Welcome my friends to the penultimate episode of Desperate Ravings.
I hope you have enjoyed the story so far, and invite you to finish out today’s and tomorrow’s assignments.
By this point most of you know what is what, but for those of you who are just joining us, you can check out any ep marked Depserate Ravings, or read the explanations from Episode 1 or Episode 5 to get your bearings.
Now that we are past the point of daily $10 bribes, I feel confident in revealing the two hand-copying exercises I love the most. Longtime readers of my greater Magic writing have probably encountered both already.
The first one of these two is from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
Josh Ravitz and I, working together at the time, heard of the 1973 novel, unanimously elected to the Pulitzer Prize by the three-person novel-selecting committee… with the award later overturned by the other eleven members of the Pulitzer illuminati. No award was given out that year.
Gravity’s Rainbow did earn the 1974 National Book Award… But Pynchon chose to neither acknowledge nor accept it. He has been depicted as a secretive recluse, you know, like on The Simpsons.
I would guess none of my readers actually visit seemoretube
In the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, Susanna Clarke paints this wonderful idea, when one of the titular wizards distills the idea of madness itself into a vial, so that he can take a few drops when he wants to do magic, to touch madness itself. As a writer this is an incredibly attractive idea for me. I hope that exploring this passage from Gravity’s Rainbow will give you the chance to touch on the same scary and exciting experience, even for a moment:
With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate’s mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp’s mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded into the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto … tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead … banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter …
Yes. That’s pretty much one run-on sentence. One wonderful run-on sentence. No. Josh and I never finished the book.
What to Do Next:
Copy down the above passage from Gravity’s Rainbow, by hand and in triplicate.
But for at least three lucky Desperate Ravings readers, Day Five was the most important one of all!
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from GatheringMagic: Eric Blanc
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from LegitMTG: Avery Garon
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from ManaDeprived: Devin Brown
Congratulations to Eric, Avery, and Devin on their $10 gift certificates from our generous sponsors!
And get to it every one — You have until June 12 to finish all seven Desperate Ravings assignments and qualify to win one of our four big prizes (three $50 gift certificates or a one-hour call from YT)… Plus the unprecedented long-term awesome sauce of Desperate Ravings – Flashback. Bring it!
LOVE
MIKE
Thanks for visiting our Desperate Ravings sponsors:
Here’s What I’ve Got: Desperate Ravings Assignment #5
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Here’s What It’ll Do for You:
Considered a masterwork of 20th Century imagist poetry, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams — probably even more than Rachel Maddow’s Drift selection from yesterday is a great example of writing that engages your visual imagination.
Here’s What I Want You to Do Next:
Copy “The Red Wheelbarrow” by hand and in triplicate, like so:
In case you are just joining us, Desperate Ravings is a collaboration between myself and the good people at GatheringMagic, LegitMTG, and ManaDeprived. Aspiring writers (or just contest participants) are given passages each day of Desperate Ravings to copy and upload to the aforementioned Facebook group. For each of the first five days — today being the fifth and last — our sponsors select a single winner of a $10 gift certificate. For example, here are yesterday’s winners:
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from GatheringMagic: Marcus Bastian Hensing
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from LegitMTG: Jarrod Keith Williams
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from ManaDeprived: Bernhard Zander
The thinking is that anyone who drives himself — or herself — to do all seven assignments, consecutively, will have shown the shoulder-to-the-grindstone commitment necessary to become a consistent producer of content for one of the above sites.
Simultaneously, the thinking is that copying down some of the great passages selected by Desperate Ravings will help aspiring writers / contest participants to internalize that elusive turn of phrase that makes for engaging or entertaining writing.
… Plus there’s the, you know, prizes!
In addition to the 3×5 daily prizes from GatheringMagic, LegitMTG, and ManaDeprived, anyone who finishes all seven assignments by June 12, 2012 (ten days total to finish seven assignments) may qualify for…
One $50 gift certificate from GatheringMagic
One $50 gift certificate from LegitMTG
One $50 gift certificate from ManaDeprived, or
A one-hour coaching call from Yours Truly!
… Plus consideration for actual feature writing gigs at the sponsor sites (though we’ll shake all that out in the second phase, Desperate Ravings – Flashback).
So… If you’re late to the party, it’s okay!
Do today’s assignment and you might just get lucky on Day Five. You’ve still got until June 12 to get all of them in!
I was surprised at the lukewarm (and perhaps “lukewarm” is generous) reactions to yesterday’s selection from Thinking, Fast and Slow. It so happens that I am reading Thinking, Fast and Slow right now and I pretty actively try to highlight and add from stuff that I am reading at any time.
That was half, anyway. Some readers commented that they didn’t love Kahneman’s prose. I actually thought it was well written, but that wasn’t really why I picked it. Kahneman, in this segment, uses simple and very clear language. He describes a fairly complex sequence… but I think all of us got it, and more than that, believed it.
As for the content? It kind of reminded me of this old Matt Sperling comic.
Speaking of stuff I read recently, these are the first two paragraphs from Rachel Maddow’s excellent Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power:
Homework #4!
