Brian Brushwood
Sometimes you just have to take a break and listen to something, engage your ears to give your poor weary eyeballs a rest. If you don't mind VERY not safe for work content, friend of the site Brian Brushwood has a comedy album that makes for a great diversion. Night Attack 2: Enjoy the Garden is available on several platforms, available at the link below.
A little while back I bought an advertisement on the Weird Things Podcast hosted by Andrew Mayne, Justin R. Young and Brian Brushwood. I've been listening to the show for some time now, it's fantastic if you're fascinated by the... er, well, the weird things in our world. The things that sound like fiction, but aren't.
Anyway, I expected a regular ad read; I supplied the copy, and generally they just read it and thank the sponsor and off they go. Tonight I listened to the episode in which my ad appeared, and I got more than I bargained for. They did the ad read perfectly (aside from a name issue, which they corrected on their own,) but then in a really nice twist, they got into a really good discussion about the state of indie ebook publishing today and how open the field is.
This was definitely more than I bargained for and more than I paid for, and I'm incredibly grateful to them for talking about my site so extensively in the episode. It happened because Andrew Mayne is also an indie author who has done incrediblywell for himself at it over the last year or so; he's published a good 5 or 6 books in the last year (yikes!) and one of them, Angel Killer, is currently the #15 book in all of the UK Amazon Kindle store.
Both Andrew and Brian have done a lot to inspire my choice to seriously write over the last year so it meant a lot to me to be the focus of a cool conversation like that. I don't want to oversell it--it's not like they devoted the episode to it or anything--but I strongly urge you to check both of them out over at Amazon, as well as on the Weird Things podcast itself.
Justin doesn't have an author page, but he and Brian released a best-selling comedy album, Night Attack, which you should definitely check out if you're into weird comedy. I don't know how else to describe it. Be warned that it does contain explicit content.
I know you're all at Dragon*Con having a blast, but thank you for making my night.
Also, Brian, we will have words over your outing me and my connection to the secret serpent clan of the McLeods, sir! ;)
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.
