Of course, that was easier said than done.

The week before the mind-numbing cataclysm that was the Lost finale, I bought two shirts from the Spatula City of hip t-shirts: Threadless. The first, entitled The Horde, meets the criteria of being new, but fails at being colorful, despite all those little red zombies. The other, 108 Objects from Flight 815, suffers because it is still too soon after having my brain ripped out of my head by the flagrant stupidity of the Lost finale to be worn any time soon. And it also fails the bright color test. Bonus complaint: I’m just not a huge fan of Threadless T-shirts.  They feel chintzy and have a weird cut better suited for starved hipsters than a normal guy like me.

So I moved on, this time to English shirt shop Last Exit to Nowhere, a collection of clever folks who make vintage style logo tees that pay homage to genre movies. It was a tough choice, but I settled on the logo of KAB Radio 1340, the radio station from John Carpenter’s The Fog. It is fantastically geeky and obscure (note: mine didn’t come with the lame tattoos). But it is also black. Another failure.

Then, suddenly, I got the email announcement that Meat Bun had finally released their summer line of designs.

I learned of Meat Bun earlier this year when I received of their shirts (a black and white version of the Four DX design they currently have in the catalog. Not even a hint of color) for supporting Kill Screen Magazine on Kickstart.com. I wanted more, but most of the designs I wanted had sold out.

I had the pleasure of meeting owner Scott Spatola at the Microsoft party at the Edison in Los Angeles. We talked videogames for a split second but he was clearly much more enamored with the tour he had gotten earlier from the club’s owner. You see, the Edison is housed in what was once Los Angeles’ first power plant and it is filled old turbines and generators that were found in the building once the owner dug out the 5 feet of mud and debris that had been dumped there. The end result is a place with a very genuine Art Deco/Steampunk ambiance. All of this was explained enthusiastically by Scott, who paused only to exclaim, “Have you seen the girl with wings? They have her dressed like the Green Fairy and she’s handing out absinthe shots!”

Clearly my kind of guy. But I digress.

Meat Bun makes brightly colored, witty T-shirts that celebrate videogames and geekiness without being painfully, well, geeky. They are fun. They are not ironic. They are not embarrassingly fanboyish. Did I mention they were brightly colored? Also, they are limited runs, so if you want one, you best be buying it now before crazy people like me buy them all.

I ordered four. When they arrived, I found that Scott had thrown in one of the out of print Shuma-Gorath tees. He had no way of knowing that I appreciate pretty much anything involving a tentacle monster, so that is awesome, but dear god, it’s black and white! Damn you, Monochrome, will I never be free from your clutches?

(Unwinnable Fact: despite being best known for its inclusion in Marvel vs. Capcom, old One Eye was originally created by Robert E. Howard as a Lovecraft-style deity in the world of Kull.)