strike back at these terrorists.  He said we were “attacked.” As a listener of his show for my entire life, for the first time, I thought he sounded like an idiot.  Sure, innocent people had their personal information stolen.  But where were these comments when Home Depot and Target were hacked.  There we none.  Now that its happened to Hollywood, we are supposed to get all up in arms?  There is a reason why Sony went after news outlets and threatened them with lawsuits if they did any further reporting on the breached info.  Sure, they didn’t want everyone to know that the company leaders exchanged black jokes about our President, or they didn’t want the salaries of their workers posted for the world to see.  They didn’t want comments made about major actors being made public.  All of this is obvious and not that surprising.  Oh I forgot to mention their plan to destroy the Internet.  I forgot that little detail.
    Leaked emails revealed the MPAA plans to pay elected officials to attack Google.  The MPAA has been after the internet for years stemming back to 2011 with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a dangerous and deceiving bill to combat piracy.  Fortunately it was shut down thanks to the great internet blackout when over 7000 websites protested by shutting their services down.  Wikipedia stated that they had successfully reached 162 million people with their banner to fight this issue.  It was a legendary day for the internet that paid off immensely.  The MPAA has not given up and their lawyers are turning their focus to attacking the DNS (Domain Name System) that directs traffic across the internet.  This was one of the practices included in the SOPA bill, and now looking for a way to practice this in existing law, working with ISP’s like Comcast to see how the system could work technically.  If it does work, this could be the key to the MPAA’s long standing goal blocking sites from delivering content to the U.S.  At the same time it also threatens the basic engineering of the internet.
   A memo commissioned by the MPAA in August proposes a legal case for blocking infringing sites from the DNS entirely.  It would be the equivalent to wiping out addresses and phone numbers from a phone book.  This powerful new tool they are working on would essentially threaten ISP’s with potential secondary liability if they do not cease connecting users to infringing sites.  This wouldn’t fully block users from reaching “infringing” websites as they could still use a DNS friendly server, but it would make it much more difficult for the casual user to find the sites.  Sounds reasonable?  Think again.  A system like this would make it extremely easy for anyone to knock a site offline with a fake copyright claim.  The MPAA’s legal argument is that the DNS records are acting like a directory or index rather than simply routing the data.  If this holds true, the DNS links could be subject to the same take-down rules used to wipe torrent searches from Google links.  It would make it as easy to remove an entire website as it is to remove a video from Youtube.  Sure, there are easy ways around any of these tactics for someone that wants to use a little effort.  VPN, Tor, and typing the address directly into the address bar are a few, but the goal of the MPAA is to stop the majority of the people, people with “101” knowledge of the Internet.
    The DNS system is already a security issue as it stands, exploited by hackers to hijack websites and any authentication measures like DNSSEC would quickly run into issues under this new MPAA system.  If users leave standard DNS servers in search of pirate sites, it would essentially create an underground DNS market, exposing people to unknown security risks.
     Above all this represents another massive attack on the open Internet by an individual corporate interest group.  The hack on Sony may be looked at by some as a “Terrorist” attack, but if you look closer, it’s just a greedy corporation being outed for doing (and planning on doing) a bunch of terrible things.  I”m not sure I feel all that bad…
     Protect the Internet at all costs!

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Good Read: "When Google Met Wikileaks"

    In 2011, Julian Assange sat down with Google’s Eric Schmidt and a few others and debated technology, politics, their impacts on different societies, and the tech solutions endangered by the global network.  Each man gave their own drastically different perspectives on issues.  “When Google met Wikileaks” isn’t exactly a “book”, but more a well documented transcript of their encounter that Assange wanted the world to read.

   The reason this book exists was because of the “betrayal” Assange claims, which had happened after the two sat down.  It was the billionaire leader of the world’s largest information mega-tron verses the truth exposing Wikileaks founder. Assange states in the book that Schmidt said to his face that he is “obviously sympathetic” to Assange’s “vision.”  Schmidt then when on to write his 2013 book, “The New Digital Age” where he linked Assange into a group of “Terrorist Hackers” and also referred to the success of Wikileaks as “unfortunate.”
  
    These actions by Schmidt are essentially what prompted Julian to release this book where he skilfully discredits the views represented by Schmidt in “The New Digital Age.”  The beginning chapters of the book are brilliantly written calling out Schmidt and Google as being appendages of the US Government, successfully supporting each claim with detailed footnote after footnote.  The Electronic version of this book is way better as it makes reading this book way easier.  The large quantity of footnotes in this book would be difficult to follow in print.  The electronic version allows you to soak in everything with a simple click as run into each footnote.  Every claim Assange makes is greatly supported with actual facts and documentation readily available for anyone to go read.  Some of the details of Google’s relationship with the Government is alarming (especially the close relationship with Hillary Clinton.)  This book was a great insight into the intimate relationship between Washington D.C. and Mountain View, California.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the digital age, politics, and Wikileaks.  The transcript of their conversation was compelling and there isn’t a moment in the conversation where Assange loses a step.  This was one of the most interesting reads since Julian’s, “Cypherpunks: Freedom and Future of the Internet.”

Don’t forget to check out the Super Sweet Podcast, my new weekly Podcast where I discuss the same types of topics discussed in this blog.  Episode 1 is available right now.  Have a listen and tell me what you think!

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