We’ve been working a bit invisibly on a few things here; nothing quite seemed important enough to leap in and write about before it was finished.

Now that there’s less left to get done, I could probably mention a couple of things.

Hunter’s in the process of moving her stuff within CafePress.com from her own store into /wastedinc. Since CP are still charging annually for premium stores, but not still making it particularly worth it to have one, it’s kinda dumb to have two of them technically competing with each other, let alone with CP’s own marketplace. The downside is that, by having a subsection within /wasted, she can’t have her own, independent theme [insofar as you can really have an independent theme at all]; the upside is that, to the extent that anyone goes to a store instead of going to CP’s marketplace, more of you go to /wastedinc than to /coffeechick. So it kinda saves money while benefiting from notoriety. Supposing that we’re at all notorious. Probably: soccermoms don’t seem to like us much; they tend to lock their doors when we’re around—the front ones, which aren’t already childproofed all to hell.

In other news: actual news. New enough that nothing here is actually ready for the announcement; I should do something about that in a minute. But first: the news, starting with a lengthy, pointless backstory….

Once upon a time, I started writing books. Novels, to answer the next question [half the time, when people ask what sort of books I write, I tell them I mostly stick to the rectangular ones; sometimes, they even get that; other times, there's drool, which I'm not into]. And that was okay. The job’s simple, if not easy: string together about a hundred thousand words in a some way as to make sense in the end, and go.

In going, there’s the bothersome part of submitting them to a publisher. Sometimes that works out; sometimes, it nearly works out, but they want to let editors molest them into boring cheese, at which point you have to explain how little you care what they want; sometimes, over time, they just give up and let you write whatever you want, since they’re getting way more money than you per copy anyway.

That’s the old system. We kinda hate the old system.

More recently—and I’ve been testing this process out for the last decade or so under a name not attached to publishers—it’s become possible to ignore the publishers and submit books directly to PoD joints, kinda how the shirts and skateboards and things work. And that’s good, in that I don’t have to care what publishers think; I wasn’t going to anyway, but there’s less hassle when even the expectation is removed. The downside…technically, there are two downsides. One’s that, annoying though publishers and editors and other little helpers might be, they’re not always wrong. Selfpublishing increases the chances [technically already present] that a released book will contain typographical errors, gaping plothoes, nonsequiturs, and whatever else could still happen even after publishers and editors looked things over. Selfpublishing also increases costs.

With, like, a real publisher, any book I write should end up at Safeway for maybe US$8.99 these days; the same book in hardcover at Borders might be thirtysomething, and then probably on sale for X% off. Going through a PoD, who won’t be preprinting a million copies, the prices get a little higher; hardcovers I’ve selfpublished average about forty bucks each; softcovers, though more like trade paperbacks than pulpy Safeway books, average twentysomething.

I suppose it’s not a lot of money. To be real, any game I pick up for the XBox is sixty bucks. But, at a time when no one can be bothered to read more than 140 characters in a row, forty bucks for a book could be called a bit much.

Enter EBooks. Which of course is a lie. I’ve been doing EBooks for a while. Long enough that, for example, I released one for free in 2000. It was in fact a prequel to a series I’d written through the nineties. Because it was merely an EBook [that's already sounding a bit funny], I uploaded it and allowed anyone to download it and read it for free. In part because the other nine books weren’t free, and, in a perfect world, people reading the prequel would want to keep going, spending up to $360 at $40*9 to get through the whole story.

The EBook was in PDF, which is and was a bit clunky. It has its uses; readability isn’t really one of them. Also, it’s now back offline, for that and other reasons.

More recently, amazon.com developed the Kindle. Overall, this is good news. A simplish, cool, EInkbased EBook reader. Fine by me. Probably. Eventually.

