Finished adding the BSR stuff to zazzle.com. Which isn’t true, of course; I didn’t finish anything: I just got caught up. Finishing would involve running out of little words and phrases to print on black shirts. That could take millennia.

I’m still not thrilled with their backend. Especially the part where, to date, I haven’t figured out a way to sort things. So everything in BSR is displayed in some purely random order. At least, I think it’s random. It’s not alphabetical, which is what I’d want; it’s not chronological, since some of the oldest and newest .pngs are right in the middle; it shouldn’t be according to filesize, since the images should all be the same bytecount. It’s just random. Apparently.

But it’s all added. So far. Not yet including whatever follows. Of course, the BSR stuff is templated, so it should be possible to customise any given shirt by deleting the image and replacing it with your own text; zazzle.com lack the fonts I use for the images, but I suppose it would work in, like, an emergency.

There’s some good news, of course. The ZOMBIE: eat flesh stuff is selling [some of you probably already knew that, having ordered it], though it’s all still officially Pending at the moment; hopefully that’s only because it’s a new design [well, to zazzle.com, anyway], so they’re processing it through the system; hopefully it’s not because they’re gonna give a damn whether Subway like it yet. Since the first order was on Monday—two days ago—it hasn’t really been long enough yet to suspect much of anything. I do know that printing anything onto black shirts can take three or four days back at CP, even if they’ve done it before. But, since I backed out of zazzle.com before they even got black shirts, I have no idea how long they tend to take. That they’re still in business suggests that it’s gotta take less than a week, so I won’t consider it a concern before about next Monday.

Of course, I forgot personally to order one of these things yet. I should probably do that. Just to make sure I’m okay with zazzle.com’s process. I’ve already got a few ZOMBIE: eat flesh shirts around here, from back when CP and PF deigned to print them.

If zazzle.com punk out too, given the popularity otherwise, I might have to go offline with this. Subway really haven’t got a case, which is why they failed to sue us, or otherwise do more than send a really laughable letter. But I’m hoping zazzle.com are the type to laugh at them too, so they can remain online and ondemand. Which, again, I should know more about by Monday. Though, that they’ve had something like forty-eight hours now since getting the first order to notice what it is suggests that, probably, the downtime’s just about the setup; or, you’d think they’d have taken the whole thing offline and probably EMailed me some bad news.

Though also, that doesn’t prevent things from going wrong later, if and when Subway find out about zazzle.com and start sending badlywritten jokes again. So that I suppose creates a sense of urgency: if you want one of these things, sooner might be better than later….
—Gremlin

Well, not really. CafePress.com may have declawed themselves, but they’re not entirely useless. Yet.

But, the damage done to date, and the potential for more, has got me working a bit on other places to which we can outsource these things. One of those places, as a lot of people already know, is zazzle.com.

I think I set up an account over there around 2003, looked at their backend, and their policies, and wandered away again. Things sucked. A lot. But now, six years later, while their backend still annoys me, their policies have changed. Meaning that, in something like irony, in 2003 their policy was to arbitrate markups to ten percent, which they’ve since dropped; at the time, CP didn’t yet have exactly that policy, which they’ve since implemented. So, really, the two have simply traded places. Though CP’s backend still makes more sense to me; maybe that’ll change over time too.

Of course, I’m not supposed to mention markups, my people tell me. Because, pfft: who’d expect a company to be in it for the money. It’s far easier to trust a company denying any interest in getting paid for its efforts. Actually, it probably is:

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true in itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.
—Adolf Hitler, 1925

Hitler in most matters having been something of an imbecile, I’m not sure I fully trust his analysis of the human animal. So, yeah: there’s money going on around here; surprise.

See what I did there? I just godwinned everyone who ever denied being a capitalist. Though not really, the alternative being national socialist, which happens to be precisely what nazi means. If in German. And in contraction. Also a basis for NewSpeak.

</TANGENT>

Anyway: I’ve got a few gigs of stuff sitting here on the computer, also sitting somewhere on CP’s servers, which should probably be sitting on Zazzle’s servers too. So I’ve been uploading images and setting them onto shirts and things and trying to talk their backend into believing me about categories and colours and whatever. So it’s not as easy as I’d like, but I’m making progress after all.

Speaking of progress: I did get something done fairly quickly, once I’d found newer [and arguably inferior] copies lurking in zazzle.com’s marketplace; I backed out of zazzle.com/wastedinc long enough to set up zazzle.com/siteofthelivingdead, which of course contains the original ZOMBIE: eat flesh again. Until or unless we get another perjurious C&D from Subway whimpering that our thing about mindless automatons eating human flesh is too close to their corporate purpose. I guess time will tell, and possibly be limited; Get Yours Today.
—Gremlin