read it?

One of the things I've enjoyed most since the acquisition has been the chance to do a lot more reading. You see, it wasn't enough to tell people "Oh, I don't own a TV" -- now I can say that not only don't I own a TV, but I also read for leisure. I suspect this is why people don't talk to me for very long at parties.

On top of that, I'm deluded enough to think that some of you might care about what I'm reading (see the sidebar, you'll need to scroll down a bit). That, and I made these icons

and had nowhere else to use them. The links go to a personal Amazon Sellers account, but if you get duped into clicking one of the book titles and end up actually buying the book from Amazon (I wholeheartedly recommend their "used & new" section for this) I'm donating 99% of everything I get to BLAST Kid's Cancer.

Granted, it probably won't be much anyway, but you're nevertheless probably asking your monitor "Why the hell not 100%?" and muttering something about me being a cheap wanker.

Well, back when we first opened our Cafepress reddit store we priced all of our items at cost. In fact, we promoted the fact that it was zero profit -- Cafepress wasn't going to be giving us much in the way of profit even if we did bump things up a bit and we just wanted the free exposure ("someone was going to pay us to wear our logo?"). We figured not marking up our gear was the least we could do.

We didn't sell a single item. This went on for a couple months. Pretty dejecting stuff when you're the guy who draws the alien, ya know? But we had a fateful meeting with Joel Spolsky who said that he'd be happy to support us by buying a shirt -- if it were actually supporting us.

"Just make it 'minor-profit reddit gear' or something, and people will buy it to help you guys out."

And he was right. So I figured it'd be worth trying to apply that same lesson here -- hence the 1%. Besides, as Jason Calacanis once said, "everyone's gotta eat".