Time’s been a bit crunchy today, so it’s nearly a miracle that I found time for my pre-sale post. But I got it all conquered up, so here are the Superstars!
Superstars March 2015 – click us to get to the Superstars page!
In other news, a biiiig hailstorm got us yesterday. There were little pea-sized ones and giant golf-ball sized ones, brought to us by 80mph winds. Yessirree, it went smackety-smack all upside my house for a good 20 minutes while the tornado sirens sounded throughout. And yes, there were also tornadoes in the usual places. Spring has sprung, nothing new here. I suspect that Oklahoma City’s current high rating of Top Places To Live is going to slide down the chart rather quickly as springtime progresses into summer and our famous late afternoon massacres stomp all over us as they’re wont to do. Our property values are low for a reason, people, and I assure you it has nothing to do with Toby Keith. Traffic has already gotten bad enough these last couple of years since they started screwing with the traffic signals. Stay in Connecticut and California if you know what’s good for you. If I weren’t so committed and didn’t have so much family here, I’d probably get the hell out, myself.
Anyway! Great Superstars on tap in about an hour from now… here’s what’ll happen:
7:30PM Central Time – 8PM Central Time: Sale preview. Take this time to look, read, decide. Feel free to ask questions.
8PM Central Time – start sending in your requests!
….and in case you were wondering what “Veni, vidi, meatball” means, it means I found the Mad Libs my dad and I did when I was young. I had a good nostalgic giggle at Dad’s answer to my request for an Italian word. I had misread “latin” as Italian.
In keeping with their famously cutesy ideals, the geniuses at Etsy have apparently put a precocious kindergartener in charge of revamping the category structure. Now, I find no category at all for glass of any sort, including blown glass, fused glass or lampwork. (Seriously, how dumb is this? No category available for glass pipes now that doobage is in the works to be federally decriminalized? Another tick in the Derp column for Etsy.) And this is the only significant goof-up that I noticed with a cursory glance. My particular items (lampwork glass beads) have been moved to the Craft Supplies & Tools> Jewelry & Beading > Beads > category. And this would make sense, but there is no further subcategory for lampwork, or even glass beads, or gemstone beads or pearls or plastics. Instead, there are now about a zillion subcategories for every *shape* of bead imaginable… of all things, potato beads have their very own category. Potato beads? What the hell is a potato bead? You’d think that with the gobs and gobs of money they seem to be making, Etsy could hire a competent professional when they get these fantastic new remodeling ideas. But that would make entirely too much sense, wouldn’t it? Looks like I might have to get way more serious about using better tags so that people might actually be able to find my beads on the off chance they come from the Etsy home page.
“if they seem off, you can edit them.” Oh, etsy, ever so gracious.
Yes, I know. I’ve pissed and moaned about Etsy numerous times and you’re probably sick to death of hearing about it. It isn’t that I like to complain, but I am an idealist, after all. Etsy makes drastic, nonsensical changes, and with such regularity, that I can’t simply let it pass on by without saying anything. I went to Etsy from eBay in 2009 in the vain hope that I could be a part of something slightly less corporate than what eBay had become. Most of my peers and buyers (existing and potential) had jumped eBay’s ship for Etsy’s calmer waters. I’ll admit, there’s nothing like the thrill of watching your eBay auction get bid up sky high. By the same token, I understood that, from the buyer’s perspective, duking it out on eBay for a set of glass beads had grown tiresome by then. I guess I never bonded with Etsy the way I did with eBay. eBay appealed to my punk-rock sensibilities – eBay has that down in the dirt, anything goes, “we’re not your friends”, grungy flea-market thing going for it. Etsy is just too wide-eyed and plinky-plunky, and too clean and polished to be believable. My grandpa always said, never trust a man whose shoes are too shiny…
The truth at the core of this is that it’s really up to the artisan, the maker of the items they list for sale on Etsy, to promote and advertise their shops. Etsy is just a glorified shopping cart with the added benefits of faulty logic and whimsicle f*ckery. As long as I can see Etsy for what it truly is, I won’t get too lathered up about it.
All that said, if you still prefer the Etsy experience when buying from me, you haven’t a thing to worry about. I will continue to use Etsy for specials/quick sales when I don’t feel like messing with a big Superstars sale, and I’ll continue to announce it here since that seems to work quite well. But since I’m getting more Superstars mailing list sign-ups lately, this tells me that I ought to focus more on that for a while…
SO! I’m having a Superstars sale next week! Mark your calendars for next Thursday, March 26th. If you’re on the mailing list, you’ll be hearing all about it next week.
While you wait, here’s a really cute video titled “Dogs Annoying Cats with Friendship.”
the z-beads blog 