But first… the latest book review is of Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s The Perennial Boarder. Also, since people have been asking me for more detail about the bar code scanner option over at LibraryThing after I mentioned it the other day, I promise that once I’ve gotten my scanner and played around with it a bit, I’ll make a full report/review of what I think of LibraryThing. I can tell you so far that I’m totally addicted, however, and that the 200+ books I’ve entered by hand are barely scraping the surface. I also still have to decide whether I want to use LT with tags the way some people do to keep track of those books I’ve read but don’t end up deciding to keep—some of the books I review, for example, I end up donating to the library when I’m done if I know I won’t read them again.

Now, to pass on the latest T-shirt designs. First, we’ve added one to the Caffeinated Chicanery shop; great for creative people who are tired of always finding out that someone thought of their brilliant idea first:

I hate people who steal
my ideas before I think of them

And we’ve also added to the Gamers’ Heaven shop:

“What do you mean I don’t get frequent flyer miles for gryphon flights?!” and “Invalid Target”.

We were taken by surprise when our Level 70 Mom design turned out to be the runaway success of this year’s holiday season at our Cafepress store; we made it in time for Mother’s Day this year, but apparently the winter holidays are seeing a big resurgence in love for moms. We quickly designed a Level 70 Dad design to go with it. When that proved popular as well (apparently all the cool parents are wearing gamer gear this year!) we knew we had to branch out a bit. You guys sure do keep us busy! First, for married couples, the 70 Husband and 70 Wife designs (hmm, I guess since my husband helped to come up with this idea it would probably be anticlimactic to get him one of these for his holiday present; back to the drawing board!).

[Urk. Brief pause to convince my cat to stop stepping on the mouse button. Devil-kitty indeed.]

And finally, the 70 Boyfriend and 70 Girlfriend designs:

In unrelated news, today’s book review is of the Red Lion Inn Cookbook, Third Edition. It’s one of the major books that provided the recipes for our Thanksgiving feast. Enjoy!

Afterword: You know, there’s something wrong with a day in which I get most of my major productivity done before 6 am. Not that I’m complaining about being productive, mind you.

Just a quick note to point you to today’s review, the first of the holiday cookbook reviews: The Pastry Queen Christmas. YUM!

Also introducing: the Gamers’ Heaven Holiday 2007 sale section and the Caffeinated Chicanery Holiday 2007 sale section! Enjoy the discounts on all sorts of gamer, geek, book, and humor-related T-shirts, mugs, buttons, and more!

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

Today’s question comes from Conspiracy-Girl:
I’m still relatively new to this meme so I’m not sure if this has been asked yet, but I’m curious how many of us write notes in our books. Are you a Footprint Leaver or a Preservationist?

I’ve been both over the years, but overall I’d say I’m a preservationist. I’ve had my spates of underlining or highlighting non-fiction books, usually a habit brought on by taking classes, but I’ve always returned to my habits of leaving books relatively untouched, with at most a dog-ear or two that I smooth out after I’m done writing my review. That way, after all, if I decide I don’t want to keep the book, I can donate it to the library when I’m done. Cookbooks, however, I absolutely write in. I put a rating on recipes as to how good the results were, and I note any changes to the recipe.

Yesterday’s book review was the delicious Hot Drinks by Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss. I’m making progress in The Gift of Rain; it’s somewhat slow, but has definitely caught my interest, so even my limited attention span can hang on for the ride! Last night we made cranberry-walnut scones as our first recipe from The Pastry Queen Christmas, and they were awesome.

We have some a designs up at the shops, one that we’d originally intended to be infant wear, until a clever teenager pointed out that it would work for just about anyone:

Someday I’ll use words
to express my extreme
dissatisfaction with the
current situation.
Meanwhile allow me
to scream.

I found the new Massively MMO news rag via Plaguelands. It’s kind of like a news rag on too much coffee, but that’s okay. Drop by often, check out their news posts on your favorite games, and enter all the spiffy giveaways they’re launching with (okay, so if you haven’t been there yet you’ve already missed a bunch of them, but not all!). I still have my fingers crossed on the ones I’ve entered.

Today’s new book review is of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, a fantastic Harpur & Iles mystery which I highly recommend. Also this week I’ll be reviewing a hot drinks cookbook (yum!), so stay tuned for that. This is the latest list of upcoming reviews, and I’ll post a new one soon so it won’t have so many crossed-off items on it. You might notice a sudden increase in the number of cookbooks we’re working with; this is, of course, due to Thanksgiving upcoming! Our usual guests can’t make it (a standard hazard when some work odd schedules and others are a number of states away), but that won’t stop us from cooking too much food!

We posted our first new “Adventurers’ Last Words” design in a while: “Awww, How Cute!” It seems particularly appropriate to baby clothing, don’t you think?! Somehow cute things always turn out to be so darn deadly in roleplaying games. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

*blinks sleepily and glances at the watch*

Yes, yes it is.

Here are some links to the latest book reviews:

• The Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook
• Liza Fosburgh, Soups & Stews for Fall and Winter Days
• Jack R. Nerad, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hybrid & Alternative Fuel Vehicles

I now have the ability to easily add new links to the main page of the site, so it’s being updated quickly now. I’m in the middle of reading Bill James’s Wolves of Memory and hope to have a review up for that Monday at latest.

