Many things have changed since we first started selling shirts & stuff through cafepress at Gamers’ Heaven and Caffeinated Chicanery. I have a better sense of what will translate well from my screen to a T-shirt, mug, or poster. Cafepress now allows us to use the same transparent-background image on dark and light items since they have better printing processes. I have a copy of Photoshop. I have some actual—*gasp*—experience!

Now that all of these things have happened, I noted that our earliest designs were kind of… embarrassing, frankly, next to the recent ones. So, bit by bit, I’m going back through and re-working them. I’m also cleaning house on the designs that never did well. Here I will present you with some of the new/old designs that I’ve done so far; I’m starting off with the gaming shop. First, “I’m not lazy I’m just out of mana,” also known as our first runaway bestseller, which won second place in a Cafepress holiday contest based on sales:

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There we were, driving back from the grocery store. We arrived at the traffic light and saw something unusual, something unexpected: a dark blue race car. The driver wore a helmet; it sat low to the ground; and it had that cage-type design.

My husband’s first words: “Huh. A rare spawn.”

Yesterday’s book review: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerilla Marketing. The next one will be of Donna MacMeans’s The Trouble with Moonlight.

I had about five or six things I was thinking of writing about today, but I’m drawing a near-blank. You’d think I hadn’t had my cup of coffee this morning yet. Okay, one at a time, let’s see how many I can remember:

Book reviews: Today’s review is of John Izzo’s The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. I know it sounds gimmicky, but it’s actually a very good book.

I have three cookbook reviews upcoming soon: a Betty Crocker whole grains cookbook from Wiley; an EatingWell Healthy in a Hurry cookbook; and a New England cookery cookbook. I’ve also gotten four new cookbooks for review; two are filled with decadent desserts; one involves coffee drinks & desserts; and one focuses on olives and olive oil. I’m nearly done reading Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good Food as well.

Sayonara, Rite Aid: Imagine for a moment that you’re getting a prescription filled. It’s a medication that you have to take three pills of every day. Your doctor deliberately gives you a scrip for the time-release version so you only have to take it once a day, all three pills at once, so, for example, you won’t forget to take it at lunch. It’s a psychoactive mood stabilizer prescribed for bipolar, so it’s something you can’t mess around with in terms of blood level. You get the prescription filled. Thankfully you’ve been taking the medication for a couple of years already, so when you open the bottle up a couple of days later you know damn well your pills shouldn’t be bright pink.

Turns out they gave you the non-time-release version—without changing your instructions to take it once a day.

Imagine what could have happened if you had never taken the drug before and didn’t know any better, if you’d actually taken all three pills at once. Spike in blood level, possible toxicity effects… at best, without a consistent blood level it certainly wouldn’t have kept your moods stable.

Yes, human error exists at pharmacies. They can miss the very large ‘XR’ that indicates extended release (a later check of the carbon copy proved it had been on there). But any halfway-awake pharmacist should have realized that the direction to take three pills in the morning, combined with that drug, could be bad.

I was willing to deal with the apathetic pharmacists and ridiculously long wait times at our local Rite Aid because it was so close to home. I’m not willing to deal with careless mistakes that could truly screw me up. I’m now a happy customer of a different pharmacy, which is an extra 15 minute drive away, but had noticeably awake pharmacists and techs, a much shorter wait, and much nicer facilities.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: I love the game’s economy system more than that in any other game I’ve ever played. However, in order to really go nuts with it, you pretty much need a society (guild-equivalent) to work together. Each player is allotted ten plots of land (essentially) per server that they can put into use. On each plot of land you can build some sort of structure, like a plantation (which allows you to combine stored hours of labor plus money to harvest, for example, beans, maize, wheat, or hemp), a grain mill, a textile mill, a weaponsmith, a tanner, a hunting lodge, etc. The devs deliberately made these things fine-grained enough that you need more than ten buildings to really make anything useful.

One of my complaints in games like Warcraft is that ultimately, crafting isn’t entirely useful. There’s an end-state characters reach where there just isn’t much more you can craft that’s useful. Pirates put that to shame—there’s so much to build that’s constantly useful. Ships, ship modifications, ammo, consumable repair kits, buffs, etc. (special gunpowder, hull patches, and so on). With a good society you could really go to town playing with the economy and the pvp mechanics.

Unfortunately, everyone I know has already invested years into their Warcraft characters. Putting all that stuff together in Pirates would take a lot of time that they just don’t have. Nearly all the gamers I play with are adults, with jobs, spouses, kids. They don’t have time to do that and Warcraft, and since we already have our WoW guild kitted out and having fun, with its level 70 characters, the odds of them pulling up roots and settling down in Pirates—no matter how good it is—are virtually nil.

So as much as I’d like to play Pirates and enjoy the game, for the moment I’m not buying it. Perhaps later, if we can convince even a couple of friends to go with us, we’ll do it. But for now, it looks like we’re sticking with Warcraft.

EVE Online: Eve, on the other hand, is easier to get a satisfying experience out of without that active a corp behind you—simply because there are no levels, and thus it’s incredibly open-ended. There’s no worry that you’ll hit the top level in two months and say, “now what?”

