Seeding the Torrents

I've started to place corrupt versions of Naked Mentalism 1 & 2 on P2P networks. Such larks...

Nervous Times

Naked Mentalism 3 is nearly ready for release, and as usual I'm getting increasingly nervous. Will people like it? Will they understand it? Will anyone want it?

The feedback from the people who have read the manuscript recently has been very good and positive, but that never stops me from feeling that when it's released, people will hate it. When I released the first volume, I wondered if this nervousness ever goes away. It doesn't, but it's probably a good thing because it makes me try harder to create something of quality and worth.

Sell-By Food Shops

I watched an item on the news this morning about "dumpster diving" for food thrown out by supermarkets simply because it's past its sell-by date. A shocking statistic flashed on the screen. The US alone throws out billions of pounds in weight of perfectly good food every year simply because it is "time" to do so.

In the UK, the big supermarkets have basically gang raped the hell out of our high streets, and local councils have held their coats while they did it. Up and down the UK, high streets lost small businesses as the likes of Tesco expanded into everything from dry cleaning to prescriptions. no one was there to help them and that was wrong of us. I propose a new law that taxes the supermarkets to fund a chain of high street stores that cheaply sell the "past sell-by" food they currently throw away.

Naked Mentalism 3

I don't usually talk about my magic books in this blog, but about 5 years ago, realised that I rather liked using my smarts to come up with new material for magicians. Perhaps the thing I'm most known for inside magic is Naked Mentalism, which has to do with using genuine psychological principles in magic - specifically mind magic or "mentalism". I'm currently readying Naked Mentalism 3 for sending out to trusted friends to read and pick apart, and I thought it'd be good to throw caution to the wind and share what it's all about.

Volume three marks quite a departure in the series. By that, I mean it focuses on the way in which mystery entertainers can exploit the naturally occurring "bugs" in the way we use common sense thinking. It is the business of experimental psychology to discover these bugs. Rather than showing how to avoid them, this book shows how to use these bugs to enhance effects of all kinds (not just mentalism effects) to make them seem more natural and all the more remarkable. As well as containing more traditional "Naked" effects, this, I think is the "breakout" volume of the Naked Mentalism series because it spills quite naturally into other areas where the techniques I reveal are also applicable.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about this book, and excited to know what the magic community at large think about it.

New Life

What's this? Hits on my little blog after all this time?

Hello new readers! I see you're predominantly coming from the Make It Macclesfield forum. Stick around, have a read and, hopefully, a laugh at previous posts while I try to think up some new ones.

Hmmm...

If the US has killed Osama Bin Laden, where's the body?

It's been a long time...

...but I think it's time I started this blog up again. The world's become even more stupid than it was a year ago.