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

So, I’m sitting here splitting my efforts between trying to get facebook.com to believe me at all about a wastedinc page and reminding myself to not go out and kill everyone I encounter. As of now, that’s roughly fifty/fifty. Very, very roughly.

The problem is that facebook.com is in a word retarded. Or, in two words, developmentally disabled. Though, since we’re talking about an IT App, it’s DevDis, which is kinda like one word again. I’d put DevDis on a shirt; but it might be too soon to expect anyone to get it, since I probably coined that about ten seconds ago.

Maybe not. There’s a DevDis.com out there already; though it probably doesn’t mean the same thing. Call it a homonym.

Here’s what I’ve got done at facebook.com to date:

Wasted, Inc.

Wasted, Inc. on Facebook

So, not much.

The idea, I guess, is that you click on that and, if you’ve got an account at facebook.com already [nice of them to assume], you can elect to become a fan [nice of us to assume] and help to spam spread the word about Wasted’s little fanpage thing at facebook.com. Which I’m led to understand is supposed to be helpful in some way. If perhaps only to facebook.com. Who can guess.

Anyway: that’s set up. Apparently. So, if you’re into clicking on things to become a fan of them, knock yourself out. If not, that works too; I’m sure three or four billion other people will become fans in no time, giving us a majority and allowing for the Wasted, Inc., Industrial Complex New World Order. Because—let’s be real—as the new oligarchy, it’s not like we could really make matters much worse. Free cookies for all, or something.

We’re working on the benefits in the WIICNWO scheme; but we’re leaning toward free cookies, as of now.
—Gremlin