IN THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE I LIVE IN HAPSHIRE COUNTY, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck — one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike barrier, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.
The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantanamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantanamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantanamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbor’s land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.
I love Maddow’s diction, humor, combination of simple and unusual words, and sense of the bizarre. But what she does really well in this segment is to engage your visual imagination. You can see the fire truck sticking out of the too-small garage; the flames and towers detailed, the little pump station, couched and hidden behind too-tall “frowzy” grass.
Anyway… same stuff as the last three days!
Copy down the assignment, by hand and in triplicate
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from GatheringMagic: Tony Merriam
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from LegitMTG: Wil Rosario
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from ManaDeprived: Armando Lope
LOVE
MIKE
A Note on Homework and Prizes:
Just because you miss a day or caught on a little late doesn’t mean you can’t participate! I designed Desperate Ravings to give you 2-3 extra days to get all the homework in and potentially qualify for one of the four big prizes. Remember – We are giving away three $50 gift certificates next week to those who complete all seven assignments!
Desperate Ravings would not be possible without our generous sponsors.
Like I said, that one from A Shropshire Lad is one of my favorite poems ever… And all I did in college (other than play 50 hours of Magic per week) was read poems (mostly). Remember how I said to pay attention to your punctuation? The genius of Housman’s poem is how — via just a couple of English single-quotes — he shifts the speaker one-line-per-stanza in order to give us the overall experience of a surprisingly unsuccessful seduction.
In case you missed it, me and Bella reading, again:
[audio:http://fivewithflores.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/OhSeeHowThick.mp3|titles=OhSeeHowThickTheGoldCupFlowers]
(more on this… someday)
While the content was from my perspective super fun, the more important lesson for the day was one of form, and using punctuation and pattern in order to shift emphasis and uncover meaning in the text. Ever hear the phrase “it’s not what you said, but how you said it”? How you present an idea — what tools you use, what format or technique — can be the difference between just another boring “play my awesome deck list” that no one reads and a line-in-the-sand format-breaker that changes the composition of the next GP’s Top 8…
… Even though they might be the same deck list!
One of the reasons I make you write these exercises out by hand (rather than typing, or worse, copy and paste) is that the process forces you to slow down and absorb passages — both what is written and how they are written — more closely in order to graft the skills of a Stefani or A Shropshire Lad onto your very  spine.
Here’s a grammatical time bomb I use fairly often: repeat, Repeat, REPEAT.
I am sure you’ve seen some variation on that three-beat in my work in the past. I have come to lean on that capitalization progression something like every other week. I like how it looks.
Flores Fact: I stole it from faster / Faster / FASTER in the letter column of an old issue of The Flash comics. True story.
Now on the subject of form, if you want to get a message to stick, learning to add a little poetry to your prose is an effective vector to covert hypnotism. I do a fair amount of not only caps / Caps / CAPS but alliteration and internal rhyme in order to increase the convincingness of my various articles and blog posts.
But don’t take my word for it!
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in his best-selling Thinking, Fast and Slow cited a stunning study thusly:
“… Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth. Participants in a much cited experiment read dozens of unfamiliar aphorisms, such as: Woes unite foes. / Little strokes will tumble great oaks. / A fault confessed is half redressed.
“Other students read some of the same proverbs transformed into nonrhyming versions: Woes unite enemies. / Little strokes will tumble great trees. / A fault admitted is half redressed.
“The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not.”
Now you know why we marketers love those jingles 🙂
Today’s assignment comes from a different, in my mind surprising and delectible, section of Thinking, Fast and Slow:
Assignment #3!
In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. They were to remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter and receive the one cookie. As the experiment was described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.”
The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.
… To improve your game and qualify for fabulous prizes!
Why Am I Doing This Again?
I just said “fabulous prizes” didn’t I?
Each of the first five days of Desperate Ravings comes with it three generous prizes from our sponsors, GatheringMagic, LegitMTG, and ManaDeprived.
Yesterday’s big winners:
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from GatheringMagic: Michael Marsala
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from LegitMTG: Susan Zell
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from ManaDeprived: Carlos Gutierrez
Carlos, Susan, and Michael were chosen by KYT, Medina, and The Stybs for their efforts on the Desperate Ravings HOMEWORK page(my homework is already uploaded there!).
Want to join the growing legion of winners (and topdeck the communication skills of a Nobel laureate while you’re at it)? You know what to do.
LOVE
MIKE
A Note on Homework and Prizes:
Just because you miss a day or caught on a little late doesn’t mean you can’t participate! I designed Desperate Ravings to give you 2-3 extra days to get all the homework in and potentially qualify for one of the four big prizes. Remember – We are giving away three $50 gift certificates next week to those who complete all seven assignments!
Desperate Ravings would not be possible without our generous sponsors.
Once upon a time I held the respect of Isabella Jane Hill Flores.
She had, at an early age, decided she was going to be Girl Iron-Man and has, admirably I think, done a good job of focusing on math and science and disciplined thinking and strategy… at least for an eight-year-old.
… Once upon a time…
Today if you ask her which parent she thinks is smarter, me (the primary breadwinner) or her mommy (the infectious, more accessible @BastardStory) she will laugh at you.
