Mailbag #105 - Christmas Party Wrap-Up
/Happy New Year, Everyone!!!
Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?
No! I submit that it should not.
I got a lot of feedback regarding last month’s Christmas Spectacular. I thought I’d take this week’s mailbag to address some of the general responses I got.
“Thank you!”
You’re welcome! But really, don’t thank me. Thank the people who contributed. And I mean that literally. If there was someone who contributed something that you found to be of value, please reach out to them in some way if you haven’t already. It’s one thing to hear it from me, but I’m sure it will mean much more coming from the people who consumed the material.
“So, is this going to be an annual Christmas tradition?”
No!
Here’s the thing, part of the reason I can put a call out to 36 magicians and get 33 contributions in return is because I never do this. This was the first time in eight and a half years that I asked other magicians to submit something to the site. If I started doing it regularly, even if it was only annually, there would be diminishing returns.
So no, don’t expect this to return next Christmas.
That being said, any magicians who want to share something on the site are always free to. (I mean… if it’s good.) This site is one of the few places where you can share ideas with a large world-wide audience who all have a genuine interest in magic. People aren’t just casually perusing this site because they have a fleeting interest in magic. The site is just too dense for that.
So yeah, while the Christmas party was likely a one-off thing (or I’ll do it again in another 8 and half years (Summer 2032 Christmas party, y’all!!)). I’m always open to sharing stuff from other magicians on the site.
“How much was written ahead of time?”
For each entry, I had four things:
The guests’ contribution.
What time I was going to put their post up.
A couple words about what I might write about leading up to their contribution.
Anything they were working on that they wanted me to mention.
I wrote that on index cards. And all night I just went from one card to the next. So, for example, with Andi Gladwin I had a card that looked like this.
I’m an incredibly slow writer, generally. Not a slow typer, but a slow writer. As in, slow to organize my thoughts and put them forward in an intelligible way.
The only exception to this is the type of goofball bullshit that introduced many of the posts. That shit flows out of me. But still, trying to write and edit and format a couple of posts every hour was pretty rough.
“What the hell happened in the middle of the night?”
Okay… first, let me start with what my thinking was in regard to how to present the material originally. I decided to make it one long post even though I knew that would be harder for me and harder for the reader. My thinking was, at least on that night, I wanted people to experience the post as if they were travelling through a party. When you go to a party, you come in and wind your way through from room to room and interact with different people as you go. So even if there’s one person in particular you want to see, you still have to work your way to that person. That was the idea of the long post. You had to scroll all the way through to get to who you most wanted to see.
About nine hours in, this became unmanageable. The post that I was repeatedly editing became too long and unwieldy, and every change I was making in the background was super slow to load, which just made it unusable when I was trying to edit and change things quickly. So I broke it off and started a second post around 1:30 am.
So I start in on a second post at that point, and all was going fine until 3am or so when I realized the first post was gone. It wasn’t on the site. And it wasn’t on my dashboard in Squarespace. Just poof 💨
I’ve had posts disappear before, but not posts I spent 9 hours straight writing.
Duplicating effort is my least favorite thing in the world. I’d rather have to walk an additional 5 miles than walk backwards half a mile to get something I forgot. So seeing that post disappear was a gut punch. And it was made worse by my choice to write it live and make it all one post. If I hadn’t done one or the other of those, it would have been the mildest of inconveniences. But the confluence of all those things made it a disaster.
As I was contemplating how to deal with this (while still trying to get the other posts written) I put a message in the announcement at the top of the page that if anyone happened to have the site open in another tab or on another device and they hadn’t refreshed the page recenly, I wanted them to email me so they could copy and paste everything over to me. It was a long-shot, but in the end, with the help of Seth R. and Dan C., I was able to get everything back up by, I think, like 9 or 9:30 in the morning. It meant reformatting and publishing 150 or so graphic elements, text blocks, and all that stuff. But it was better than the alternative in my mind of either writing it all up again a week later, or just saying fuck it and setting the blog on fire.
“How long did you crash for afterward?”
Three hours. I had Christmas plans all the following day with friends.
The timing wasn’t well-thought-out.
Staying up all night isn’t that foreign to me, so it wasn’t that bad. What was bad is that after staring at my laptop screen for 17 hours straight, I couldn’t see anything. Everything was super fuzzy. I prayed, “Please don’t let me lose my eyesight because I tried to write a magic blog for 17 hours.” I didn’t want to have to explain that to others.
Fortunately, god answered my prayers and my vision went back to normal after a day or so.
All-in-all, it was a fun experience. The feedback has been great. But it will likely never happen again.
Oh!
One thing I forgot to mention as I was dealing with sleep-deprivation and losing all the work from earlier in the night was what Caleb Wiles asked me to share on his post. So I’m going to highlight it here.
Caleb is the president of a non-profit called Magic For a Cause. Their mission is in three parts, per their website.
We organize magic shows to raise funds for charitable causes. All proceeds go straight to the charity... we never take a cut.
We provide magic instruction to empower young people to develop social skills and confidence.
We engage in community outreach to perform magic for underserved groups (such as children’s hospitals, foster care group homes, etc.)
If you are interested in donating, please check out the site at the link above.
Caleb also says… “I'm also looking for people who are interested in helping with the project overall (graphic design, website design, custom print services, submitting easy-to-do tricks, etc.) If anyone is willing to contribute, they can reach out to me directly at caleb@MagicForACause.org “ Do it!