This week...

...is progressing much more quickly than I would prefer. Darn TIME, advancing without asking my permission...

GenCon prep is shaping up... or, more to the point, it looks like I won't need to bring much more than I would for any other H.A.T.E. event & 5-night hotel stay.  Probably won't be able to get any new props built/decorated in time, though, which is sad.  We'll see how things look come Monday, I might be able to do some last-minute painting...

Most of what I've been up to has been what I tend to call "invisible work" - research, paperwork, organizational fiddling, etcetera - which can be a lot less satisfying than building a new Thing, but is nevertheless important.  And sometimes pretty cool!

For instance, I should be able to accept credit cards when I vend now!  Much of Friday and Monday were spent researching mobile card readers, which was... rather circular.  The main contenders, PayPal Here and Square, are VERY comparable, so trying to find a clear winner was pretty fruitless.  Overall, I think that PayPal might be the better choice for me, partly because I already use PayPal for online orders, but there are a few more identity-proving hoops to jump through to get it, so I'm going with Square for now, just to make sure I get the required gadget in time for Deeplight.  Plus, it has an offline mode, which is pretty handy, and it never hurts to have a backup, especially when you're talking free gadgets!

Also on Monday, I ordered some really cool new business cards!  Which, since I want them for GenCon (to hand out to folks who ask about my garb), qualifies as some fairly major procrastination, but hopefully they get here in time.  They're just UPS-printed cards (one day I'll be successful enough to commission a custom die from Raky Press, the printers of my first set of cards), but I did a ground-up design on them and I'm really proud of it - one side is just the tentacle-face-me logo, business name, and a one-sentence blurb about what I'm about on a plain white background, and the other is teal with a neat list of ALL my websites and my email.  They're pretty darn sweet, hope they look half as good in person!

Also also Monday, I picked up a new commission!  Okay, so I'll admit that the fact that said commission will be delivered at the next Deeplight event all of two weeks and a very large gaming convention from now is a little intimidating (especially since I couldn't get the fabric I need until last night and won't be able to get the trim until this weekend at earliest), but I've got this.  That I'm guaranteed to pass at least ONE piece of merchandise into the hands of a customer at that event is enough of a stress reliever to counteract the intimidation.  Plus, it's for a Viking-style tunic, which is an innately awesome-looking project that's also a really easy build - I'll probably be able to knock out all the structural stuff on it this afternoon, which will be a nice change.

In other news, it looks like the blog has reached a point where a I get a tiny trickle of pageviews during the week or so between new posts, which gives me some warm fuzzies.  This is a thing that is going rightly, albeit in a tiny way.