“Mommy has a Masters Degree in Physics,” Bella will declare, and with contempt. “Daddy studied poems. Poems!”
You see, I had a strategy backfire a couple of years ago. Mommy was always there, kind, and focused primarily on taking care of the kids. They loved — and of course still love — her, but I didn’t feel they were showing her sufficient awe (Katherine really is one of the most impressive persons I know). So I informed my Girl Iron-Man-to-be which of us had the full-ride advanced degree in Physics (though she went into publishing and later conventional advertising pre-full-time mommy); and which of us studied poems. Poems!
I got it half-right. At least she now respects mommy.
So on the subject of poems, longtime readers know that in the years before FiveWithFlores, my online handle was madmanpoet. Paul Jordan (and I would guess relatively few others) have figured out that I stole that from the wonderful Dar Williams song Are You Out There.
But anyway, at the age of 18, freshly off my first national publication (in a poetry journal) I decided I was going to devote my college years to British poetry (Americans, in my 18-year-old estimation, couldn’t write). One of the poets I most liked was A.E. Housman; today’s assignment was a piece I fell in love with in the spring of 1994:
Today’s Assignment – The Pickup Artist of 1896
OH see how thick the goldcup flowers
  Are lying in field and lane,
With dandelions to tell the hours
  That never are told again.
Oh may I squire you round the meads    Â
  And pick you posies gay?
—’Twill do no harm to take my arm.
  ’You may, young man, you may.’
Â
Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad,
  ’Tis now the blood runs gold,    Â
And man and maid had best be glad
  Before the world is old.
What flowers to-day may flower to-morrow,
  But never as good as new.
—Suppose I wound my arm right round—    Â
  ‘’Tis true, young man, ’tis true.’
Â
Some lads there are, ’tis shame to say,
  That only court to thieve,
And once they bear the bloom away
  ’Tis little enough they leave.    Â
Then keep your heart for men like me
  And safe from trustless chaps.
My love is true and all for you.
  ‘Perhaps, young man, perhaps.’
Â
Oh, look in my eyes then, can you doubt? Â Â Â Â
  —Why, ’tis a mile from town.
How green the grass is all about!
  We might as well sit down.
—Ah, life, what is it but a flower?
  Why must true lovers sigh?    Â
Be kind, have pity, my own, my pretty,—
  ‘Good-bye, young man, good-bye.’
-from A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman
Please make sure to pay attention to your spacing and punctuation in this one; it’s both tricky and rewarding.
Here is a short, two-minute, recording of YT & Bella that illustrates just why:
[audio:http://fivewithflores.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/OhSeeHowThick.mp3|titles=OhSeeHowThickTheGoldCupFlowers]
Same deal as yesterday!
1) Copy today’s assignment, by hand, and in triplicate.
2) Upload to on.fb.me/DesperateRavings
3) Like this post!
4) Become eligible for fabulous prizes!
On the subject of “fabulous prizes” here are yesterday’s winners —
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from GatheringMagic: Sonja Boschman
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from LegitMTG: David Weitz
The winner of a $10 gift certificate from ManaDeprived: Shaun Louis Korb
The Story So Far… In order to qualify for those prizes, Sonja, David, and Shaun wrote out a short segment from Gwen Stefani’s Early Winter and uploaded their work to the Desperate Ravings HOMEWORK page:
Why?
Why do you act so stupid?
Why?
You know that I’m always right.
(in case you were wondering my homework for today has been up there for hours!)
The Gwen segment perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the comments from some — especially combative — commenters and forum denizens. It is important if you are going to write down your thoughts and present them to large groups of people — and certainly if you expect to be paid for them — that you can develop some sense of confidence (that your words are worthy of publication, and to be appreciated by others), and a bit of a thick skin (haters gonna hate).
I love a lot about Gwen, but really, really, thank her for the above fourteen words.
Secondly, one of the classic openings in the Magic writing game is the asking of a question. To wit:
I wanted to prime the Desperate Ravings pump with a super simple one, and one of the best — and reminiscent of likely the absolute most influential and important articles — despite its being an easy and simple one to start us off right… Even if the question itself (“why…”) wasn’t a particularly useful one.
If you think you’re late to the game — that’s okay! You might have missed the first day’s $10 gift certificates, but you have until June 13 to complete all seven Desperate Ravings assignments in order to qualify for one of the big prizes.
The Desperate Ravings Calendar:
June 4, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #1, $30 in gift certificates went to Sonja, David, and Shaun!
June 5, 2012 – (today) Desperate Ravings assignment #2, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 6, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #3, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 7, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #4, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 8, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #5, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 9, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #6
June 10, 2012 – Last Desperate Ravings assignment, #7
June 12, 2012 – Everything is due! Shortly thereafter we will finalize an additional $150 prizes, a personalized coaching call, and the possibility of Desperate Ravings – Flashback.
Or would you like a wider opportunity to express yourself, and share your ideas, to the greater Magic and gaming communities? Do you want to improve your communication skills or become a better writer? Or try your hand as a writer at all?
HOW ABOUT FREE STUFF?
DO YOU LIKE FREE STUFF?
