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FYI all you Bombadil fans out there: All That the Rain Promises will be available on vinyl starting July 24. You can pre-order here now if you need the next month or so try to find a record player to buy. Here’s a sneak peek, compliments of Bryan and Instagram:
Be particularly impressed by the bone-colored vinyl. Be somewhat less impressed by the album art and insert by yours trulies. Order now! Hello all – the fire sale is OVER. Thank you everyone for testing out the site and getting some wicked awesome deals at the same time (one of you managed to get a Makers Tile game for just $4. $4!! You notice I didn’t advertise this before the sale was over…). All of the troubleshooting helped out a lot, so thank you thank you thank you. Here’s hoping we don’t run into too many more problems in the future! And, just because I can, here’s a picture of a donkey doing a split:
Tah-DAHH!! Your keen eyes and bear-trap intellects are requested. After setting up the new e-commerce site, we need to test it. And test it you will.
We are offering 50% OFF the first 15 orders. Use the coupon code FOOFAH, cross your fingers, and if it doesn’t work, please email me right away (I tested it myself, but that doesn’t always seem to work). Aside from the coupon, though, I’d like to hear about any problems you might have in the process, or any things that don’t seem to make sense. **NOTE** The one thing the coupon won’t work for is subscriptions. Those, it turns out, are already dirt cheap. I am aware that one of the sort options is “By Manufacturer”, but apparently that’s a non-negotiable with the software. And doesn’t it make us sound like we’re bigger and better than we really are? I thought so. So go to it. Enlighten us, while you enlighten your wallets (but not as much as you would enlighten them if you had stopped by yesterday). (And oh, ps, the first person who spends more than $50 gets the FIRE SALE original. To, um, hang on the table at your next yard sale to bring in the teeming hordes.) UPDATE: Though we would still appreciate it if each of you spent $50 (or more, or much more), we think it only fair to tell you that Nifer K. has just won the fire sale illustration. Thank you, Nifer, generous of spirit (and wallet). Hello all. We have been alluding to exhaustion in recent posts without really getting into the details. While both of us have been busy, Robbi gets the prize for working overtime. Between getting up on Friday morning and going to bed on Saturday night, she got exactly 27 minutes of sleep. On one hand, I think it’s amazing that she’s still alive. I simply can’t stay awake for more than 20 hours, and I have never in my life done the proverbial “all-nighter.” But Robbi, like the other Behrs, is capable of heroic stretches of backbreaking work without sleep or nourishment, most likely gleaned from decades of summers working on the tundra. Robbi’s task for the last week or so has been a complete overhaul of the Idiots’Books e-commerce site. Fearing that an avalanche of visitors from Slate might crush our feeble WordPress e-store plugin, Robbi has been working with a third-party vendor who will host our store and help us with troubleshooting. From now on, when you buy something from us, you will go to another site for a moment to do the actual shopping and purchasing. But Robbi has been working hard to make sure that this new site looks and feels like the same old idiotsbooks.com you have come to know and love (you may sob gently into a Kleenex if you are feeling so moved). To do this, she developed a series of snappy, energetic banners to delight and beguile you. I love what she came up with, and can’t resist sharing them with you now. When you get to the new store, you will be cheerfully greeted with the this artful pile of words:
Meandering over to the “books” link, you will be dazzled in the following fashion:
Hovering with alluring portent atop the “subscriptions” content you will be thus persuaded:
In search of elegant, yet humorous t-shirts or snappy new threads for your ill-mannered infant, you will first be forced to reckon with:
Upon reaching the “posters” page, your eyes will be visually assaulted along these lines:
If your constitution is stout and you make it to the “prints” page, your grim reward will be encountering this:
And if you make it all the way to the “other stuff” link (as only the most devoted shoppers will), you will be treated to some minor profanity and a rather exciting typeface (see “strange”):
In other words, this post intends to save you the trouble of actually visiting the new store (and is, therefore, a terrible idea, in the marketing scheme of things). No matter. Just know that if and when you do go to the store, it is a sturdier and more functional (if somewhat less lovely) place than it was before. Her long work done, one would think that Robbi would be happy. Friends, she is not.
Because she is a devout realist with a tendency to low-grade pessimism, Robbi is convinced that the world will end before the Slate piece is published, and all her work will be for naught. Or that the piece will be published but not a single person will be interested in buying a single thing from us. In Robbi’s glass-mostly-empty worldview, the surest way to secure hundreds of orders would be to have kept the old e-store as it was, at which point it would have crashed, and Robbi would have been disappointed for another reason. What I’m getting at is that it’s hard to be Robbi. Almost as hard as it is to live with her, I bet. I have spent the past three days putting together a server that will host our gajillion pictures and be a backup system for our sundry Idiots’Books files, which are going to be priceless as soon as we hit the big time. Actually, I should say I have been trying to put it together. Using this handy-dandy diagram from my right honorable genius geek friend Varzeus, I felt well-equipped to figure out whatever was headed my way:
This diagram unfortunately did not prepare me for the following, however:
So today I am calling it done. Everything’s getting backed up, and for the most part it is doing what I want it to, but some of the things it touts as its great benefits I just can’t figure out. I am giving up on calendar sharing, for example. I’ve decided it will take much less time for me to walk over to Matthew’s calendar whenever I need to look at it for the rest of my life than it will take for me to figure out how to make one server calendar we can both work on. Perhaps the right honorable Varzeus will help me, but I believe I might have overtaxed him with the diagram request. (He has, BTW, suggested he might design a whole website like that, in MacPaint. I would be all over that.) So now that I’m done, I thought I would finally turn my attention to writing those final few thank you notes that I’ve been meaning to write on behalf of Kato (the lazy SOB) for presents he got when he was born (did I mention he’s lazy?). It’s seven months in, for god’s sake. But there is sad news: I have lost the list. The list that had who got him what and whether I had written them yet or not. I swear, I only have a few left to go. But if you are one of the few who hasn’t gotten a thank you note yet, I profoundly apologize. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s on the front, and it says, “… but only because I have to” on the inside. And, of course, “Thanks for giving me stuff. I like stuff.” He’s older now, but the onesie still fits (figuratively and literally). So, thanks to you folks who haven’t received a proper card. If you still are due one, please write me, and I’ll send it to you. I promise. It only hasn’t happened yet because I also suck. (I would, of course, be remiss to forget to mention that the onesie is an Idiots’Books creation, available here for the bold, here for the even bolder, and here for the bold and thrifty.) |
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