Scam Schooling Your Way to the Tap

Warning: I’m a bit of a butter-fingers today. I’m about to drop a name. Oops! There it goes. Damn, sorry Brian Brushwood! Let me just pick your name up off the floor here and dust it off a bit.

Brian is a friend of mine, so take this review with however many grains of salt you need, but he has just published his third book, Scam School Book 1 (affiliate link), as of this writing. And by just, I mean it released on Amazon.com, iTunes and other booksellers earlier today. As the name suggests, this is the book version of Brian’s popular Scam School web series produced by Revision 3.

I preordered my copy from Amazon for my Kindle. I’ve looked at it on my Kindle 3, on the Kindle Cloud Reader on both the PC and on the iPad, and on the Android Kindle app. Unfortunately Kindle is—for the time being—a little disadvantaged in displaying Scam School Book 1. Brian and his assistant Jon Tilton went to great pains to create something special in formatting the book, including in-line videos and audio commentaries, and Amazon’s Kindle format doesn’t handle all of that extra polish yet.

That’s changing though. Amazon announced some time back that a new version of the Kindle format will be forthcoming, and it will handle all of the new media content just beautifully.

In the meantime, the painstaking effort that went into formatting the book pays off in backwards compatibility; the text displays just fine, and while the audio and video won’t be seamlessly placed where it was intended, external links to the content make it easy to access until Amazon updates us all to the new goodness.

So what about the content?

Brian goes over 70 scams, from the Human Chimney to Tic Tac Toe Prediction. He revisits each of the Scam School show episodes, covering how the trick is done, and providing written reference on how each illusion or trick is accomplished. The audio commentaries give a personal touch to each one. Exactly what each commentary provides is unique to each trick. It may be a remembrance of the first time Brian did the trick, or learned it, or of shooting the episode of the show that covered it, or additional information and notes on it. It’s all well worth listening to.

These are brain teasers that he has demonstrated time and again in real bars with real people, getting real drinks out of the bargain.

Scam School Book 1 is clearly a labor of love. Brian and Jon spent countless hours writing, finding photos, creating videos and recording audio commentaries in order to give the reader a completely mobile reference for scamming free drinks at bars or just generally becoming the life of the party.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves magic, science, or just knowing how stuff is done … to say nothing of those who want to score free drinks at a bar.

This Mass is Effecting My Writing

This new story is really being uncooperative these last few days. Yeesh. Back to games and another blog post I guess. This time I’ll tackle Mass Effect.

I’ve played Mass Effect before, and I got part way through Mass Effect 2. For those who aren’t aware, Mass Effect is a series of science fiction role playing games for the PC and consoles put out by Bioware, the creators of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Mass Effect 3 came out, and so it’s time for me to finish the other two. Or to replay them as the case may be. I lost my original game data for them.

While playing through the original Mass Effect I was reminded of just how good these games are. Of course for me “good” means strong story, and that has caused me to sink large amounts of the last 3 days into playing.

The stories are rich and peppered with minor stories for variety. The characters are fleshed out and convincing, and the amount of thought that’s gone into the themes and background information on the world of Mass Effect is nothing short of remarkable.

There are flaws, of course, but those mostly have to do with the game mechanics and level design. Since I’m writing about story, I’ll ignore those. They’re minor quibbles anyway.

A part of me had hoped that immersing myself in this great story would give me some insight into getting past this part of the story I’m writing. So far that hasn’t happened, but there’s always tomorrow; who knows. I am coming up on a part of the game that I remember only vaguely from my first play through, and it does contain a situation similar to the corner I’ve written myself into. I won’t be able to copy anything from the game—the scenarios are far too different—but maybe it’ll give me an idea.

It is also striking all kinds of chords for stories I could consider later in the series, though I didn’t really need to play Mass Effect for more ideas like that. I’m planning another post some time on how the act of writing will, itself, generate more ideas than you could possibly need.

The takeaway I intended for this piece is one I’ve expressed before; don’t be afraid to look outside of the traditional world of books for examples of fantastic storytelling. Film, theatre, even television and video games can all provide fantastic examples. Mass Effect certainly does.

You Know What's Not Fun?

Trying to write while both inspired yet uninspired. I’m having a lot of difficulty with the part of the new Captain Koell story I’m writing, and I’m also drugged up on Neo-Citran due to being somewhat under the weather. So I’m doing my due diligence in writing up this post, and I think that’s about it for the day. I’m going to get to bed at a slightly less unreasonable time and try to sleep.

Maybe this’ll help me get my sleep schedule back on track. Anyone who’s been watching the time I publish posts may have noticed it’s getting kind of crazy, given that I’m in the Eastern time zone.

Kara

More games again today. I’m a little late to the party on this one, but this video is a masterpiece from both a games perspective and even a writing perspective. A lot of the credit has to go to the artists, motion capture systems, and actresses who brought Kara to life, but much also has to go to a very tight, very spare, very powerfully simple story, brilliantly executed.

A commercial android is assembed and put through standard startup tests. Everything checks out until it awakens to consciousness and sentience, and betrays that awakening through independent thought and emotion. 

This is a new concept project from Quantic Dream, the studio that created Heavy Rain.

Inspiration is everywhere.

A Diversion - Steam and EA's Origin

I’m going to step out of the writer’s corner to address video games again. As long-time readers and those who know me personally may be aware, I’m a big fan of Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG.) When I got it, the only option open to me to get it digitally was through Electronic Arts’ Origin service, which didn’t make me happy. I’ve been a fan of Valve’s Steam service for many years.

I’ve been going through my Steam game library and looking at Origin over the last few days and I’ve noticed there’s an odd relationship between them. I bought a game from EA’s popular Sims series, and I did so through Steam. The next time I opened up Origin, I found that same game had been added to my collection and was ready to download.

It makes sense in a way I suppose. It’s an EA game; EA obviously gets their cut of every sale of their games on Steam.

It even makes a certain amount of sense that they would allow registrations like this through a competitive service to be used on their Origin service. It makes it easier for people to use Origin more if they don’t have to rebuy content they’ve already paid for, and all of their stuff (at least stuff from EA) is there waiting for them.

The thing that I find odd is that it also constitutes a disincentive on the customer’s part to buy anything from Origin itself. I’m very interested in getting EA’s Mass Effect 3, for instance, and I was thinking of getting it via Origin, since it’s not currently available on Steam. Now though I’m wondering if it’d be better to wait until it is available on Steam.

Any game of EA’s that I buy on Steam is available to me via both Steam and Origin. But since Steam doesn’t get a cut of EA games I buy from Origin, stuff I buy on Origin stays on Origin only. (Yeah, my head is hurting now too. Sorry!)

Just another facet of the complexities of life in the digital age I guess. But it’s that same digital age that has had such a great effect on self-publishing opportunities for writers, so it’s hard to complain.