Deirdre Saoirse Moen

When someone edited John Scalzi’s Wikipedia article to include that he was a “universal blame accepter,” Scalzi tweeted:

http://twitter.com/scalzi/status/561142828315996160

Now you can have your very own. IN ANY COLOR YOU WANT.

Except of course you want the RED SHIRT.

You know who to blame for that one.

Here’s the full art:

Buy this shirt at Redbubble.

Note: Redbubble uses American Apparel for their shirts. Available there in Unisex t-shirts, scoop neck, unisex tank tops, women’s t-shirt, v-neck, racerback tank, baseball 3/4 sleeve, long sleeve, organic t-shirt, organic women’s t-shirt, sweatshirt, pullover hoodie, and zipper hoodie.

Or Buy this Shirt on Zazzle which has more clothing options including things like toddler onesies. For the same product (i.e., American Apparel options), they are more expensive than Redbubble.

Sneak Peak at Another Shirt

I’ve had this shirt done for a week, then came down with the flu before I could make all the ancillary art for other products. So, here’s the t-shirt.

It’s Always a Full Moon on the Internet at Redbubble. Here’s the Zazzle Link.

Credits

For the Scalzi shirt (the other being a NASA photo and type only):

Fancy victorian frame from Cruzine Design.

I kept two of the typefaces Peter used in the frame design: the arched text is Goblin and the plainer text is Patua One. The swooshy type in the middle is Desire from Borges Lettering.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

It’s been almost six weeks since I first posted it, but the Ellora’s Cave Author Exodus Support Thread now includes 29 authors, several editors, and a cover artist.

Each of them have spoken out in some context about Ellora’s Cave.

If you’re looking for books to get you through the holidays (or to get other people for the holidays), they could use your support.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

…than it actually is.

When I first heard that people were going to be able to shop over the web, I had some expectations about what that experience might be like.

I was reminded of this when I was standing outside my London hotel waiting for the Hotel Hoppa bus, and saw another woman who had the same obscure brand of handbag — and, having never seen an ad for said bags, I wondered how she’d found out about them. In neither of our cases was it through advertising.

Here’s what I expected, back in the day, that I’d see when I logged into a place like Nordstrom:

1. New clothing arrivals in a size that would actually fit me, with lines that didn’t ship in my size not shown at all. What do I see? Only clothes that don’t fit me.
2. New shoe arrivals in a size that would fit me.
3. Focus on what I mostly buy, which is accessories, in lines I actually buy from and (given that there are photographs of these things) colors I’m actually likely to buy. Show me something in a color you know I like, right? I’ll be more drawn to it. Isn’t that basic psychology?

One of my peculiarities is that I don’t buy black or brown unless it’s something spectacular (or spectactularly funny to me, in the case of Woot t-shirts). I own no black or brown shoes, for example.

So let’s take a look at Nordstrom, who presumably knows what I’ve bought from them, and have a look at the home page when I log in, shall we?

1. Upper left: I don’t wear a watch. I have no philosophical objection to watches, I just fractured my wrist some years ago and wearing one is still painful. So I don’t. They know I’ve never purchased a watch there.
2. Upper right: I don’t wear heels that high, and I don’t wear black shoes. At all. They know this.
3. Lower left: While I do occasionally shop for make-up, this is not a line I purchase. They know this.
4. Lower right: While I do love Nordstrom’s cashmere, the piece shown isn’t one that would fit me, and the pieces I would buy aren’t shown at all. They know this.

Below the fold is much the same.

How much does this draw me in? Frankly, it says that my interests aren’t at all relevant to what the company wants to push on me. No doubt this is why I’ve felt less and less of a draw to Nordstrom over the years.

Now, you might think I’m singling them out, but this is an endemic problem. It just happens to be an endemic problem with a company who has enough information about my purchase history to do something more meaningful.