I gave it a couple years to figure itself out. Then, starting a couple weeks ago, I began retrocoding books into the sort of hypertext the Kindle ultimately relies upon. The hypertext in question is of course Version Stupid, allowing only for the most basic tags available in about 1994. But it’s a start. And, probably, the Kindle will improve as new versions are released, with any luck allowing for slightly more advanced tags, possibly including inlined images and things.

But that’s later, and not really the point.

The point…there are two points.

First: books I, or anyone, have written and submitted and allowed to be printed as rectangles are by contract limited to the publishers who publish them. Those contracts don’t mention Kindles, or in most cases EBooks at all. So, as with selfpublishing, there’s no need to argue with anyone about what will and won’t be in a novel.

Second: as not with selfpublishing, books aren’t forty bucks. They can in fact be as little as ninety-nine cents. For example: that prequel thing from 2000 is $0.99 through the KindleStore, as of now.

I wanted it to be free again. But amazon.com won’t let me do it. And it’s kinda fair, I suppose: the action of downloading a book across WhisperNet costs them a bit of money; so they get a [largish] percentage of the 99¢ you’ve got to give them. Incidentally, as I understand it, the Kindle itself costing three to five hundred bucks, they’re technically selling the things at a loss, assuming they’ll make up for it now that you’ve got to buy books for at least a dollar each. So things could be worse all around.

So. Storytime’s over. Here’s the news: 97D, the prequel to the next nine books in the saga, is retrocoded and uploaded and available. It’s ninety-nine cents, because that’s not really up to me; then again, it lasts longer than anything on the DollarMenu and might even have a little more substance. Also, if you haven’t got a Kindle [yet], amazon.com have free emulators for your computer, your iPhone, or your BlackBerry. So go grab the thing and start reading, or something.

See what I did there? Hardsell. Or, at least, as close as I ever really get. Unless you count the really cool subliminal advertising I’ve designed to make those who don’t spend ninety-nine cents to get this book begin to smell bad.

Coulda got the Nobel for that. Instead, I’m using it to make a fraction of a dollar per copy. My priorities are weird.

Other priorities include retrocoding other books for the Kindle. And playing videogames. Mostly I’ve been playing videogames.

I’m not sure what I’ll set the prices at for the other books. The average for KindleBooks seems to be around ten bucks each. So maybe that. Or, maybe, to see what effects it has, I’ll release them for $0.99, then kick up the price a month or so later; I think that’s called, like…I have no idea what that’s called. It’s like a lossleader, but different. I suppose it’s called a sale; but that seems too obvious to be a real marketing term. So it’s probably more like an Inverse Preliminary PricePoint…Syndrome…Thing.

Note to Self: Hire a marketing department.

Supplemental Note to Self: Strike that; go back to the videogames for a while….

Don’t worry: I’m largely joking. But I got an EMail yesterday from zazzle.com mentioning that the stuff we’re outsourcing to them is now doing well enough to kick /wastedinc up into their ProSeller status.

Which means…erm…apparently, I can do something with this thing:

So…there: it’s official; we’re all, like, ZedPro. Go us.

I guess it’s kinda cool, in that it sets us apart from housewives thumping jpegs of their cats onto TShirts to order from themselves. I’m just a little creeped by the whole Professional Status thing: it means we’re actually kinda doing something; and that can only end in expectations from people.

Also weird is that everything is dated for 2009, when we apparently hit this ProSeller mark [stands to reason: 2009 was when I started actually sending things to zazzle.com, though the account's been there for years now], but the EMail wasn’t sent until…6pm Friday [as supplemental proof of something, I had to scroll down past more recent alerts about people buying shirts; you see how hard my job really is]; I’m not sure when we went all pro, or how much downtime elapsed until we were told about it.

But, again, it’s something of a good thing, connotations aside. I’m just a little freaked whenever I’m accused of being professional. But I’ll get over it: I’m gonna take the rest of the day off to skateboard through the snow now….

This is quick and simple: I was looking at Black Shirt Required over a couple minutes of downtime [we've been working on a few things here, not immediately involving shirts], and I realised that I was missing a few obvious things. So I got them crammed in there.