I got my first Myrmidon and lost it again almost immediately in my first level three mission. I know, that’s incredibly pathetic. I blame the fact that I hadn’t had my coffee yet, because it’s a convenient excuse. (Actually, had my reflexes been slightly better I wouldn’t have lost my Myrmidon—I hit warp just a fraction of a second too late.) I went back with my tail between my legs, refused to drop the mission, spent a few days replacing my Myrmidon, kitting it out better, and building up shield skills, and went back and succeeded at the mission. Phew.

Okay, I don’t know if that was all I meant to talk about today, but it’s certainly enough for now. I’ll leave you with a bumper sticker that beautifully reflects my political feelings:

I vote for people not parties

I love the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. I really, really do. I’m utterly and totally addicted to both sea combat (pirating the merchant ships! yarrr!) and the economy. I plan to get into that in more depth soon. But today I want to talk about the pre-order thingie.

Here’s the deal. In order to encourage retail sales (which gets the game on shelves, which puts it in front of buyers, which results in more sales) SoE put out a pre-order box to retailers. This box includes a 60-minute CD of music, and codes for an early launch (two weeks before the normal start date if you just get the normal release box) as well as a couple of spiffy in-game items. The minor amount of money you spend on this box—$10—goes toward your purchase of the final game, so it doesn’t cost you anything. So far, so good.

Then everything goes to Hell. First, most of the companies supposed to be stocking these boxes had never heard of the game, much less the pre-order box program or what it meant. Most of that has been sorted out now, but there are still Gamestops and other outlets that have no idea what PotBS is or that don’t understand there’s any sort of pre-order program available before the major release date.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a lot of the boxes are missing the insert that has the pre-launch codes on it. Without those codes, the only thing you’re getting for that pre-order effort is the music CD. Buyers have been advised on the Flying Labs forums to shake boxes before buying (you should be able to hear the insert slide around) and to, if possible, get customer service to open up the box before you buy to ensure the insert is in there. Folks have reported going into a Best Buy somewhere only to find that fully half of the boxes are missing the inserts. If you get home and find the insert is missing, you’re supposed to go back to the store and swap your box for one that has the insert. Problem is, anyone who doesn’t read the forums isn’t going to know that.

Then there are the places you can order from online such as Amazon that list the various pre-order bennies in their descriptions, but also list the ship date as the major release date. And although it was stated at one point that Amazon would be shipping the pre-order boxes, when I asked if anyone knew for sure that this was happening and when, there was no answer.

So, while we kept our Amazon order in the pipeline just in case we couldn’t find the box, we decided to go looking for the pre-order box. I really want to get in on the whole early launch and so on. No luck at Gamestop, so we decided to try Best Buy. We went this Saturday.

The good news: they had a bunch of pre-order boxes on the shelves! Whooo!

We of course decided to do as suggested on the forums and take the boxes to customer service and have them checked for the insert. We explained to the girl there that many people had been finding that the boxes were missing some of their contents, and we wanted to check the boxes before we bought them. She looked at us like we were idiots and told us that it’s a pre-order box, it doesn’t come with software. We said yes, we know, we’re not talking about software—we mean the pre-launch keys that are supposed to come on a package insert. She rolled her eyes and said she’d check and disappeared into the back. A few minutes later she emerged and told us the box was supposed to be empty.

I’m thinking to myself… supposed to be empty? Why the hell would I come in here and buy an empty freaking box?

We calmly attempt to explain to her that no, as the box says right there on the back, buying the pre-order gets you early access to the game, and that there’s supposed to be an insert that gives you the keys for this. She gets angry and tells us just go buy the boxes and open them.

We leave at that point, shake the boxes well to make sure it sounds like they have the inserts, and buy them. Before we leave the store we double-check that they have the inserts in them, which thankfully they do. However, I have no doubt whatsoever that if they’d been missing the inserts, and we’d gone back to customer service to ask for new boxes, we would have been told the boxes were supposed to be empty and we couldn’t have new ones.

So the pre-order boxes were meant to encourage retail sales, and yes, they got me to go into a retail store and buy a game that normally I would have bought online. However, the experience of actually going in and buying that game convinced me never EVER to go to a Best Buy again if I can help it. And if you’re looking for Pirates of the Burning Sea pre-order boxes in the Annapolis area and go to the Best Buy near the Annapolis Mall, make damn sure you shake the boxes well before you buy them.

Skill training completed

Today’s review is of Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Soups. It’s good, but it didn’t bowl me over. Which is too bad, because it’s exactly the kind of food I could use right now.

Sorry for so few reviews, posts, visits to other folks’ blogs, etc. this week. It’s been a very low-energy week. I finally saw the gastroenterologist yesterday, and he basically told me this: yep, looks like my gallbladder is slowly deteriorating and on its way out. But until a test like the HIDA scan or ultrasound shows that unequivocally (the HIDA results were borderline), a surgeon won’t be willing to take it out. So in the meantime, we try a few drugs that probably won’t do much but might if I’m lucky, and mostly we wait until my gallbladder gets bad enough that tests aren’t equivocal and a surgeon will take it out.

As the doc said, “welcome to 2007.”