In focusing on what companies pay them to push, they ignore their real customer and their real customer’s real needs. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the phrase (which I wish would DIAF) “must have.” It’s a phrase for the intellectually dishonest and lazy to use, in my opinion. It’s about telling the sheep what to do, not about providing what people actually desire or need.

What I’d actually hoped for in the internet shopping experience was something completely different: a way where one could find more indie-made goods that would be of interest based on some kind of social networking that is not based on advertising. In other words, based on what people you know and who have similar taste to yours actually like that you may not know about yet. Learning by networking based on similar aesthetic sense.

How you do that without big money from advertisers corrupting the process is left as an exercise in futility.

While that’s my grand utopic vision of internet shopping, it remains an impenetrable problem, apparently. Etsy’s as close as it gets to good, and it can be a really long way from good.

Every time I see someone trundling around with a Louis Vuitton logo bag, I wonder: is this something they’ve only been told they should like? Or did they spend that money because they thought it would get them status with other people? Do they realize how much status they lose in the minds of other people? I have nothing against LV bags per se; they do make fine leather goods. However, they are not the only company making fine leather goods. Also, I see relatively few of the “no logo all over” lines like Epi than I do of the ones that are walking ads. Worse still are the people carrying fake LV bags.

Frankly, every time I see someone carrying anything that’s a walking ad, I think, “Really? That’s all you think of yourself? That you’re a billboard for someone else? That you paid to be a billboard for someone else? Show some self-respect.”

I thought web commerce would be more about being more individual. Instead, it seems more about the homogenization of tastes. Homogenization is fine for milk.

The handbags we had in London? Ella Vickers. Probably not your thing, but, hey, the world’s a big place.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

I thought I’d bring up some small Hawaii businesses I’ve run across on my two trips to the big island. The first two you can only enjoy from the island, but the rest you can enjoy almost anywhere.

First, two tour companies.

1. Lava Ocean Adventures does ocean tours to the volcano (and other points out of Hilo). It was an awesome experience last year. (This year, lava wasn’t flowing when I was there, so I skipped it.)
2. Vavoom Volcano Tours does the obvious volcano tours, but also can customize day tours. Lori’s great.

Food companies.

1. Volcano Winery is Hawaii’s only full-grape wine producer. There are a couple of other companies on Maui that make pineapple wine, etc., but this company grows grapes. They do offer two blended wines, though. They are less than a mile from the entrance to Volcanoes National park, so the name is no exaggeration. I tried four of their wines, including two that aren’t on their site. I’m not a wine person, but they seemed decent. The Mac Nut Honey wine (which has a champagne yeast, iirc) is very light and delicate.
2. Hilo Coffee Mill is one of the non-Kona coffee growing regions of Hawaii, and one of three on the big island (the other being Kona, which includes both North Kona and South Kona, and then there’s Ka’u, which is east of Kona and west of Kilauea). Because of the rainfall, it’s the mildest coffee, but it’s also significantly less expensive than the premium Kona coffees. (Example: Kona coffee at Peet’s, which is a very nice select grade, runs $50 per pound. Hilo Coffee Mills’s coffee runs $29.) I have had some truly awful roadside Kona coffee (that I needed to cut with TJ’s coffee to improve it), so I can say for sure that not all Kona coffee is created equal. In essence, Hilo coffee is shade-grown simply because of the frequent cloud cover. Because of the difficulty transporting and logistics surrounding manure and compost from other farms in a high-rainfall area, this is not an organically-grown coffee if that’s important to you, but they do not use pesticides in growing, just non-organic fertilizers. I am incredibly impressed with their pineapple coffee. Usually, flavored coffees are an excuse to use up the worst beans, but that’s not true in this case. It’s a subtler flavor than you’d expect, and a nice addition to the coffee. Really. None of their coffees are bitter, so if you like coffee but not bitter, you might give it a try. Our pound of the pineapple coffee is almost gone. Sniff.
3. Aunt Phyllis’s Macadamia Nut Butter with Macadamia Nut Honey. Three ingredients: mac nuts, mac nut honey, and sea salt. This stuff is incredibly addictive and I am now out. I will be getting more in a few weeks. They do mail order (it’s $10 a jar plus shipping), but don’t have a web site set up. If you want contact info, let me know.
4. Wao Kele honey (link is to a story and video about them, but they don’t have a web site) makes great honey. I do have a PO Box for them off their labels if anyone’s interested. The lehua honey is particularly nice.

