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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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.

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):

It’s getting harder and harder to solo your way through World of Warcraft. The older the servers get, the more guild-play and raiding affect the economy and practices. At this point, no matter how much of a loner you are, or how odd the hours you keep, I highly recommend finding a guild to join just for the few little conveniences it gives you–non-antagonistic people you can ask questions of; folks who are more likely to help you if you need it; having a guild-name under your character name (which makes people less likely to assume you’re a gold-farmer). It is possible to find one of the few laid-back, non-raid-focused, friendly guilds out there if you look in the right ways–but that’ll be the subject of another post. Today it’s time to adapt my old blog posting (of more than a year ago) on solo play in Warcraft to today’s issues.
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