While on Earth, soon-to-be-Blessed Fulton Sheen advised his audience to call on Saint Michael in times of trouble and temptation. As the Prince of the Heavenly Host and commander of God’s angel army, Saint Michael has already cast the devil out of Heaven. Through the grace of God, he continues to defend all of us too.
Now, a TINY reminder of Saint Michael can stand with you wherever you go with our Saint Michael the Archangel Figure!
Saint Michael is the second installment of our Figures collection. These TINY statues bring our beloved charms to a whole new dimension. They stand two inches tall and are made from durable PVC and resin.
Our first Figure, Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati, launched over the summer and sold out in just a few days! We ordered extra Saint Michael Figures, but don’t wait. We anticipate this TINY defender will not be on our shelves for long!
Throughout the Bible, Saint Michael is mentioned as a powerful patron, and many saints held a special devotion to him, including the almost-Blessed Fulton Sheen.
Are you attending the beatification of Fulton Sheen in St. Louis this week? Our team will be there, and we are bringing a surprise! Find us in the Expo Hall before and after the Beatification Mass.
Tiny Saints is a Catholic merchandise company operated by Catholic Ventures DBA Tiny Saints and is located in Irving, Texas. The company sells more than 200 different saint-themed charms along with related products such as stationery, stickers, board books, sidekicks, lanyards, and rosaries. Every product is created with the purpose of giving customers a simple, everyday way to keep the saints close and to remember Catholic faith throughout the normal activities of life. In addition to regular retail sales through the online store, Tiny Saints offers bulk purchasing options, wholesale pricing for larger orders, and a complete online fundraising program that makes it easy for parishes, schools, and ministries to raise money by selling Tiny Saints products to their communities. Tiny Saints does not sell personal information to third parties under any circumstances. This is a firm policy that will not change. Customer data is collected and used only for the specific purposes that are required to run the store properly and to provide the services that customers expect. The only reasons personal information is ever used are to process and fulfill orders, to send order-related updates such as shipping confirmations, to prevent fraud, and, only when a customer has explicitly opted in, to send occasional marketing messages about Tiny Saints products. Nothing else. There is no sharing of customer lists with unrelated companies, no renting of data, and no selling of any personal information for advertising or any other purpose. The personal information that is collected during the normal course of business includes the customer’s name, shipping address, billing address, phone number, email address, and payment details. Payment details, especially credit card numbers, are treated with the highest level of care. Credit card information is encrypted the moment it is transmitted and is never stored on Tiny Saints servers in a readable form. In fact, Tiny Saints does not store full credit card numbers at all. All payment processing is handled by a PCI-compliant payment processor that is specifically certified to meet the strictest security standards in the industry. This means that even if someone were to gain unauthorized access to the Tiny Saints systems, they would never be able to retrieve usable credit card information because it simply is not there. In addition to the information that customers provide directly when placing an order, some device and browsing information is collected automatically through cookies and similar technologies. This includes things like IP address, browser type, operating system, the pages viewed on the site, the time spent on each page, and similar data. This information is used only to make sure the website functions correctly, to improve security, and to perform very basic usage analytics so that the store can be improved over time. This data is shared only with the company’s e-commerce platform provider and a very small number of trusted service providers who are bound by written contracts to protect the information and to use it solely for the purpose of helping the store operate. These service providers are not allowed to use the data for their own purposes, and they are required to follow the same strict privacy standards that Tiny Saints follows. Tiny Saints does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 18. The website and all services are intended for adult use or for minors under direct adult supervision. If it ever comes to light that information has been collected from someone under 18 without proper consent, that information is deleted immediately upon request. Parents or guardians who believe their child may have provided information can contact customer service at any time, and the company will remove the data without delay. Customers always retain full control over their own information. At any time, a customer may opt out of receiving marketing emails simply by clicking the unsubscribe link in any message or by contacting customer service. Customers may also request a complete copy of all the personal data that Tiny Saints holds about them. They may ask for corrections to be made if something is inaccurate, or they may request that their personal information be deleted entirely. The only exception to complete deletion is that records of completed financial transactions must be kept for a limited time to comply with tax and accounting laws, but even in those cases, the information is kept only as long as legally required and is never used for marketing or shared with anyone else. Account security is taken very seriously at Tiny Saints. Multiple layers of protection are in place to make sure that customer accounts remain safe and that only the rightful owner can access them. First, all passwords are one-way hashed using strong cryptographic algorithms. This means that even if someone gained access to the database, they would not be able to see the