Other.

My favorite discovery by far is the funny and gregarious guy who runs Filthy Farmgirl Soap at the Hilo farmer’s market. He definitely has great marketing and labels. Product names range from the extremely tacky to the merely quirky, each with its own unique label and ingredients. He advertises “no yucky stuff” and means it. Most of the soaps are vegan; a few are not (e.g., the Goat’s Milk Chai soap we picked up for my mother-in-law). I picked up some of the Filthy Geek (aka Hyper Mocha Minx) soap (chocolate and fair trade coffee) for ourselves. Unlike most of the other small businesses listed in this post, he’s got a shopping cart and takes PayPal.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

You know, I never should say anything like I don’t want to join a cult in jest like I did here, because the universe is a perverse place.

I’d narrowed down my luggage choices to four, and I’d have been happy with at least three of them.

I went and looked at spinners and fell for Tumi’s smaller international-sized carryon. Yes, it’s larger than I wanted. Yes, it’s hard-sided, but it’ll be useful for larger planes and stuff. But, more importantly, there were two other factors: I thought it had better corner crush support than its competitors, and I found it on sale.

I wasn’t super-crazy about any of the colors, but, hey, at least they have colors. So I picked the “breast cancer awareness” pink multi.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Bernie Sanders has a point: US taxpayer-funded museums and their gift shops should make a point of selling stuff made in the US. Not all the stuff, of course, but as much as possible. Especially when we're talking busts of US presidents.

In a few weeks, I'm going to do my annual consciousness-raising and ask people wearing "patriotic" items around July 4 where that item was made.

Note that I have no particular issue with stuff made elsewhere, just if we're shopping on price alone (as people often do) and not thinking about the larger picture, we're making the local situation worse than it already is.

"Dear Angry Birds, I already paid for you. Now you flood me w ads? Top grossing app not enough? Now you're Greedy Birds. Nate" (link)

"Dear Angry Birds, I even gave you a shout out on CASTLE, and ads slowing my game is how you repay me? I await your response. Nate" (link)

Exactly.

I'm reminded of an Animaniacs routine where Dot went to a perfume shop and was looking at typical perfume product names (except, unlike Obsession, Opium, etc., the ones in the cartoon were, so far as I know, fake).

Dot says, "Do you have anything for beginners?"

I can't help but think of that every time I see a perfume ad.

Anyhow, here's the story on BoingBoing.

Actually, I'm not all that fond of receiving any kind of calls, truthfully.

My usual, when faced with marketing phone calls: "Please remove me from marketing phone call lists."

When charities call, I tell them I never ever ever donate to any charity that calls me on the phone. And I never do. (Conveniently, this avoids scams. It also encourages them not to pass along my name. I'm still pissed off about a one-off name/email variant given to Planned Parenthood where I'm getting a bunch of spam....)

I have simply discovered that people trying to drum up business over the phone these days aren't worth the bother.

Earlier this year, I ordered a single bra from Lane Bryant when that particular model wasn't in the store. This was a sufficient customer relationship that they felt they could call me about marketing opportunities -- and I'd have to call them "to opt in or opt out of future calls." (Which is it? I don't believe for a moment that they set up this infrastructure for a one-off, but one of those two phrases is dishonest.) I was in the car, hadn't set up the bluetooth mic, so I let it go to voicemail.

Eff that.

I asked them to cancel my account. I whined about it on Twitter.

I can still buy underwear in store if I want.

I also re-upped my number on the National Do Not Call List.