Dustings #68

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Is your name Adrian S? Are you waiting on an email from me? I’ve tried to send it a dozen times over a few days. I continually get a message that “your mailbox is full.” Too full for even a two sentence email? That’s possible? I guess I don’t know how email works. I have no other way to get in contact with you, so I’m trying here. Clean out your email, I guess? Or send me a different contact email.

Everyone, I know google is maybe evil or whatever, but 99% of the email issues I have are from people without gmail accounts (or one of the other standard email providers). It’s all the wonky providers that cause a pain in my ass. Whenever I get an error message that’s like, “Whoops, couldn’t send this. That person is allowed to have eight emails in their account. This would be the ninth. Sorrryyy 🤷‍♂️” It’s always someone with a weird email suffix like datacomm.net, or something else I’ve never heard of. Or they’re going through their community college email address. Or Fart.biz. Or something like that.

I’m not saying everyone has to get gmail or yahoo or whatever for my sake. I know it’s not possible in some places or for some people. I’m just bitching because waiting to see what emails bounce when I send out the newsletter, then tracking people down, and figuring out how to make sure they get my emails is one of the few non-fun parts about this operation.

I didn’t reach out to everyone individually so I wanted to send a mass “thank you” to everyone who wrote in to offer their help with the indexing project. I’m still mulling over if I’m going to do it, how I’m going to do it, if it’s going to be something that I make publicly available, etc. See, this isn’t something I”m doing for posterity’s sake. It’s not like, “Oh, my thoughts must be archived for research purposes for generations to come!” I need the index for my own benefit. There’s so many posts that have been in my head for months, or even years. I’ve thought so much about them that it’s easy for me to forget if I actually wrote them or not. So having some kind of index will help me because just searching for key words isn’t always the most useful way to do it. There are also concepts that I’m not 100% sure if I’ve talked about or named previously (for example, the idea in this past newsletter of performing for adults through performing for their children), and having something more searchable or categorized would be helpful.

Of course the issue is that I’m now seven years in and there are almost 2000 distinct pieces of content between the blog, newsletters, books, JAMM, etc. So it’s a lot of catching up to do. And even if you imagine it just takes three minutes to skim a post and make indexing notes, that’s still like 100+ hours of time for this project. So it will probably be something I do on my own because I don’t feel great paying someone essentially minimum wage to do it for me.

I’ll let you know what I decide. For a while now I’ve considered at least adding categories and/or tags to the posts. But then there’s a part of me that likes that it’s all just a sprawling mass of ideas without organization. The only way to really process it is to start at the beginning and follow along. Well… we’ll see what I decide.

A couple people have mentioned the new video game Card Shark to me as something I might be interested in checking out. Apparently it teaches some card cheating techniques as part of the gameplay. (“Teaches” might be a stretch.) You can see an example here at 8 minutes and 20 seconds into this video.

It’s kind of interesting to see this element in a video game. I’m not much of a gamer, so I don’t quite get it. Like, I understand why you’d want to play a game where you’re shooting up a rival gang, playing football, or piloting a spaceship through a black hole. I don’t quite understand the appeal of doing a jog shuffle virtually. It’s not even that exciting to do in real life. Although I’m sure in the context of the game it might be a good time. I don’t know. Just a heads up for anyone who might be into such a thing.

Received this email from Kane F.

I tried out a Jerxxian idea at a wedding this weekend. My idea is based on The Faux Secret Imps and The Wonder Room. I think it’s more Faux Overt Imps…

At my performance table I had a little open box with these in:

I didn’t draw attention to them but without fail everyone who came to my table asked what they were.
I played along the lines of “I can’t really explain it but these crystals seem to make things happen, they focus the mind or something. It’s probably just a placebo but…..maybe it’s more than that. Pick one, lets try something”

I then rolled in to the effects I’d prepared for that thing. Mainly “spectator as” effects. Sort of Psychic by John Bannon for Intuition, Springboard by Micheal Murray for Telepathy, etc.

I had great fun letting the participant pick something they were interested in and it seemed to go down really well with everyone. I’m thinking of adding more imps for future, rings, necklaces, other weird stuff/objects etc. Though you might like the idea.

Yeah, I love stuff like this as a way to get into effects and let the audience direct how the interaction goes. Having this set up in a casual environment—on a small shelf somewhere in your house—would make for a nice Wonder Room/Hook/Imp combo.

The Daily Jerx era begins next week. More frequent, more focused posts, every weekday for the first three weeks of every month.