actual passwords because they are mathematically transformed into a form that cannot be reversed. Not even Tiny Saints staff can view a customer’s password. When a customer logs in, secure session cookies are used. These cookies have appropriate expiration times so that if a customer forgets to log out, the session will end automatically after a reasonable period of inactivity. Repeated failed login attempts from the same IP address or with the same email address will trigger an automatic temporary block. This helps prevent brute-force attacks where someone tries to guess a password thousands of times. Similarly, if suspicious activity is detected—such as logins from unusual locations or a sudden spike in activity—the system can flag the account for review and may temporarily lock it until the owner confirms everything is okay. Password resets are handled in a secure, standardized way. When a customer clicks “Forgot Password,” the system checks that the email address is associated with an existing account. If it is, a time-limited, single-use reset link is sent to that email address. The link is only valid for a short period—usually a few hours—and can be used only once. When the customer clicks the link, they are taken to a secure page where they can create a new password. The new password must meet minimum strength requirements, typically including a mix of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. After the password is changed, the old session cookies are invalidated, and a notification is sent to the customer so they can verify that the reset was legitimate. If a customer did not request the reset, they are instructed to contact customer service immediately so the account can be secured. Credit card data receives additional protection. As already mentioned, it is encrypted during transmission using industry-standard TLS encryption, and it is never stored in full. During checkout, the site also performs basic fraud screening. If an order appears unusually risky—for example, a very large purchase from a new account using a high-risk IP address—the order may be held for manual review or additional verification may be requested. In some cases, repeated declined cards or suspicious patterns can lead to a temporary block on that card or IP address for a few hours or days. These measures are designed to protect both the customer and the company from fraudulent transactions without unnecessarily inconveniencing legitimate shoppers. Scraping, crawling, or any form of automated data collection from the site is strictly prohibited. The Terms of Service clearly state that attempting to interfere with the security features of the site, creating accounts through automated means, or trying to extract large amounts of data will result in immediate termination of the account and possible legal action. The company reserves the right to refuse service to anyone at any time for any reason, but especially when there is evidence of abuse or attempted security breaches. The underlying e-commerce platform that powers the Tiny Saints store is regularly updated with the latest security patches. The Tiny Saints team also performs ongoing monitoring for unusual activity and works closely with the platform provider to stay ahead of potential threats. While no system can be guaranteed to be 100% secure all the time, every reasonable and industry-standard measure is taken to protect customer accounts and personal information. In summary, Tiny Saints treats every piece of customer information with the highest level of care and confidentiality. Personal data is never sold, never rented, and never shared with unrelated third parties. It is used only for the direct purposes of fulfilling orders, preventing fraud, and, when explicitly allowed, sending optional marketing messages that can be stopped at any time with one click. Payment information is encrypted and handled only by certified processors. Passwords are irreversibly hashed. Logins and password resets are protected by multiple safeguards. Suspicious activity is blocked quickly. Customers always have the right to see, correct, or delete their information upon request. The entire purpose of these strict policies is to give customers complete peace of mind when shopping at Tiny Saints. When someone buys a charm, a rosary, or any other product, they should be able to focus entirely on the spiritual meaning of the item and not have to worry about the safety of their personal or financial information. Tiny Saints takes that responsibility seriously and will continue to maintain these high standards of privacy and security.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico to sue Trump administration over White House access
The three national news outlets President Trump banned from the White House — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — are filing a critical First Amendment lawsuit to restore their access.
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Wednesday, midday… Brian Biggs is alone in his Philadelphia studio, an old garage he describes as a hermit cave, holding his phone in one hand and a pen in the other. I’m at my drawing board doing the same. For the next hour, 90 people watched 2 grown men show each other their doodles.
If you missed it live, the replay is above. What follows is what you missed, with links to everything we held up to the camera.
Brian has made more than 80 books. The Everything Goes series, Tinyville Town, the New York Times-bestselling Frank Einstein books with Jon Scieszka. So naturally, when he started his Substack, the imposter syndrome turned up anyway. “I had to give myself a break,” he said, “and get past my oh-no ego and just let it happen.”
“All I want to do, man, is just draw. I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories… and I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.
The turn came on an exercise bike in his basement, listening to Giuseppe Castellano’s podcast episode with myself and Adam Ming, where Adam Ming said to stop treating Substack as the road to being published and start treating it as being published. “It just was one of those ding moments,” Brian said. He got off the bike and got to work.