Have we got some hoops for you to jump through this week!
A month or so ago I was on the phone with Adam, “The Sybs” Styborski, puppet master and proprietor of GatherringMagic.com; Adam and I were chatting about the quality of content on GM and areas where it could improve. One thing that Adam pointed out — that has been a refrain even when talking about some of my favorite writers on certain bigger sites —
… Isn’t the quality of ideas themselves, or the passion behind those ideas, but the qualities that make for a good — and consistent — Magic columnist.
Now this got the gears in my head turning.
I grabbed Evan Erwin to make sure the Shadow Cabinet / Parliament of Trees in Roanoke, VA were okay with a small collaboration with my friends at some of the up-and-coming sites.
All clear!
Now not every subscriber and follower loved the videos I posted last week; certainly they were not my best work, but that was the point — they weren’t supposed to be. It might surprise some of you to learn that most of what I write and do ends up on the floor. I think that the only way that you can get good at something is by doing it over and over, and that’s what I try to do. I write as many as 8,000 or even 12,000 words in a day, but professionally publish less than 8,000 words per week, so you do the math.
Now to Geordie’s point, the essential something that can make an entertaining writer — in whatever niche — is that “turn of phrase” … not just whether you agree with him or he is always publishing cutting-edge deck technology.
I can’t do much in terms of kindling your The Fire or improving the substance or your ideas (only the process by which you form them), but I can pass on two things that can help make you — if you are interested — into a consistent and desirable Magic content generating machine: 1) That “turn of phrase”, and 2) Consistency!
Here’s the thing: If you go back and read The Ferrett’s essays on producing content for Star City Games back in the early- and mid-2000s, you will learn something… Consistency is more-or-less the most important thing Magic websites need.
“My favorite writer is, undoubtedly, me. I find me very easy to edit, and me always makes the deadlines that I ask him to. Furthermore, if I’m short on good articles, me can usually pull one together with very little notice. Plus, I hear me always speaks well of myself.”
-The Ferrett, 11/19/04
One-of articles — especially great ones — are (or at least can be) great… But they can also set expectations that, long run, are impossible for a site to maintain.
In the same 11/19/04 Ask the Editor, The Ferrett criticizes “guy who has few ideas, but wants money” … and decries in particular that “Pros tend to be the worst at this – but who can blame them? The winner of the last Pro Tour knows darned well that if he wrote ‘How 2 not Seck N Xtendud’ on toilet paper, his articles would still get more hits than 99% of the PTQ-grinding articles out there. I can’t really blame ’em, but turning them down can sometimes backfire.”
So how do we solve this issue?
Star City hasn’t got any shortage of guys and gals who can turn in that turn of phrase eight years later.
As @FloresFacts reminds us, I constantly add and jettison to my algorithm.
One of my strategies is to steal / add / approximate the prose styles of writers I admire by using a specific exercise; I am going to share some iterations of this exercise over the next seven days.
You — if you are interested in awesome prizes, and / or making a go of becoming a featured writer on one of our sponsoring sites (itself an awesome prize) — are going to do them!
Each day, I am going to put up a short piece of prose, poetry, or song. It will be awesome. You will copy it down BY HAND, three times, and upload your work to the Desperate Ravings Facebook HOMEWORK page.
There will be seven such exercises.
But because I am a kind slavemaster, you get ten days to complete all seven.
As the exercises for the most part aren’t easy, if you can complete all seven in this relatively short time frame, you will show — in my opinion anyway — some of that capacity for consistency that is essential in a featured Magic writer.
If you can do them all, you will not be able to avoid adding tools that will help you ask questions, craft descriptions, develop characters, and make arguments with more beautiful, horrifying, clear — or when necessary, obfuscating — turn of phrase.
Our Sponsors:
Like I said earlier in the post, this idea came out of a conversation I had with Adam. I haven’t had a chance to work with Adam on anything before (despite our both being longtime writers on The Mother Ship DailyMTG), and I am excited to do something special this week. Thanks to Adam and GatheringMagic for participating, and sponsoring!
A month or two back, Jonathan Medina had the idea of resurrecting Flores Rewards. Gavin Verhey is in R&D lockdown, and we haven’t had a Flores Rewards hoop to jump through in over a year (despite certain proprietor’s “promises”) … Desperate Ravings seemed pretty Flores Rewards-ish, and I knew Medina would be excited to participate. He even came up with the name!
KYT has proven himself one of the most enthusiastic young influencers in the Magic community over the past few years, and single-handedly rallied the entire country of Canada around his black-and-blue lightbulb. Most recently, ManaDeprived was rewarded with a PT win when their Alexander Hayne spiked Barcelona with his magical Miracles. KYT was the first person I wanted to include; he quickly ponied up the dough.
… What dough?
Desperate Ravings Fabulous Prizes: There are at least $300 in fabulous prizes being awarded by our sponsors: GatheringMagic / Cool Stuff, Inc. LegitMTG (“what is LegitMTG?”) ManaDeprived / Face to Face Games
… and one priceless one from YT!