I’m sure I’m still missing a few obvious things. But I can probably figure out what they are while I’m sitting here staring at whatever I’m not doing instead….

Reworked the site. Like I mentioned I was gonna do, a few months ago. So that’s done now.

In other news, I got a couple new things up at zazzle.com. Like this:

There’s other new stuff there too. Go look around for it. I’m kinda in the middle of bugtesting the new site you’re looking at right now….

Somehow, to date using zazzle.com more than the other PoDs, I totally forgot to get the Swyndlechicks online. That’s fixed now: zazzle.com/swyndle.

I actually got started a few days ago, with skateboards; now I’ve got them on shirts too. I’m kinda looking at the rest of the productmix, trying to decide what else they’d look good on; but this is a good start, I suppose.

Technically unrelated, I got the facebook.com URL switched over to facebook.com/wastedinc todayish; feel free to Become a Fan over there to get us closer to, like, taking over the world.
—Gremlin

Okay, so, in fact, it’s probably not; it might even be a close second; but, it’s late, and there’s no changing that.

I know: I was being good about adding stuff approximately daily. The key word there being I, since it’s pretty much just me here. Apart from Me, there’s also Myself and I; but Myself mostly plays videogames while I just sit around drinking coffee all night. Me, I’m pretty much on my own. And I’ve been doing various other things lately. Games at facebook.com, sure; but also I’m banging out a new novel here and…coffee all night, and…okay; you know what? Fire me. See if I care.

First though you might wanna look at this:

Click for to Trade Money to Get

Yeah, I know: October the twenty-second, it occurs to me that I need one of these. Just, in general. Like I care what day it is. But everyone else might; so I really probably shoulda done this back around August. Then again, there’s plenty of time to grab one for Halloween 2010, I suppose.

Also, I’ve been uploading what we’ll call a smattering of watchmen/smiley/whateverthedamnedthingsarecalled. I had a bunch of them back at CP already [I didn't trust CafeOppression to get that the Prozac Smiley was, like, legal; so, while it's a year or two old, it's also kinda new], so I ported them over to zazzle.com, now that I prefer it.

I’ve been porting a few other things—however quietly—since I stopped telling everyone what I was up to here; look around and you might see a few of those, too. Meanwhile, I’ll try to remember to be less quiet about doing these things; analysts tell me that’s an important step toward receiving large bags of cash. So, maybe I can outsource that, or something.
—Gremlin

I’d have had this up yesterday, when I made it; but zazzle.com just updated their whole site, and a bug slid in to prevent me from adding anything for at least six hours: twonk

Technically, I coulda added it to cafepress.com/wastedinc, but I can’t trust their legal team to spot the difference between infringement and parody; so I didn’t. Also, I coulda added it to printfection.com/wastedinc, but I didn’t because…that actually only just occurred to me; maybe I’ll do that later.

Not that I hate twitter.com, by the way. I wasn’t thrilled with it in the beginning [I didn't even register an account right away], but, if you can look beyond the hourly exploits of Demi Moore’s kid husband running around and trying to make Paris Hilton look reserved, there’s some good stuff there. Same for facebook.com, which I’ll probably get to once i guess which font they’re using for their logo.

Maybe I’ll look into that today, too; I am after all a day behind now.
—Gremlin

EDIT: That wasn’t so hard….

feeb

—G

So much for adding a new shirt every day. I’ve got a decent excuse, of course.

First: Friday night, I had this thing I had to do. And that became Saturday morning, and eventually Saturday afternoon, and further eventually I managed to get tired after all. So that’s where Saturday went.

Then I woke up with a really sinister headache, and didn’t get rid of it until pretty much now.

So, there you have it. I was sick that day. Or something.

But that’s okay: Hunter had a fun idea on the whiteboard, so I stole it. That’ll be funny in about three seconds. Because here it is:

See? Because it’s about stealing intellectual property and—nevermind. It was funnier before I started in with the typing.

