Today’s xkcd is made from 10 pounds of awesome, wrapped in WIN, and delivered by the nurse from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Oh yeah, you know the one.
I’m on boingboingTV today
My friends at boingboing started a daily online broadcast last week, and Xeni invited me in to the studio to talk about The Happiest Days of Our Lives. We taped it late last week, and it went live this morning.
I didn’t know we were going to shoot in front of a green screen, so I stupidly wore a Green Lantern T-shirt (that ends up looking like a Nightwing shirt) and I’m not thrilled at how the profile shot lets my big fat double chin upstage me the entire time, but it’s still a fun interview where we get to talk about geeky stuff.
(RSS readers may have to click through to my blog, or visit boingboing to watch the video.)
Huntington Beach manga stop canceled.
UPDATE at noon: I just talked to TokyoPop, and confirmed that we won’t be coming to Huntington Beach tonight. I’m real sorry for the three people who were going to come out to visit, but I’ll get in touch with a store down there (anyone have a suggestion for an indie shop in OC?) to schedule something in the near future.
Our final stop on the Star Trek Manga promotional tour is tonight in Huntington Beach, as part of a teen literacy event at Barnes & Noble.
Christine Boylan, who wrote the cover story, and I will be there to sign books and hang out, and if you have copies of my books that you want to bring with you, I’m happy to sign them. I’m bringing my DS for Mariokarting, as well.
Details from the B&N Storefinder:
Bella Terra
7881 Edinger Ave. #110
Huntington Beach, CA 92647
714-897-8781
We’ll be there from 7-9.
UPDATED at 10a.m.: I’ve just gotten word from TokyoPop that our
participation in this event may be canceled. Check this post during the
day, or follow me on Twitter for more news when I get it.
some happiest days items, and paypal frustrations
My head was pounding when I went to bed last night, and is still pounding as I write this, seven hours later. I had one of those nights where I couldn’t get comfortable and woke up about once an hour,
so I finally decided to just give in and get out of bed about an hour ago.
I still have the headache that I kept waking me up all night, but I did get to watch a beautiful sunrise while my coffee brewed.
Why do I have a throbbing headache that kept me up all night? Oh, this is just fantastic . . .
I took a box of books to the post office yesterday, so about 100 of you guys who placed orders in the first couple of days can start checking your mailboxes on Friday. I understand that many readers who bought The Happiest Days of Our Lives are starting to get their books, and it looks like it’s taking about a week for them to arrive. If you’ve gotten your book and had a chance to read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, either in a comment, an e-mail, or via review at Monolith Press.
Speaking of the book, I wanted to clarify something about the signed, numbered, limited edition hardback: it hasn’t arrived from the printer, yet, so we can’t start taking orders. I can’t even do pre-orders, because I don’t know how much it will weigh to calculate what we need to charge for shipping. Also, I’ve encountered two significant problems with the otherwise-perfect PayPal ordering system:
1) When I print multiple orders, it’s not passing the item number through with the address and buyer information. Until we can figure out why it’s doing this, we can’t take different orders for different products. We’re working on it, but the FAQs at PayPal are pretty goddamn useless. If you’ve had any experience with this problem and solving it, would you let me know what you did?
2) PayPal won’t let me automatically process Canadian orders along with US orders. That’s annoying, but it gets even worse: if I use the otherwise-awesome "print shipping label" option, which handles postage and addressing and all that good stuff, it forces me to buy an international priority mail envelope for 9 dollars. Since I’m only charging 5 dollars for shipping, I’d lose money doing it that way, and I can’t justify charging Canadian customers more than half the cover price to pay for shipping. It wasn’t like this when we did Dancing Barefoot, so I asked at my local post office, and the woman told me I can ship books to Canada for around 3 dollars, but to do that, we’ll have to process orders the old way, and I still have to fill out customs forms. By hand. For each fucking one. I can’t even begin to tell you how much this sucks, and how much work it’s going to be to handle Canadian orders, now. Thank you very much, stupid intrusive government regulations that waste my time and cost me money. I don’t know why the rules have changed so much since we did Barefoot, because we could just identify the books as "bound, printed matter" back then and avoid the customs hassle. This is the opposite of awesome, and I’d love any advice on dealing with this from indie sellers who have dealt with it already.
So what do these things mean for customers? Until I can figure out WTF is wrong with PayPal, I can’t take hardback orders. This isn’t an issue right now, because they aren’t even here from the damn printer, but it’s going to be a potentially disastrous issue for me and my business if we can’t solve it within a week or so.
I’m currently working on a backup plan to deal with this stuff, but I’m sure there has to be a way to make this work using the tools I already have. If you have a small business and handle payments and order processing the way I’m trying to, would you please get in touch and let me know how you did it?
Finally, I updated the FAQ at Monolith Press over the weekend, and forgot to mention it until just now.
they can polish their medals and sharpen their smiles
Wow.
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden
video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on
Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition.
It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials
not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun
downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day,
the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from
within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast
worldwide.The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this
premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed
a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to
intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings
of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.
"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder.
In recent years, those of us who
question our leaders, want to preserve our Constitution, and believe
supporting our troops is more than a bumper sticker slogan have been
vilified, attacked, and consistently called "traitors" by this
administration, their supporters, and their allies in government and
media.
(via Propeller)
But when powerful Bush administration officials leak
classified information to further their own personal political agenda,
the self-appointed defenders of the American way of life fall
conspicuously silent.
I used to be outraged by this sort of
thing, but now it just makes me sad. What happened to my country?