Over the course of the next five days, each of these sites is going to give out a $10 gift certificate to a lucky reader who:
Likes the DesperateRavings exercise of the day, and / or
Completes the DesperateRavings exercise of the day and uploads their three pages on our Facebook HOMEWORK page.
So if I were you — and I were interested in getting a $10 gift certificate — I would upload early and often!
Need some practice? Go like this blog entry now!
Anyway, that is $30 in prizes for the next five days, or the first $150.
At the end of the line — on June 13, 2012 — we are going to assess everyone who has completed all seven assignments.
At that point we will hand out three $50 gift certificates among any cats who have done all seven.
In the unlikely case that only one person has finished all the assignments? That lucky hard-working cat is going to claim all $150!
On top of the $150 from GatheringMagic, LegitMTG, and ManaDeprived, I am personally going to award one hour of coaching / consulting to a fortuitous finisher.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving Anyone that finishes all seven Desperate Ravings assignments is going to be eligible for a long-term / permanent writing gig on one of our sponsor sites. We don’t really know how this promotion is going to stick at this point, so we don’t know how that is going to shake out in its entirely, but LegitMTG’s Jonathan Medina has an idea he likes to call:
Desperate Ravings – Flashback
More on that when we get there!
Prizes, In Summary:
Five $10 gift certificates from GatheringMagic
Five $10 gift certificates from LegitMTG
Five $10 gift certificates from ManaDeprived
… Distributed randomly among those who Like and / or complete Desperate Ravings assignments
Three $50 gift certificates from GatheringMagic / LegitMTG / and ManaDeprived distributed among those who complete all seven Desperate Ravings assignments
One one-hour call from YT, to one all-seven-assignments completer as well.
And for those who want to land a long-term gig… the next step is: Desperate Ravings – Flashback!
Desperate Ravings Calendar:
June 4, 2012 – (today) Desperate Ravings assignment #1, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants from the good people at GatheringMagic, LegitMTG, and ManaDeprived!
June 5, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #2, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 6, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #3, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 7, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #4, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 8, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #5, $30 in gift certificates to Like-ers and contest participants
June 9, 2012 – Desperate Ravings assignment #6
June 10, 2012 – Last Desperate Ravings assignment, #7
June 12, 2012 – Everything is due! Shortly thereafter we will finalize the $50 prizes, coaching call, and the possibility of Desperate Ravings – Flashback.
Today’s Assignment – The First One’s Free
Since I already made you read 1,000 words explaining what Desperate Ravings is, I decided to be super kind on the first assignment. It’s a short segment from Gwen Stefani’s solo hit Early Winter.
What to Do:
Copy down the following short excerpt from Early Winter, 1) by hand, 2) three times.
Weird Note on Facebook: Facebook is weird. I mean we all love Facebook but it is em effin’ weird about some stuff. Ergo, we have two Facebook locations.
“Here is a picture of Tuna basking in the bright sun, carrying little Bella Flores on his great shoulders. He may have been pretending to be Hodor. God, I hope he was.” -Lan D. Ho
I first met Charles “Tuna” Hwa at an unsanctioned Sealed Deck Mirage tournament in Philadelphia, PA in 1996.
In those years — believe it or not — I had a high opinion of myself, and always felt like I should be doing better in whatever tournament I was in than maybe I was actually  doing in reality. I came up to the judge / scorekeeper in-between rounds maybe three or four rounds in and asked him who was doing better than me at that point.
He rattled off some names of people I probably knew then but don’t recall today, blah, Blah, and BLAH… and “Charlie”.
“Who’s Charlie?” I asked.
A boy I didn’t know — the tall, athletic, man who would be Tuna — was standing next to him, actually, smiled. He beamed at me, introduced himself, and gave me a wave.
I looked him up and down, replied:
“That’s not ‘Charlie’ … That’s Tuna.”
…
“You know,” I explained… “Like ‘Charlie Tuna.’ Like the fish.”
Charlie Tuna
And the name stuck.
From then on — to all our friends in Philadelphia and New York, the entire Magic universe (for Tuna would over the next few years become an important member of that cadre) — he was Tuna.
He was always a cad.
His last name was Hwa.
At some point he decided to adopt the gigantic phasing blue dude Taniwha as his personal avatar. “You know,” he’d say. “Taniwha… TunaHwa…” And then he’d smile… “I’m a 7/7 phasing fish!”
Taniwha
Tuna became one of my best friends.
He was the first one excitedly jumping up and down when I won my first PTQ a few months later. We formed Team Armageddon, and later Team Discovery Channel with Al Tran and Jeff Wu, plus loads of other names you may or may not recognize… Young Lee, Dan Holzer, Dan Bridy, Patrick Lennon Johnson. For a minute, road tripping one summer, we almost stole Brian Schneider from Team CMU!
“Can you imagine Erik Lauer telling half the anal sex jokes to Randy Buehler that you two have exchanged in the last half hour?” bschneid once asked. “But you guys are a lot more fun.”
It is hard to crystalize the experiences we shared in college for the next 2-3 years so I won’t bother to try. It was college, we screwed around playing Magic and video games and getting recruited to do WCW house shows at the height of Nitro and the Monday Night Wars and were overall terrible at girls… and he was one of my best friends.Â
A legit HB10 once asked me out for dinner my senior year of college. Stricken with one-itis, I had been pining after her for months actually, but SHE actually asked ME out. I wanted to play it cool (plus there was a sanctioned tournament that night). I told her some other time.Â
I went 0-3, trashing the best rating in the city at the time.
