Saturday, July 09, 2005

Everybody picks on Sturgeon

In an interview with science fiction writer Ted Sturgeon the interviewer mentions that 90% of science fiction is crud. Sturgeon replies with what has become known as Sturgeon's Law: "...90% of everything is crud!"

Since then it's been popular to be a pessimist: to claim Sturgeon was too conservative in his percentages. I'm not that down on things, except about magic.

Magicians delude themselves. Guitarists know, for the most part, when they are not Eddie Van Halen. Hack painters are pretty much aware they are hacks. Magicians think that a day with an Invisible Deck makes them ready for the big time.

There are a number of magic blogs out there. There are maybe two that have consistent magic content and are consistently good. Other "magic" blogs either don't deal in magic much, aren't very good, or leave for really squirrelly reasons (or no reason at all). One popular blog had the tag line "For serious magicians only." As best I could tell this had to be a joke because he was never serious and never had magic content.

Magic blogs...Now there's a recipe for disaster: combine the internet - where any anonymous preteen with unresolved parental issues can share an opinion with the world, no matter how twisted - with magic, which is a magnet for social misfits.

90%? Don't be such an optimist.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lovely, i just had to comment XD
though you probably will never see this....

Anonymous said...

And what makes you think I wouldn't see it?

Anonymous said...

Guess it's not that hard to see if comments were left XD