Some changes over at the CafePress end of things

[dianeduane]

For those who might be interested, we're in the middle of restructuring the Young Wizards CafePress store. Things are getting moved around, old designs are getting spruced up or dumped, and a lot of new designs are being installed to take advantage of the much wider range of products available since the store opened up in '03.

Just added: a couple of T-shirts that appear in Wizard's Holiday and Wizards at War -- Roshaun's "Fermilab" T-shirt and Sker'ret's "Will Do Magic For Food" shirt. Also, there's an entire section devoted to various sorts of Wizard's Oath material, which people have repeatedly been asking for.

(Also: CafePress is just now rolling out its API. As soon as I can figure out how, I'll install an RSS-fed box on OOA so those interested in such things can see what's new in the store without blog posts being required.)

Comments

[ellinoora.livejournal.com]

I'm in love with the "Chocolate First, Wizardry Later" mug. Plus, eagerly waiting for the "Linear time" in girly fashion.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

I'm going to do something about the "Linear Time" shirts as soon as I can get a lighter version of the design. I'm having trouble masking it correctly, so this probably means asking Ursula if she has a few moments of her scarce spare time to devote to the problem.

[posicat.livejournal.com]

I definately need to pick up one of The Oath shirts, and the tea mug.

Any chance that one of the reaffirmations from the feline wizards might end up on a shirt as well? I find those particularly inspiring for my work (Tech Support for Library software) :)

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Since people seem to be doing requests...

Any chance of getting the "Youngest Wizards" shirts on a darker color like navy? For some reason, she only spills chocolate and jelly on white shirts. Eventually not even wizardry will be able to get the stains out, let alone bleach.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Those are on the list, yup. They're a little ways down it, though, because the large text blocks are incredibly fussy to handle in PhotoPaint -- it's weak as regards paragraph text.

Working on it, anyway. :)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Black I can do. (I'm revising those designs at the moment, anyway.) I don't think CP has navy yet, but I could be wrong.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

(chuckle) I suspect my four year old is going to be getting one of the kids ones.

I *KNOW* her 15 year old half-sister is getting one.........not to mention her da.......

[posicat.livejournal.com]

I understand, I've got a cafepress shop for one of my websites too. I ended up doing the text in plain old MS Paint, and did a tiny bit of post-processing with Gimp.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

:) Sit tight for a day or three on these. The "Young Wizards are the most powerful" ones are being reworked.

[jeeperstseepers.livejournal.com]

Hi! I just discovered your blog/LJ and am very pleased.

I love the items at the CafePress store. Is there any chance at all of getting a TP (teehee) shirt/mug/poster/stained-glass window with "What's the meaning of life?" on it?

[dduane.livejournal.com]

That's on the list too. A very popular request. :)

[azurelunatic]

This is the first time I've checked out the store over there, and the disclaimer on the "Just the Oath" section almost prompted me to share my olive pit with the laptop.

[wolf-moonshadow.livejournal.com]

*Sigh* Want it all – can’t possible get it all. *repeat sigh*

Hubby is still whining that he’d like to see a Ponch T-shirt. Isn’t it interesting how similar husbands and dogs sound when they want something?

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(heh heh)

But it's strange how these things develop. I can't think how many times, over at the discussion forums, we've had message topics with titles like "Will DD publish the Manual?..." and "Have you taken the Oath?" ...and leaving aside the issue of the basic division between Reality^TM and fantasy, I hate to come right out and dash anybody's hopes of Something Happening. Yet at the same time, you have to warn them that things might not... And as soon as I started thinking about how to say that, the legalese THIS IS NOT AN OFFERING appeared, as it were, in burning letters in the air: a sort of "MENE MENE TEKEL DON'T-GET-YOUR-HOPES-UP."

(resigned look) It's a sobering thing, sometimes, to have created something that so many people wish was true. Not least of all me.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

I have a Ponch one in the works at the moment. It is the Year of the Dog, after all. :)

[azurelunatic]

(And I had most of a reply, but then other things distracted me, and Firefox crashed, so...)

And it's truly amazing that you have created this thing that so many people wish was true, and so many of them are so generally sane about it.

Even if it were true, though, there probably wouldn't be wizards declaring themselves on open forums. First, that pesky "this is fantasy" thing. Second, it would be so very tactless to effectively waltz in and say "I'm a wizard and you're not!" That would of course give rise to recriminations, backstabbing, and the discomfiting knowledge that no matter how much one had wanted to become a wizard while muttering the Oath on the sly, there was just some lacking element in there.

And third ... imagine the complications of being an out-of-the-wizardly-closet wizard in a world not used to wizards! I have this mental image of a spam-box filled to overflowing with trivial or absurd requests from people who thought that wizarding was Just Like Magic, when in fact they could solve their own problems if they thought about it and put some effort into it.

And the explanations! It's quite bad enough being of non-standard religion in an overly curious and woefully under-educated workplace. I'm not sure I could manage the sorts of explanations a publicly known wizard would have to be able to give. (I gave up on the "She eats babies!" battle, and have started to respond, "Yeah, jelly babies," which requires an explanation of Dr. Who, but at least gets the topic off religion and onto the far more intriguing field of scary gummy candies that people have encountered. The gummy hamburger is my personal favorite.)

Wizards are far, far safer under cover on Earth, I should think.

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Love the new multi-color screen on the Youngest Wizards shirts. It looks like the black is only an option for the bigger sizes? My littlest wizard is a toddler. She's grown out of her 2T, so I guess I'll be getting her a larger one whether or not I can get black...

[janeway216.livejournal.com]

Heh. After reading the Feline Wizardry novels, I have become convinced that my cat is a wizard, because otherwise I have to come up with rational explanations for the things that cat gets up to. Much easier to cock an eye at her and say, "Been on errantry again, cat?" and leave it at that.

;-)

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

I definitely read the Oath very quietly under my breath when no one was looking as a kid. It never dashed my hopes when nothing happened, because, after all, who was to say that nothing happened? Maybe the person I helped across the street the next day was the first step to saving the world. I had a firm belief that the Universe paid attention, even if I didn't quite "get" its answer.

On occasion I still read it out loud, to remind myself why I did it then. Because, you know, as a kid, you believe (or at least, I believed) that you're ready and eager to save the world, if someone would just let you stay up late enough to do it.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

I think I can do that. :-)

I know my daughter's half-sister is reading "So You Want to Be a Wizard" to my daughter right now, (so my daughter told me the last time I made my daily Qatar-to-Southern California phone call), so I suspect she'll like the shirt.

Then again, considering I suspect my daughter is a budding FanFic writer at the age of four, this may not be a good thing. Watching a Classic Trek episode before I left for Qatar, Little Bit said that Scotty should get Kaylee (from Firefly) to help him fix the Enterprise. And once when she was playing with her Thomas the Tank Engine trains, I asked her where Thomas was going. She said "Thomas is taking Harry Potter to Babylon 5!" *Faceplant*

With that imagination, I'm just wondering what she's going to come up with when the YW series gets fully intergrated into her mental database.

[azurelunatic]

Very wise decision. It probably would have saved a lot of questions to my kitten the time she decided to carry the local kid's yarn-and-bead necklace around. We probably would not have laughed so much if only she'd told us it was a spell component...