An early-morning conversation:

Me: I’ve noticed a pattern. I’m most prone to insomnia after sugary, fatty desserts.
My husband: Another good reason to eat well and take care of ourselves.
Me: Oh, speaking of, I ran some EVE missions last night and sent you another 3 million ISK for implants.
My husband: I’ll pick up some cupcakes on the way home from work.

Actual conversation.

I deployed three new designs to the cafepress stores last night. One went to Caffeinated Chicanery, the writing-reading-cooking-humor-etc. store:

THAT
They told me I couldn’t
wear that on a T-shirt

Okay, so we might be over-fond of wordplay and irony-based humor, but I think lots of other people appreciate it too.

The other two went to Gamers’ Heaven, our gamers & geeks store:

Level 70 Dad

It’s the companion piece to our Level 70 Mom design; I noticed sales of the latter were going up noticeably as the Christmas season approaches, figured folks were buying them as gifts, and thought it would be nice to have a matching design for dads too. So I set our business partner to the task of brainstorming image designs, and then I put them together. Fun process.

The other is called ‘Boss Faction,’ and it’s for all you working Warcraft or other mmorpg players:

I’m not kissing ass
I’m just grinding boss faction

Don’t forget if you sign up for the monthly store newsletters (left-hand navigation column, at the bottom) you’ll get access to a subscribers’-only sale each month. Also you won’t have to worry about missing our special announcement later this season!

That’s it for now, I think, although I’m sleepy enough that I’m not sure.

I still think it’s a riot that we have baby-wear at Caffeinated Chicanery and Gamers’ Heaven. I never would have thought of it on my own (I don’t have children, and don’t particularly have plans for any), but it came about thusly: When deploying designs in the stores, I tend to add them to whichever items I think they might make sense on. On a lark, I added them to things like baby-wear because… well, because you never know. Then it started selling; folks bought RPG sayings on baby-wear, things like I don’t need Wisdom. I’ve got Charisma. or High Intelligence, Low Wisdom. FEAR ME! (both which, come to think of it, might be appropriate for a baby).

Anyway. When I told our business partner (who is a crazy-efficient idea man) about this, he immediately started coming up with more ideas for baby-wear. And yesterday I found this: What the Fashionable Baby of Geek Parents is Wearing this Season.

Yes, the pictured infant bodysuit is one of ours.

In unrelated news, coming hopefully sometime this week: a review of James Rollins’ “Deep Fathom” (I just finished it this morning), and some preliminary thoughts on City of Heroes/City of Villains. Okay, okay, so I’m late to the party. Story of my life.

I also finished with the reading part of “The EatingWell Diet,” but more than half of the book is a cookbook, so I still have to try a few recipes out.

Okay, I just want to make it clear that the following design is the doing of our business partner, and NOT MY FAULT:

He also sent me a whole list of alignment variation ideas to play around with this morning, so I have enough new designs to keep me busy for months. I’m thinking that you know someone’s been in the military too long when they start using PowerPoint as a means to send you T-shirt ideas!

I couldn’t help extrapolating a weird combination of the recent world-building articles and some of my most recent book reviews into Artisans in World-Building—today’s writers’ exercise.

Anyway, off to read more review bookage with me. I’m a little behind where I’d like to be on my current book.

This morning we debut the first article in a new series: An Interesting Nexus, a peek inside the head of our dear friend and business partner (under the pen name of Jervis Pax) as he pieces together bits of his own long-time campaign world. The flavor text is hardly just flavor—he truly is off in Afghanistan emailing us these things as a distraction from very real worries about getting shot out of the sky, so please keep a few well-wishes in mind for him and his family. This is a bit different from our usual style, which is very cool, and I found it really drew me in; I look forward to seeing the rest of what he sends us.

I’m also delighted to find that Photoshop is a far better tool for t-shirt designs than GIMP, particularly running on my new laptop, which is much faster than the old one. I started a new series of designs as a means of playing around with Photoshop: alignments and variations. The first three are up, but there are definitely more to come.

Lawful Neutral

There’ve been some changes over at Gamers’ Heaven and Caffeinated Chicanery that I wanted to bring you up to date on. Although we haven’t had a chance to introduce new designs over the last month due to being rather busy with web stuff, we have taken the time to update old designs with the newest rounds of merchandise available from CafePress. The most recent addition to their lineup consists of light and dark maternity shirts, and some of our oldest designs hadn’t yet had a few other shirts added either: women’s plus size and v-neck shirts in light and dark colors.

We’ve also put handful of old designs on clearance (marked by a nice handy “CLEARANCE” note at the beginning of a sub-section name), so if you’re looking for a good deal, take a peek through before the end of the month!

Finally, according to CafePress:

We’ve had lower than acceptable customer satisfaction on the Value T-Shirt. We look at many factors when determining overall customer satisfaction on products. This includes sales rates, return rates, buyer survey scores, perceived quality, and more. Unfortunately this product routinely misses the bar.

As a result, they’re making the value shirt unavailable through the general marketplace as of sometime next month; it will only be available through individual stores. We really don’t like the idea of offering sub-par merchandise either, even if it is cheaper, so we’ve already gone through and removed the value shirts from all designs (except those on clearance sale). It would be one thing if we knew those ordering the cheaper value shirts were well aware of what they were getting and that the quality would be substantially lower, but we don’t want someone ordering our shirts and being unhappy with the results. We hope you’ll understand this decision.

Adventurers’ Last Words: I disbelieve!