Tuna wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion. Then put it up on the Internet.
You can still read it on Google if you want, followed by a response by Tuna’s longtime roommate Al Tran [THE BALLAD OF MIGHTY FLORES]
A few years later, Tuna dropped out of Penn (for at least a little while) to join Psylum, Inc. the company that had bought The Magic Dojo from Frank Kusumoto. I was the Editor-in-Chief and later Editorial Director; Tuna was… I dunno. I think he was the Director of Business Development or something, but at some point our CEO had the bright idea to stick him in a van with our resident comics reviewer and in-house counsel (hi Brook!) and send them across the country on a comics-and-Magic-evangelism road trip called Asphalt Action. Tuna had convinced small companies like Astronauts in Trouble and big companies like DC Comics to donate literally thousands of dollars in graphic novels to us and our trip; WotC gave them Portal or Starter or whatever it is called to popularize Magic. They toured these United States handing comics and Magic cards out at comics and hobby shops, spreading and building up a culture that we all today love fiercely.
They totaled circa three vans along the way.
When he got back to New York, Tuna had two cell phones (one was on Sprint and one was on some better company… They wanted to have mobile phone redundancy seeing as they were going to be spending weeks and months in the corn fields of flyover states). Making fun of me because I had to wait around the office for a girl I had met the night before to call me back before squiring her off to one of the famous Matt Wang birthday parties at Citrus… Tuna tricked me into buying that Sprint phone off of him. Fucker. I still have the same phone number 12 years later.
Tuna (far right) at one of Matt Wang’s Citrus birthday parties along with Don Lim, Jeff Wu, Brook North, Wang, and Al Tran
When The Dojo went belly-up in 2000, Tuna stepped in as the interim Editor-in-Chief, and held the place together in-between my departure and the company’s re-launch under The Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy). Yeah, that’s who bought us.
Tuna was my roommate for a few months before having the good sense to go back to Penn and finish his degree; a Wharton undergraduate being more-or-less the most valuable kind of undergraduate degree you can have. He would later show me, first hand, just how valuable.
A couple of years later I got married. And again.
Tuna was a groomsman of mine at both the wedding I had in my apartment, and the lavish one my parents threw for me and Katherine (our “real wedding” -my parents) (“NOT our real wedding” – my wife) a few months later. Tuna was funny and brilliant and a devoted and loyal confidant. Tuna would go on to form Team Filipino Dress Shirt with John Shuler, Jeff Wu, and Jonathan Becker in the summer of 2002.
I got a job at an international public company in about 2003, and we had an opening in marketing about a year in; I had Tuna apply. That got him back in New York from Philly. Yay! About a year later, he was promoted to… you  know… being my boss. I am a marketing genius but he ran circles around me. He was that kind of miser.
It was while we were working there that Tuna — the Wharton-trained Marketing Director — taught me SWOT analysis and systematic thinking, incredibly powerful ways to organize my mind that have served me over and over since. He broke down Steve Nash’s second MVP season step-by-step and compared it to LeBron James’s same year. We pulled up their stats on ESPN. “They have about the same offensive output,” he taught me… “But Nash does it using half the possessions.”
I never looked at basketball the same way again.
Basketball is one of the things I am most passionate about, as a fan. He taught me to love it in a smarter way… a better way for me, and a better way period. Thank you Charles Hwa.
He was very good, very apt, a natural leader, and like I said a zillion times, one of my best friends.
After work one night in 2006, he graced the Top 8 Magic Podcast, reminisced a bit with me and BDM; talked about ye olde Ballad of Mighty Flores. Thank God for the Google! You can listen to his voice here.
Tuna was a huge sports fan. He taught me why people in South America and Europe love soccer, even though it makes no sense to an American. He loved sports themselves more than particular teams, and had an amazing eye for how to appreciate them… He had the enthusiasm of a fanboy, but the sober mind of an… I don’t know… statistical genius. He was occupying the next chair in that sports bar during Daniel Gibson’s epic game over the Detroit Pistons in 2007… The one that sent LeBron and my Cleveland Cavaliers into the NBA Finals. “That kid has ice water in his veins,” he nudged me as Boobie drilled a pair of free throws. “… Don’t know what the Spurs are going to do about him.”
He was a founding member of the New York Movie Klub, recruited by Lan D. Ho himself when he moved into Jon Finkel’s apartment back in 2008.
Tuna showed Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and The Wrestler before flying back to China, ostensibly to watch the Olympics first-hand. Though Tuna’s Movie Klub career was short, he is considered to have one of our group’s highest batting averages.
He decided to plant a flag in Beijing, and ended up earning an international MBA at Tsinghua University; where he met the love of his life, Valeria (herself an international traveler and South American transplant).
