founder's message

first off, i want to let you know that i am just one person running this store, i do not have help, but i do have ideas that i'd like to share in t-shirt form that come from being a part of the community in which these designs are referencing (the gaming and anime space).

i want to be upfront about the graphics, but i also want you to know where i stand on the situation as a whole.

nuance may be hard to sit with, and it might even push you away. whether you decide to support my shop or not is up to you, and it always will be.

i hate generative ai. to the people who spent their lives learning to draw and design impactful artwork have my utmost respect, and i will never be at their level. i'm not claiming the designs of the shirts to be drawn by me and i am not claiming to be an artist to any degree. these models were trained on the work of artists who never consented to it, and that makes me sick. i know exactly how much vitriol exists for people who use ai in creative work. i've read all of it and i'm not asking anyone to be okay with this.

so, plainly, the base characters and graphics start as ai generations. the ideas are ran through ai but they don't end there. i do not thoughtlessly use generative ai and just put whatever it spits out up on a shirt to sell. i spend hours in photoshop cleaning, refining, and tuning every design before it goes anywhere near a shirt. i also use a lot of free assets provided by adobe if i feel like it will improve the vision of where i want the design to go. every concept comes from a lived experience and writing down ideas that i think would be funny or relatable on a shirt. the words, the compositions, the coloring, the editing and cleanup are done by me. after i complete each design, i run them through reverse image searching to the best of my ability to make sure nothing is being directly copied from any artists work. if i do not find anything, i proceed to sell the design on a shirt. (if you ever find something that shows a direct copy from someone else's work, please send it to me, and i will take down the design)

if you haven't stopped reading, here's the rest of my story.

i was a professional product photographer. i shot e-commerce product photos for major brands, smaller family-owned ones, and did the technical editing behind them. unfortunately, most businesses figured out that ai does it cheaper and is "good enough". i lost my job because of ai, so you might be wondering "why do you even use the very thing that took it?"

i begrudgingly started using it because i needed to build something that can't be taken away from me.  i started this store while unemployed, in desperation of trying to earn money to support my partner, me, and our three pets. because i lost my job, i had no steady income (still don't) and was trying to find something to generate money as i was relentlessly denied work for months in black hole of a job market. my experience lives in a field ai just ate. i'd like to survive by any means necessary, even if that means using something i fucking hate. (i was unemployed as of april 2026, opened this store in june after working on it for 3 weeks, and have only found work as of september.)

as hypocritical as i may be for running this store, i am never going to be fully at peace with using ai and i am not going to pretend to be.

buying a shirt here doesn't take anyone's job. it gives me hope that i may be able to one day fully support myself without the hand of ai threatening to take my job away. and to be frank, i'm losing money selling these shirts, but it genuinely makes me really happy when someone buys one and tells me they enjoy it.

if this store were to ever make enough money to afford it, i would love to pay real artists for furture designs.