Pre-Climax Summary

“Oh, shit. I’m gonna cum!”

No. Not that type of Pre-Climax Summary.

Jonah B. writes:

I wanted get your opinion on something I see as somewhat of a trope in magic. The trope is to summarise all of the strong, fair points of a trick to the participant just before the climax. For example, 'Remember, you shuffled the cards, you thought of any card at random, you shuffled the cards again and I never went near the cards. I was blindfolded and upside-down the whole time, and I have been illiterate since birth, so even if I did see the card I wouldn't be able to read it...' and so on. It seems to be common wisdom among magicians that this kind of summary of the 'fair' moments makes the trick stronger. I see the logic of this approach, and I've done it many times myself, especially as, in my experience, some participants actually do forget the fact that they shuffled the cards etc. Stylistically, though, I wonder if it comes across a little cliche, or at worst, desperate. If the emphasis on the fair points of the trick is strong enough throughout the routine, does this summary need to happen at the end? I'm torn, because it seems to make the trick seem stronger, but the experience feel worse. In other art forms where the audience is called upon to remember earlier parts of the narrative (I'm thinking in theatre, film or music), allusions or refrains that echo previous elements of the story seem to be more artistically satisfying than direct flashbacks or repetition ('Remember when that happened?'). 

What do you think? —JB

This is a great question.

I find the Pre-Climax Summary to be something of a necesasry evil at times. It frequently has to be done to remind someone of the conditions of the effect. But it also does come across as semi-pathetic in practice. And it certainly gives the performance the rhythm of a magic trick, rather than a more normal type of human interaction.

Sometimes you can’t get around the PCS, but I’ll give you some potential alternative ideas and advice.

Self-Assurance

I fucking hate mayonaisse.

Okay, Andy, that was an unexpected left turn. Where is this going?

Stay with me.

At a restaurant I’ll frequently find myself ordering a sandwich and saying, “No mayo.”

And then I get the sandwich and it’s fucking slathered with that shit.

This happened enough times that I would find myself reiterating it when I ordered. “You got that I wanted that without mayo, yes?”

That’s fine. But I could tell that asking that would annoy some people. As a competent person myself, I get it. It can be annoying when people treat you as if you’re incompetent. And asking for something with “no mayo” and then clarifying “no mayo” 14 seconds later suggests you don’t think the person is super competent.

But the issue is, there ARE a lot of incompetent people and I don’t know who I’m dealing with the moment I step into your sandwich shop.

So I came up with this technique.

“I’ll take the club sandwich. No mayo on that. And… I’ll have the fries. And a Coke please. I think that’s it.” Then, before the waiter leaves or I walk away from the counter, I say, “Oh… wait… did I mention ‘no mayo’ on the sandwich?”

You see? Now my message isn’t: “I think you might have screwed up.” It’s: “I think I might have screwed up. Can you reassure me?”

You can do something similar with the PCS.

Instead of saying, “And remember, you shuffled this deck before we even started.”

When you get to the climax you can say, “And if you look at the cards—oh hold on… I had you shuffle the deck at the start, yes? Okay, good. I thought so, but I wasn’t 100% sure. This will be much crazier knowing you shuffled at the beginning. Okay, so if you look at the cards…,”

That’s the idea. Instead of reminding you, I’m assuring myself.

This won’t work if you have a whole litany of stuff to summarize. But you can use it to clarify an important condition.

Clarifying Conditions

Last year I wrote a post (and a couple of follow-ups) on the biggest takeaway I’d learned in my time testing magic. And that was the idea that you cannot really overly clarify the conditions of an effect. People forget too easily. And if you take the standard (bad) magician advice that you shouldn’t tell them what to notice(e.g., “Don’t tell them your hand is empty before you put it in your pocket. Simply show it empty”) then they are even more likely to forget, becuase you didn’t mention what they were supposed to take note of.

That’s the whole point of the Pre-Climax Summary in the first place: reminding them of the important stuff they might have forgotten.

However, this is less necessary if you take the time to properly note these things as they’re happening.

Don’t be afraid to do this. If you’re the person demonstrating some incredible power, the EXACT thing you would do is make sure people understood all the conditions along the way that make this particularly impossible.

Third-Party Summarizing

But often, I’m not the one demonstrating an incredible power. In those cases, it might come off as weird for me to overly clarify the conditions as we go if I’m trying to play the part of someone who is also “along for the ride,” as opposed to the person driving the bus.

Fortunately, in those situations its even easier to justify the ending summary. You just treat it like a checklist to make sure you’ve done everything correctly.

So, for example, if I’m showing them some sort of psychological test, or we’re following a ritual my grandfather wrote in the back of one of his weird books, or we’re plaing an obscure game, then I can pause before the ending and go over the instructions or the rules or whatever and act as if I’m just clarifying to myself that we did this right. The instructions or rules don’t necessarily have to be phsycially in front of me. If they’re not I can just act like I’m running through them in my head.

“Okay… let’s see if we go this right. So we started by shuffling the cards, yes? And then you freely eliminated one of the the halves? Okay. So then we cut the remaining cards into four smaller piles. Then we made that blood sacrifice to the Guardian of the Dark Water Bog. Okay… looks like we got all that right. Let’s see what happened…. the four aces! Wow!”

Minimize

“And you shuffled. And you stopped whenever you wanted. And you cut the cards at places you chose. And you turned over the cards yourself.”

