As you may have noticed, when I get caught up in a whirlwind of productivity, I don’t do as much blogging as I might otherwise want to do, but now that things are slowing down, I’m doing what I can. For example, I recently tested out Kickstarter for the first time, putting together my first campaign, this one to put together this year’s April Fools issue of IF-X.

Only $2.99!

It was so tremendously successful, I was encouraged to put out this comics publishing primer. In fact, these books were SO successful that I’m already out; if I get any more orders, I will have to do another printing!

Meanwhile, I’m working on a newer version of “Sudoku: Tactics” which should prove a little easier on the pocket;  more importantly, once I have a new prototype of it, it should be much easier to license.  Anybody interested in picking up license to manufacture, produce, and sell it?

I recently had a situation with Chase Bank in which they sucked my account dry with service fees. Seems that if you just keep your money in their bank and don’t *use* it–you know, what banks supposedly WANT you to do so they can lend out your money, they charge you a $6 service fee. I’m guessing the “service” was charging me a fee. No, this wasn’t from having a low account balance (I checked), just “inactivity.” Of course, they hadn’t *told* me about this feature, nor did they let me know that they were charging me the fee WHEN they charged me the fee, nor, for that matter, did they tell me when they had closed the now-empty account. They just let me carry my debit card and let me find out about the problem when I finally decided to USE the damned thing.

BEWARE.

After the fact, I was pointed by a friend toward http://chase-sucks.com, and it seems I’m not alone in being treated badly by them.

Just about every explanation of how the “alternate universe” theory works describes a sort of bifurcation between two universes that resolve quantum events in different ways, as if the single event creates two completely disjoint universes.  I would suggest that there are any number of intersecting and overlapping sets of events that seem like universes from the viewpoint of those perceiving them.   After all, at the quantum level, it’s not the events that are perceived (as I understand it) as much as it is the outcomes. As events are perceived from different trajectories from different viewpoints (in this case, from different points of view)…

Damn.  I’m not really finding the words.  There was a bunch more that I had, including a concept of “Conservation of Events,” in which points of resolution would be distributed amongst possible “continuum sets,” but either my vocabulary isn’t big enough or I’ve forgotten part of the images that came to me this morning.

Suffice to say, though, it’s ingenious.  If you’re a quantum physicist, perhaps you can help me figure out what I’m trying to say about event clouds and such.  Argh.  I’ll try to return to this when I can figure out what I was imagining this morning.

IF-X Volume 2, Issue #4: Social Intercourse

So, the new book is in, and now, it’s in stores throughout Michigan;  I’ve just got Flint to hit (two stores there carry us) and Green Brain (which I’m visiting tonight), and I’ll be done.  The problem with having only two titles, though, is that they don’t occupy much “real estate” in a store–there’s very little visibility amongst the hundreds of titles by our larger competitors.  It’s for this reason that we have to rely on our retailers.

We need the retailers themselves to look at our products, read them, and tell their customers how good they are.  At the very least, we need the retailers to point their customers our way, saying, “Hey, we have these new books!” and tell their employees to do the same.  Without this, nobody even knows to look for our comics.  Sadly, some store owners don’t seem to see this, and after buying the books, they just languish on a shelf instead of being displayed prominently.

If we had the multimillion dollar advertising accounts that our competitors do, we wouldn’t need this type of “hand up.”  Then again, if we had that kind of money, we would also have dozens more books out, and we wouldn’t have to worry about paying the light bill.

Help us out, will you?  Look out for us little guys and help us out this Christmas.

I appreciate that you want to post thousands of links at no costs to yourselves in a desperate effort to bring money to your business (or worse, steal people’s identities so that you can do illegal things decided on only by your greed), but any time you try to post them to a Yovia blog, they go to a “safe area” where I get the joy of moderating your comments by labelling as spam, at which point they disappear into oblivion.  I also have to thank you for being so utterly blatant about it by putting little to no actual message content in it–just links with keywords attached, like “free sex porn kids puppies xxx” (and I really don’t want to follow any of those links!).  Just so you know, there are add-ons to my browser that also protect me from going to websites that have a tendency toward information theft or farming, unsafe data practices, or downloading viruses.  Your stuff isn’t getting anywhere.  Sorry.

Given that, please stop posting your comments unless you’re sincere in your response.  Anything else is going to be safely moderated into oblivion.  It’s a waste of your time and mine.

Sincerely,

Michael Marcus

Even with something as simple as an MP3 player, the results are pretty incredible. As an experiment I did a couple of years ago, I took a player full of music with me for a day. I have to admit that the music improved my general mood, transporting me to a conscious plane of oceanic sound. However, it also caused me to miss sound cues in my environment while going about my daily business. When actual people got my attention, even to help me, I found myself getting slightly aggravated by the interruption.   Cellphones, for me, work in the opposite direction–when I used to have one primarily for work purposes, I found that people would frequently call me just to talk about things that weren’t important… you know, stuff better handled by e-mail, at leisure.  If I missed a cellphone call, the message would make me feel guilty for ignoring someone.   These days, I keep one for emergency purposes, like on long trips, so that if my car breaks down, I can call for help.

This is primarily why, when I design games, I design board, card, and roleplaying games.  It encourages people to interact with each other, face-to-face.  They keep people, more or less, in this world and enrich their connections with others.  Games over the internet, for all their richness of content and internet-socialization, just aren’t the same.  They leave the user at home or, in the case of hand-held device users, travelling “virtual bubbles.”  To me, it often feels like people are sealing themselves off from each other, and that seems rather sad.

It’s too much obligation.

This is why I invented a holiday called “Zuul” some years ago.  It replaces all the major gift-giving holidays in my year with one that I can invoke any time I can actually afford gift-giving.  I explained this to all my friends, and they understand that they don’t have to feel obligated to get me anything, or vice versa, but if something should make them think of me, and they can afford it, it’s up to them (and vice versa).   I’ve had Zuul come multiple times a year–sometimes with giveaways of soft toys, others, self-made art…  It’s all a question of inspiration and what I can afford.

Give because you want to, and just be a litttle bit more friendly and charitable each day.  It’s WAY easier than trying to save up all your friendship and brotherhood and expressing it all at once.  The retail sector may not like it in the short term, but if everyone did this, then they’d see increased business year-round instead of depending on one huge spike at the end of the year.  It would save them on their workload and general stress as well… and that’s always good, too.

Nobody was harmed in the process.