My series of short movies about videogames is being screened together for the first time as part of a really fun event on Saturday April 8th in Toronto. It’s put on by the dorkArmy crew at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street W., 7:30pm, $5) — come for the vids, stay for the Drunken Dance Dance Revolution & karaoke! There’s also a screening at the Blim Art Gallery in Vancouver on Monday May 8th. I’ll be going to both and really looking forward to them — as well as six videos I’ve released on the site and elsewhere, there’s a brand new minidocumentary piece about two indie game makers. Click through to see one of the series, “Mark Slutsky Reviews the Nintendo DS.”
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Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography isn’t just a title tease: it puts out plenty of sleaze and theft in a smart and funny queer adventure story. The narrator puts his foot through a television, pulls together a genderfucked super hero team and launches a figurative and literal attack on the straight man’s world. Starting life as an online novel, it’s become a beautifully designed physical object courtesy of Vancouver’s Loose Teeth Press. Joey is launching it with a reading with Derek McCormack at Toronto’s This Ain’t The Rosedale Library Bookstore (481-A Church St) on Tuesday, March 21, 7 p.m. Free.

I asked him a few questions over email about the book.

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By Hamish MacDonald

Back in 2000, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. It’s all good news for us independent publishers.

The original article was called "DIY Book Production." Aside from being a clunky term, you now have more power than that: You can be your own press. I now produce my own books at home from start to finish, and in this article will explain what I’ve had to learn and acquire in order to do that.

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For those of you who’re still in an Oscar mood, Susan and I made this fake movie preview that asks: what if the plucky heroine from Million Dollar Baby was into the Dance Dance Revolution videogame instead of boxing?

This is one of the pieces from my new video series about videogames, Pleasure Circuit Overload. I’m looking for screening possibilities over the next little while so let me know if you know of a good series — I have DVDs I’m sending out. I’ll be posting other new shorts from the series in the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Click through to watch the three minute vid.
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