Wizard's Blog

ECA logo

The Entertainment Consumer Association is a non-profit organization that lobbies for gamers’ interests.

Throughout history the establishment has always been afraid of new things that they don’t understand – from the waltz to rock and roll.  These days gaming is the new kid on the block and I’m sick of the media and politicians ignorantly blaming it whenever some lunatic shoots someone.  With the ECA around there’s finally someone to counter the rhetoric and hyperbole.

In addition to this, I found out from an article on Kotaku that one of the membership benefits of ECA membership is 10% off of gaming purcahses on Amazon.  As membership costs $20 and games cost about $60, you break even if you buy at least three games a year.  So not only can you help a cause that’s dear to your heart, but you can effectively do it for free!

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Spreadshirt logo

I found out about a cool t-shirt website called Spreadshirt from one of @gandalfar‘s tweets.

Like several other t-shirt stores, in addition to the pre-designed shirts available you have the option of designing your own.  You can upload a design of your own or design a shirt using the existing designs and text or just change the colors on an existing shirt.

Unlike any other t-shirt store that I’ve seen, Spreadshirt lets you create your own store containing your designs.  They make and ship the shirt, collect the money from the customer etc. and you get a commision.

My store is here.  I’ve created one shirt so far:

I’ve wanted a lion rampant shirt for a long time and couldn’t find one.  With Spreadshirt I was able to design the shirt I wanted and as a bonus I can make it available for other people to buy and make a little extra money.

Spreadshirt also gives you the ability to include your store in your website, but it uses iframes so I there are problems with cookies so I’m not using it.

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I humbly beg your kind forgiveness for the deafening silence that has been coming from my blog for the last two months (holy crap).

I got completely out of the habit of posting, and since I quit Plurk I started twittering a lot more.  I’ve found that twittering all day means that I’m left without any topics that I want to blog.

For example I had found that I was always tired, even after lots of sleep, so I decided to cut caffeine completely out of my diet.  I didn’t even mention that here but gave progress updates at least once a day on twitter.

If I hadn’t been twittering the experience it definitely would have given me enough material for at least one blog post.

Has anyone else experienced this?  I only have so much energy and so much information to communicate – there are so many options these days that either I only use one method of communication, or use them all a little or just freeze up and don’t communicate at all.