Tuna never stopped being dear to me — or any of us here in New York and Philadelphia — though we have seen him precious little in the last three or four years, while he studied and fell in love. He was back in the States last month; I chided him for skipping over New York during his visit. I did nothing but give my former roommate and boss good-natured beats from the moment I met him and stapled to him that fishy nickname that simply never went away.
What was the harm?
I always assumed he would move back to New York. I don’t know what he and Valeria ever speculated about their future, but to me it was always some scheme to get him back where he belonged. I got him back here the last time; and he was a Movie Klubber and everything.
Charles “Tuna” Hwa died last Sunday, doing what he loved most — playing basketball with his friends — via sudden heart attack. He was one of the most fun, most caring, most intelligent, and quickest to smile people I will ever meet. (Also an atrocious Magic player.) I look back on my life at this point, and I am pretty sure he was there every time something awesome happened to me. He was there the first time I won a PTQ. He was there the first time I got paid to write a Magic article; embarrassed, I tried to refuse (that’s not why I did these things!). Tuna thanked the nice man for me and put the boxes in my duffel bag. He was literally waiting for me, smiling in the doorway, as I walked into my first job. In New York City! At Origins that year, he — along with Pat Chapin — got on the ground, kowtowing the Wayne & Garth “we’re not worthy” routine, waiting for my name to be called for my first US Nationals Top 8 (though history remembers me being out at 9th place on breakers). Tuna LITERALLY WALKED INTO THE ROOM as I was getting to third base with a girl for the first time; obliviously he fell asleep in the other bed, ruining a perfectly good story. He was standing next to me when I got married to my actual best match, Katherine. And the second time (still Katherine). He was pumping the fist over a basket of fucking onion rings when my team locked the NBA East over the favored former champs. In six! He was reading a Wildstorm graphic novel during the commercials. It’s been a few years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he helped me soberly into a cab, the first time I got drunk.
If you are a younger player, you might not know how important Charles Hwa was to our culture, and the development of our online community in its formative years. He was not only one of my best friends, but whether you know it or not, he was your grandpappy — your sensei — at least for a little while.
Today’s videos are also out-of-step in terms of audio and visuals.
Oh well, I assume you will forgive me.
Speaking of forgiveness, Huntmaster of the Fells really undoes a lot of goofball play. That is a good Magic: The Gathering Card.
In these videos you will see (but not really love the narration of) the battle between ye olde Huntmaster of the Fells and new kid on the block, Blood Artist. Blood Artist tries his best, but let’s be honest, one of these cards costs twice as much mana as the other one and won its debut PT with a mirror match finals.
Huntmaster of the Fells
Cool Blood Artist play: At one point I smash my opponent with Bonfire of the Damned when he has Blood Artist equipped with Mortarpod. I mentally figure myself as taking four damage (one from the Mortarpod sacrifice, then three from the triggers on Blood Artist when his dudes die)… My opponent correctly (!) does not sacrifice the Blood Artist to Mortarpod. Why?
He wouldn’t have a Blood Artist in play to cash in the three one stack later!
So, I was wrong about taking four (took three instead). A more impulsive, greed motivated (but ultimately incorrect) opponent might accidentally just do one.
Cool Huntmaster of the Fells play: It is pretty easy to leave back spells to flip over Huntmaster of the Fells. Even mana-tapping-greedy folk like me can do it! You can use your mana to sacrifice creatures to Birthing Pod, or just cast a Restoration Angel on the opponent’s turn (ideally locking fingers with your Ravager of the Fells to set up more Huntmaster of the Fells triggers).
Sorry again for some sub-optimal video content. New computer / haven’t done this for a year / whatever assorted excuses.
So over the weekend I [presumably] melted yet another iMac hard drive by playing MTGO on Parallels.
This is possibly meaningless to you if you don’t own a Mac. Basically I slowed down / stopped making Magic videos about a year ago on account of it being cumbersome from a hardware standpoint. My wife, irate at the steaming slag heap that was once a glorious centerpiece of computing entertainment, instructed that I “get a PC and only play the Magic on it” … We are essentially a Mac household but I think it is no stretch at this point to say MTGO plays better on a PC than a Mac.
So I got this new laptop that I am reasonably happy with, and I decided to start taping MTGO videos again!
Yay!
My Star City fans will be so happy!
…
hmmm…
Long story short, I was a bit out of step in terms of audio and video on these vids, and didn’t realize until after I had “produced” like eight of them. Totally unsuitable for professional distribution, and way too much work for me to fix on the Mac (or force on Jesse Snyder or Jeremy Noell). So… In a fight between “sending the videos to the graveyard” or “throwing them up on YouTube so at least some of my good people will enjoy them” the latter prevailed.
So please take the next four or so blog posts in that light. In some wise these would have been good enough, I hope, but I am certainly not presenting them as such here and now, today.
Fair warning, a fair amount of these vids is just going to be out-of-sync voice-over of YT and a disembodied Hypercam dialog. To wit:
Big takeaways:
There will be at least four uncharacteristically content-rich blog updates here on FiveWithFlores and the FiveWithFlores YouTube page this week.
They will all be about Naya Pod.
I actually made an even clever-er deck that I am going to do an article on for Flores Friday.
