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