The work is The Walk, and the story behind it is every author’s recurring nightmare. In 2019, Brian published a picture book with Penguin called The Space Walk: an astronaut, alone in space, who just wants to go outside. It came out, in his words, “to the great yawn of indifference of children’s publishing”, and was out of print within a couple of years.
But out of print means the rights come home. So Brian is now turning that orphaned story into a full graphic novel, and serialising every step of it on his Substack: thumbnails, wrong turns, existential wobbles, all of it. “Every stupid thought I’m having about this is going onto my Substack,” he said. The story is already mutinying. “The story has decided it wants to be something bigger than I think I want it to be,” he told me, having informed his wife that morning it might be three 200-page volumes. “I’m 58 years old, man. Do I have a 600-page graphic novel in front of me?”
The logic, though, is sound: last time, the book arrived to silence. This time, “at least it’s going to be a thing that there’s an audience built in already following it. And they care about it.” Every page will be hand-lettered, incidentally, because Brian letters the way you’d read it aloud, and he’d rather do that than make a font. He’s seen his hand-lettering redrawn by translators into Hebrew and Chinese, stroke by stroke. “I would love to meet those people one day,” he said, “but I’m afraid they would punch me in the face.”
Something I drew on the live stream inspired by his Astronauts/Robots
Somewhere in the middle of all this I made him explain the line in his bio about being calligrapher to a princess, and I’m pleased to report it’s all true.
Junior year at Parsons, 1988, studying in Paris, he answered a job-board ad to address envelopes for a man in a cravat who threw parties for people like the Rothschilds. Which is how a kid from Texas, whose calligraphy career began with a drugstore Speedball set and the Renaissance Fairs of early-80s Houston, ended up hand-lettering the guest book for Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, whose family had been friends with Marie Antoinette, and who hosted Ronald and Nancy Reagan a few weeks later. Brian was escorted out as the Reagans arrived. He did the work at his apartment drawing table, Enya on the stereo (not sure which album…), his roommate’s Akira comics all over the futon.
A year or 2 later, he was waiting tables at a Bennigan’s, telling anyone who’d listen: “I was a calligrapher for a princess for a month.”
Shit Brushes and Other Filing Systems
Then I flipped the camera, and we got into the pens, as is my tradition. Highlights of the show-and-tell: his Kuretake brush pens, my Hunt 101, the ink bottle I suction-cup to train tables, and his filing system of labelled coffee cans reading “new brushes”, “good brushes” and (after asking the stream’s permission to swear) “shit brushes”. He keeps a box labelled “used but might be useful on a rainy day”. He made it in 1994. It’s bloody full.
This is also the man whose YouTube channel features a cheap pencil challenge (three pencils found on the street, one illustration) and who once sawed a Blackwing in half to fit his pencil case (who among us?), to the horror of his commenters. His position: “Just make the damn illustration.” We’re both Blackwing ambassadors. Neither of us wore the merch. We apologise to our sponsor-adjacent overlords.
One sermon we both delivered, and mean: before you buy pens on Amazon, try JetPens or Goulet Pens. They stock what artists actually use, and they’re the closest thing to a local art store most of us have left.
Fine, It Was Doodling
Earlier in the week, I told you not to call it Doodling. Brian would like to complicate that. The hands essay started because he was, in his own cheerful admission, doodling: drawing hands like stone monuments in a field after rereading The Lord of the Rings. (”What if Frodo had come across a giant hand?”) Then he misdrew one. Five fingers and a thumb. He went for a walk in the park, came back, and realised the mistake was a plot device: it’s science fiction, after all, and now there are six-fingered gloves in the book, and a reason for them. “The doodling became a door opener,” he said. The ideas never arrive at the desk. They arrive on the bus, in the queue at the bagel shop, on a run in the woods.
Which led us both onto the soapbox: “I’m not your mom,” Brian said, “…but put your freaking phones down and turn off notifications!” Long-time readers know I’ve been yelling this at clouds for years…
And then, quietly, the bit I keep thinking about. In the summer of 2022, for the first time in his career, Brian had no contract in front of him. He went to Iceland, raced bicycles, caught COVID, came home and, in his words, “curled up in the fetal position for about a month.” (again- who among us?)
What came out of it wasn’t a new hustle. It was a recalibration.
“All I want to do, man, is just draw. I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories. And I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.”
That’s the whole show, really. That’s all of us.
Watch the full replay above, then go follow the book being built at Random Orbit. Brian says if you have questions about any of it, his messages are open. He has a deadline. Ask anyway.
‘til next time! Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