There will be videos on the aforementioned deck-I-like-more-than-Naya-Pod circa Flores Friday or next Monday (Lauren’s pick / I guess it depends how fast I get them to her)
Today’s videos have this fellow featured quite prominently:
Hold on a sec… Is Zealous Conscripts a chick?
Game One, versus U/W Control In which Zealous Conscripts struts her shenanigans all over Consecrated Sphinx.
Game Two, versus U/W Control In which we encounter the hardest working Cavern of Souls in the history of Dominaria; and a U/W Venser, the Sojourner player learns who exactly has inevitability. Spoilers!
At least before we have a lot of tangible tournament results, I am thinking there are two main interesting cards to think about for Standard with Avacyn Restored:
Specifically, Cavern of Souls gives you another dual land to play first turn Delver of Secrets (and through a Mental Misstep, if that matters)… Plus you get to play Champion of the Parish for double the possible aggressive starts!
Now if you are trying to buff a Champion of the Parish you need to configure your deck list a little bit differently. The Delver deck is already chock full of Humans (Delver of Secrets and Snapcaster Mage, for instance, are both Humans)… But Geist of Saint Traft isn’t. I decided to go a little bit of a different direction and swap Geist of Saint Traft with Blade Splicer. Blade Splicer is a little bit weaker on offense (2 + 4, with the 4 evasive being a bit more damage than 1 + 3 and the 3 not evasive); but the 3 [Golem] striking first (and potentially generating a fine synergy with Intangible Virtue) makes for an elite defense.
Whether Intangible Virtue or Honor of the Pure is the right buffing enchantment is up for grabs, I think. It is a question of how much you care about Vigilance versus buffing Champion of the Parish; I have Honor of the Pure right now because this seems to be a bit of a “Champion” deck. I am sure you can see the hyper-aggressive starts like…
Champion of the Parish –> Gather the Townsfolk…
Or better yet:
Champion of the Parish –> Champion of the Parish + Delver of Secrets
I am not super satisfied with this pass right now. For one, I don’t even know which is the right two drop enchantment! Other things kind of up in the air…
2 Mana Leak + 2 Gut Shot… I am neither elite against G/R Ramp nor against other Delver decks in the main; when I was playing 2 Gut Shots in Baltimore I felt like a smart guy, but right now many Delver players are main decking threeGut Shots! I felt like Mana Leak was a compromise-able card based on my previous Cavern of Souls blog post (i.e. players like G3rryT and Jonny Magic are playing only two).
3 Blade Splicer or 3 Gather the Townsfolk? This one is pretty debatable. I went with 3 Gathers because we have shifted Cavern of Souls to a primary source of White mana… but it doesn’t actually cast a Gather the Townsfolk… Same reason I dropped the Moorland Haunt count by one (it doesn’t contribute to the Moorland Haunt activation). I guess you can cut a Gitaxian Probe… But that’s like my favorite card in Standard, so please don’t do that.
Obviously this version doesn’t have the “race you with an Invisible Stalker” functionality of the straight Delver deck; that said, I found Invisible Stalker to be the weakest card in straight Delver, worse than a Champion of the Parish, certainly, if you don’t have a Sword of War and Peace or a Pike.
The sideboard is medium-straightforward. The only weird card is Consecrated Sphinx. I actually kind of fell in love with that card in Delver playing a variation of Caleb Durward’s Delver list, whereas I give Jace, Memory Adept a rating of “uh… I guess it’s a card” in most situations.
I do think Mental Misstep is an absolute must for Delver, even though it is a bit weaker now that Cavern of Souls will be entering the Standard Arena… But if you watched Chi Hoi Yim work over Robbie Cordell in the finals of the Birmingham Open (and how could you not, with the attractive and charismatic Joey Pasco YT on the mic?) … You know what kind of havoc Mental Misstep can levy in the Delver mirror… Especially on the draw and when setting up Timely Reinforcements.
Speaking of which, a month or so ago I felt like the Delver mirror was my best matchup in Standard due to my figuring out Mental Misstep (and I know that is ironic as I finally lost the Delver mirror playing for Top 8, on camera)… and the truth is, my Invitational deck was nowhere near as prepared for other Delver decks as this one.
I think the tensions in Standard are going to be interesting. This version — whether you stay with Honor of the Pure or move [back] to Intangible Virtue — is pretty on-par with the “tokens” Delver decks in terms of tokens production + buffing (they are going to have some mix of Midnight Haunting and Lingering Souls instead of Gather the Townsfolk and Blade Splicer), but one Golem can rumble pretty adequately with multiple regular tokens, and you can use your Phyrexian mana to set up a favorable Gather, don’t forget. On balance you have much faster and more explosive mana, and you have literally twice the aggressive draws with Champion of the Parish to get in early damage and put the opponent (or any opponent) on his heels.
Again, just a first pass, but certainly adequate for… say… the first week’s FNM.
I am pretty sure if I were playing in the Rhode Island Open this weekend I would be playing four copies of each of Delver of Secrets, Champion of the Parish, and Cavern of Souls though… Those cards are too good and too fast to ignore, plus they are great together and make for wild synergies with token producers and everything else you want to do with the best deck since Caw-Blade Exarch Twin.