To prolong the funny, of course, I deigned to add a Copyright © Wasted, Inc. [wastedinc.com] tag along the bottom. That way, I can sue anyone reading the shirt without having bought it first. Those are the rules, right? So, you’re hereby advised to go throw money at me by buying your own: ©riminal
—Gremlin

So, I’ve been at this for a while. The whole TShirt thing. Long enough that we used to have shirts silkscreened [curiously, I'm wearing one of the silkscreened ones at the moment], in a time before Print on Demand was really considered, let alone perfected.

Then we got the PoD thing, which…sucked. For about five years. It seriously sucked. To whatever extent things were technically commercial and industrial, it was still largely a matter of ironing plastic printouts onto fabric. And it just sucked.

Then came direct printing, a few years ago. And it sucked less, though not to the exclusion of suction. Finally, nowish, it’s working pretty well. So that only took ten years.

That’s almost completely irrelevant. All of it. If you’ve been speedreading the first couple words of each paragraph up to this point, you didn’t miss much. Yet.

In the years we’ve been outsourcing to PoDs, I’ve run into a few thousand other people—from reasonably famous professionals to housewives—doing the same thing. And, being something like goaloriented, not a few tended to resolve to come up with a new shirt every day. Which sounds like a good way to develop a catalogue, until you remember that even those who are actually pretty good at this, if uploading 365 different shirts in a year, will inevitably upload 362 which totally suck.

Which I understand, and embrace, and don’t care about. So that’s not quite the point either.

Except that I happened to think about that tonight, for some reason. And that didn’t work for me because, while thinking that—hey—I could probably strive to work up a shirt a day to rebuild volume now that I’m concentrating largely on zazzle.com, I didn’t actually have anything to work up today, specifically.

But there’s the slushpile. Neurologists call it my brain; but what would they know. The slushpile is this vast junkdrawer of unrelated ideas for shirts and novels and whatever. Most of the stuff in there is either too dumb to waste time trying to do [incidentally, ninety percent of the time I waste the time to do it anyway, I'm wrong and everyone loves it], too hard to do at all, or both.

But, I had nothing better to do. So I grabbed a tricky one, in the sense that it’s actually graphical instead of just typed out, which has always seemed a bit stupid, but which I’ve kinda wanted to do for years now. So I did it. And it looks like this:

As for its stupidity: within ten minutes of mentioning that I’d done it at facebook.com, I was collecting thumbs up over it. So: wrong again. Which is maybe good in this case.

So, there. Making a different shirt every day. For two days now. I need a vacation.
—Gremlin

Not really. Well, kinda. On various things. Many of them videogames. More in the sense that I’m playing them than writing them. But also I’ve been doing some actual stuff. A little.

Funny is that it occurred to me that, for all I’ve been staying up for about sixty hours in a row, sleeping for two or three, and doing it all again: I’ve really only put a couple hours of effort into doing anything I’m really supposed to be doing at the moment.

So, with that in mind, I took a break from taking breaks and did something.

If you can’t make it out, the shirt over to the right reads, obviously, I’ve Been Working 24/7 Lately, then followed in smaller print by Twenty-four Divided by Seven Is—What—Like, Three and a Half Hours?

Since it, you know, is.

I’ve never understood people writing out 24*7 as 24/7. Or why they don’t just go with 168. Is it because they suck at math? No wonder they spend so much time working. You could lose them for hours on breaks alone. Okay…a bottle of Coke in the soda machine is a dollar…and I have three dollars…so the Coke would be 1/3…and that’s…thirty-three cents….or nine bucks…I dunno; wait here: I’ll go ask Bob….

And Bob’s probably got this shirt on. Because Bob’s really cool. See what I did there? Peer pressure. You will consume…you will consume….

Anyway: there. I did something. Now I’m either gonna go back to playing MafiaWars at facebook.com, or just write a PHP game I won’t get angry at.
—Gremlin