When I noticed that I hadn’t posted in over a week I didn’t feel that bad. I wanted to leave the t-shirt release post at the top to give easy access to anyone interested in purchasing said torso wear. Currently none have sold, and after spending 20 minutes trying to access the page they used to exist on I’m fairly convinced that they’ve been removed. Time for plan B.

Most of my time spent in the computer chair over the past week has been spent in an attempt to purge my precious think box of e-baddies. In other words I was cleaning out all spyware/malware/viruses that I seemed to be picking up on a regular basis. Since my normal regiment of scans would clean them, but not entirely resolve the issue as they would reappear shortly after, I went in search of outside help. That search landed me at BleepingComputer and put me in the hands of the more than competent techs there. Although in retrospect I kind of feel bad that I didn’t go with LockerGnome, as I have some prior familiarity with them through TWiT, but I suppose it’s just as well. After a few days of back and forth posting and a lot of downloads/scans/deletions I was able to free my system from the clutches of evile. Added to my security arsenal is the free version of Kerio Personal Firewall, Ewido Anti-Malware, as well as the cuddly web-based Panda Scan. The illusion of safety is a wonderful thing.

So today I decided that I wanted to make t-shirts. I’ve always wanted to learn how to print shirts on my own, but recent time, money, and space constraints have prevented me from making headway. Months ago I had looked into different online shirt printing companies trying to find what they could and couldn’t do, and for the most part none of them did much in the way of screen printing, at least not affordably. In my aimless browsings today I rediscovered zazzle.com, a site that I already had an account with, and noticed that they’ve started printing on dark colored shirts. Since I like my duds on the darker side of gray I decided to set up shop and finally made available to the public my Fueled by Vice shirt:

Available in black, red, and other dark colors.

Update: Apparently my shirt doesn’t fit certain content standards of zazzle.com, or that’s my assumption by their refusal to display my products publicly. More as it develops.

Further Update: Thanks to Hoj I was able to determine that in order to view the shirt you’ll have to sign up for an account (which you have to do anyway if you want to buy something, and if you’re concerned about spam I’m been signed up with them for probably around a year now and never received any), and the important part is that you set your account rating to PG-13. Then you should come back to CleverNinja.com and click on the image links above. Now I hope i can figure out how to get the referral link working.

And another Update: zazzle has crushed my hopes and dreams. I had sent them an email questioning if the content was inappropriate before reading the post from Hoj, and as I feared this only brought unwanted attention to the shirt in question. The good people at zazzle were kind enough to delete the fueled by vice shirt for me, as it contained “drug references”. What I’d really like to know is if alcohol and cigarettes are also considered drug references, despite being legal as they are, and I also wonder if the cigarettes can freely be interpreted as whatever the powers that be wish them to be. I’d rather not edit it as I do so love the design but can’t seem to find anywhere else to print it without buying 25 shirts. I’m so torn.

So upon recommendation from friend Charles I went to secondlife.com and signed up for an account. What is it? Well it appears to be another “virtual” life, a Second Life if you will, intended to create an online community that will allow you to meet people from across the world and maybe even form a bond with that special someone. It’s setup a lot like other MMORPGs, only the graphics and animations are horrible, the controls cumbersome and action or gameplay of any sort is non-existant. So what’s bad about it? Well unlike other MMORPGS that have a monthly fee, this one offers the option of allowing you to pump extra Real Money into the game in order to buy Linden Dollars, or Bucks, in order to buy virtual Material Wealth so you can Pimp your Crib in an attempt to lure unwitting preteens into your gameroom dungeon and cyber-molest them. So it’s pretty much your run-of-the-mill chat room with some extra interactive options plugged in.

To quote Charles: “After running around in there for like 20 minutes, I’m quite confident that it is just a giant virtual playground for perverts.”

I received no such impression myself, as I never managed to meet up with my motley crew of Charleston Chickenwing and Quincy Hornpipe. My character modification took far too long, as I was going for a very specific look that for some reason isn’t popular enough for the game to have had a default outfit already installed:

So Sullivan Duke adventured through the newbie zone, past a furry playing chess with a man in black, attempted to buy a piece of land to call his own but found the interface counter-intuitive enough to inspire indifference. So he found a snowy incline to lay claim to, and with his last remaining willpower managed to summon forth the only thing he could think of that reminded him of home: A big green pipe.

So download Secondlife, give them either your cellphone number or credit card account number in order to verify your account, and have as much fun as I had.

I’d just like to call attention to the worst Magic: the Gathering card I’ve seen in recent memory:

I don’t know, maybe there are a lot of legendary spells now. Maybe they changed the rules to make it really hard to pay for those spells using conventional methods. Or maybe I could replace this card with a normal land, or even a Sol Ring, which would cost mana but could be put out and used on the first turn. Rare my ass.

The real purpose for this post is to attempt to insert a google ad and see if what it displays is in some way relevant to my page content, as I’ve little luck thusfar in getting the one on the bottom to do anything aside from show Hurricane Relief ads. I’ve done lots of reading on the AdSense faq, and still haven’t been able to clarify exactly what it considers to be ‘frames’. WordPress is broken up into several files using php templates and I’m wondering if that has something to do with the troubles. So I’ve decided to install the handy-dandy Adsense Deluxe plugin for WP 2.0 and start troubleshooting away until I can get some real ads to show up. I had minimal success with an ad in the sidebar which would occasionally display a block of ads about friendship, but became a little disenchanted when it then moved on to medicine for menstrual pain. So we’ll see how this works out.

And last but certainly not least, there’s a new Pulp Heroes up and ready to confuse you. I plan on migrating that puppy on over to the CleverNinja side of things, but not before I figure out if there’s a way to keep some affiliation with comic genesis, or gain some affiliation with another webcomic community. Perhaps it will just end up mirrored on this site.

So Steven Long’s Cow Defender book, featuring the comedic adventures of a somewhat psychotic serendipitous superhero – and most importantly my art – is available for purchase here. I’ll have to warn you to not purchase it too quickly as a solution to the stretched look of the cover is currently underway, but wait a day or so and that will hopefully be fixed. It’s definitely a good fun read, and I was glad to be able to help out with the project as it signifies my debut as a paid, published illustrator. Even a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step.

Edit: The stretched cover thing has been resolved after a lot of screaming at Josh’s mouse and some cursing at lulu.com. Also, someone may have purchased two copies with the distorted cover before we had time to edit. To whoever that was, you guys are suckers. Hope that the edit goes through before that goes to print.