On the one hand, I’m glad to have surgeons be a bit conservative, and not want to just open patients up and take out our innards at the drop of a hat. Every time we go under anaesthesia and they open us up there’s some risk, even if the procedure is incredibly minor, like this one. However, when they know a certain set of symptoms and test results mean they’ll have to do it eventually, then I can’t help thinking delaying is mostly about insurance: i.e., they won’t do the procedure unless they can prove to insurance they had to. Which means that in the meantime, I have pain and nausea.

*grumble, grumble*

Well, at least it’ll force me to eat a very low-fat diet, because damn do I hate nausea with a passion.

Anyway, I am aware that most of the site (the regular pages, rather than the blogs) is inaccessible right now. Unfortunately I need to wait for Jeffrey to get home from work to do anything about it if it doesn’t recover on its own. In the meantime, I can distract you with the rather hysterical shirt design Jervis came up with:

Level 70 Hottie

Also, since most of our old WoW guild has kind of died away until nearly all that’s left in terms of active players are a bunch of us who all know each other in real life, Jervis decided it was time to just go form our own guild, so we could have a guild vault and all that fun stuff. I don’t know who suggested it, but somehow we ended up with a guild name of “Innocent Bystander.” I find it incredibly funny to have that under my character names!

Since I’ve been so low-energy this week I’ve been playing around in the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta. I love that game, and look forward to perhaps writing something of a review of it. I adore playing around with the economy. Wealth is your friend. Of course, going out and pirating merchant ships is an awful lot of fun too…

Oh, and I almost forgot. Apropos of nothing, you’ll need a whole box of tissues for this story.

I don’t watch most game-related videos. To be honest, I find most of them supremely boring. The majority of them are exactly what you’d expect to get from a video-maker whose true interest is gaming, not the making of videos. I.e., the focus is on nigh-meaningless (or at least fairly uninteresting) numbers flying across the screen, or showing off some supposedly ‘uber’ character, rather than on making a good video. However, there are three very notable exceptions to this that I can easily think of.

I don’t even play Guild Wars. But dang, Zack’s videos are good enough that I love them anyway! I’ve never pretended to have any skill whatsoever at reviewing anything related to movies or music; I tried it once or twice and quickly realized I should never do that again. But since this isn’t the reviews blog anyway, here’s my attempt at explaining what makes Zack’s videos so different from most of the ones out there.

For one, he has a perfect sense of editing. The movements utterly match the music. This is far and away one of the top reasons I love his videos.

One of the reasons I think his GW videos work particularly well is that the GW emotes are entertainingly spastic, particularly in contrast to the fancy outfits the characters wear, which inherently makes the videos funny to watch.

Zack also picks catchy songs that work well with video game emotes, and then he’s smart enough to stick with those emotes. So many fan-made videos end up as a bunch of ‘talking heads,’ where they somehow try to make it look like the characters present in the videos are speaking things from the songs for five minutes, and frankly that’s boring and dull.

Not that Zack is the only good game-based video maker out there, of course; of particular note is spiffworld, who makes fantastic Warcraft videos based on Jonathan Coulton’s music. If you prefer spastic and hilarious Zack is the better choice; if you like entertaining stories set to original music, spiffworld/Coulton is great:

And finally, no such list would be complete without Cranius’ inimitable “Big Blue Dress”. While it does have a bit of the “heavy on the numbers” problem, that takes a back seat to the more fun stuff. Keep an eye out for the gnome backup singers, and remember: a man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in Twill!

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.

First, yesterday’s book review was of Sebastian Beaumont’s unique and captivating Thirteen. Up next should be the Pastry Queen Christmas and Red Lion Inn cookbooks! Somehow my Amazon reviewer rank is in danger of cracking the top 1,000 (I’m at 1,007 this morning exactly 1,000 this evening), which is a little surreal since I’ve never made it a focus of my reviewing; I just cross-post brief versions of many of my reviews there so the books get a little more exposure. I can tell our Google pagerank must be recovering from the switch to the new domain name, since suddenly we’re getting lots of requests for reciprocal links from random unrelated websites.

I found the following hilarious video at Books and Other Thoughts. The costuming and detail are incredible, and the spoof is spot-on:

While that video is for the tech support weenies, computer geeks, and book nerds among you, the following is a World of Warcraft video: IRL. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to group with a jackass, and the sheer proliferation of wacky props alone makes this a hysterical view (found at Massively):

Actual conversation:

Jeffrey: I’m on a mission to find some sweet paprika.
Me: (Tells him where to find it.)
Jeffrey: That was an easy mission.
Me: Did you level?
Jeffrey: No, I need to grind some more spices.

It’s been a while since I last posted a video of any kind. I don’t even play Guild Wars, but there are some great videos for it. I once posted a link to a GW/WoW dance-off video set to MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” which was just awesome; my other favorite is the GW video set to “Beverly Hills,” put together by the same guy. He has true editing talent. I have to say that one thing I love about GW is the… enthusiasm… in the character emotes.

Anyway, I was bad this weekend and signed up for the PotBS stress test. I’m waaaay impatient about it coming out, and got my husband to pre-order me a copy for my Christmas present!