Does all of that matter? Probably not. Don’t summarize every last detail. Just the imporant ones. In this case, all that likely matters is that they remember they shuffled the deck at the start of the trick. Pointing out all those other details will just bury that most imporant point.

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The nice thing about performing socially for friends and family is that you usually get a feel for the type of people who don’t need you to do the pre-climax summary because they were attuned to everything all along.

If at all possible, roll it into the presentation, But if that’s not possible I probably wouldn’t elminate entirely. It’s perhaps better to come off as pedantic than to waste their time with a trick they can’t fully appreciate because they forgot some element of the trick that really makes it sing.

Dead Goose

Anthony O. writes:

So in April, my best friend gave me a late Christmas present in the form of Sherlock Holmes themed playing cards with different things on each suit.

She specifically asked me if I could come up with a trick with them. I said "Yes" because a lot of really basic ideas came to mind but I quickly decided I wanted to go bigger and do something truly inexplicable because she's important to me, she's never seen me do anything that extensive, and it's rare to get an opportunity to do a magic trick with a gift someone gave you.

The first thing that came to mind was forcing multiple cards to make a story. Like I'd have her pick a victim, killer, witness, weapon, and location. The only problem with that is that the deck isn't as straightforward as Clue cards where you have an equal number of people, weapons, and locations.

Here's what I counted:

• 28 Characters (30 if you include the Jokers)

• 12 Objects

• 6 Animals

• 6 Locations

So I was kind of stuck on how to force different things in a way that feels natural. If there were equal numbers of each type of thing, I could just use the same force for everything but because there's so few locations and objects compared to characters, I'd have to do something different for those and using multiple different card forcing procedures just seems excessive. I'm also having trouble coming up with a good reveal. I thought about doing something similar to your Humanity's Twins trick where her choices match up with something in an "unreleased" Holmes story or a fanfiction or something.

Another idea I had was to use "deductive reasoning" as a presentation and do something similar to your Closed Circle trick. So I'd get a few people involved and have them each select character cards and do some sort of real-time murder mystery with them.

I'm just not really sure what direction to take this trick and wanted to see if you had any ideas off the top of your head. I don't expect you to completely write out the trick (unless you want to of course) but just wanted to see if you had any ideas or suggestions to get the ball rolling since I want to do something special and don't want to waste this opportunity. —AO

You’re thinking along the same lines I would be thinking. Here’s exactly what I would do. I would first go and buy another deck of those cards. Having duplicates of something she doesn’t suspect you have duplicates of can be very useful.

I would force a card on her. I would take advantage of the duplicate I had and use that for some form of an ultra-fair force that involved a free choice at some point along the way. For example, by cutting the deck in half, in a way which leaves one of your force cards in either pile, you can fairly let them eliminate either half of the deck and then perform the force with the remaining half. You can make it clear that whichever half is eliminated will be out of play. They will remember that very fair elimination and will have a hard time getting around that, especially when they’re not conceiving of duplicates being in play.

So I’d force a card and have it hidden away without me knowing what it is (perhaps without her knowing what it is as well).

“I was really happy you got me this deck because it goes with something I’ve been looking into. Usually, card tricks involve sleight-of-hand or something. But there is a branch of card magic that actually uses techniques similar to what Sherlock Holmes used: observation, deduction, and reasoning. And I’m going to try and use those techniques to determine what card you picked.”

I would then have a group of cards chosen in some way. Perhaps cut the deck in thirds and then force one with equivoque. It doesn’t have to be super strong because it’s not going to be the focus of what they remember.

“Okay, these cards will be our clues. We can set the rest aside. But not all clues are equal. Very few are actually important. Some are red herrings. The key is being able to identify which is which. So we’ll use your choices to identify which of these clues are important.”

I would then do some sort of mixing procedure that leaves a certain pre-determined group of cards face-down. Think Shuffle-Bored. Think David Regal’s Letter Perfect. Think John Bannon’s Origami folding procedure. (I think those are all more or less the same sort of thing, but look a little different.)

So now you push aside all the cards other than the five or six cards that your spectator has seemingly chosen as the “important” clues.

“Okay, okay. Let’s see. We have a violin, we have a butcher’s cleaver, we have John Clay, a waterfall, and a dead goose. Hmm….”

I’d spend a few moments examining the “clues” and then look up, “Ah! I know what it is. You have the… the 4 of Clubs! Elementary!” She’d remove the card, showing I was correct.

“A very simple deduction. We had the violin and John Clay, of course. So that was making me think a red card. But then we had the waterfall, and the cleaver, and the dead goose. So then it was clear it was the 4 of Clubs.”

This will likely get a blank look.

“Okay, I didn’t really use deductive reasoning. I tried. But honestly these clues made no sense to me. But then I remembered that story. That famous Sherlock Holmes story. The one with John Clay, a waterfall, a cleaver, and a violin. And also a dead goose. You don’t know that story? It’s a good one.”

I’d walk over to my bookshelf and take down a book

“Yeah, this is the one. I’m pretty sure I remember the ending.”

And I’d flip to the last page of the book and rapidly read the last paragraph.

Holmes leaned back in his chair, a faint smile playing on his lips as Mrs. Hudson gathered the cards. The room was silent for a moment, the weight of revelation hanging in the air. Mrs. Thompson's eyes met Holmes's with a mixture of awe and gratitude. "The Four of Clubs," he stated definitively, confirming the unspoken truth that lingered between them. The flicker of the gaslight caught the glint in his eyes, and with that, the curtain descended on yet another chapter in the chronicles of the great detective.

“See, that’s how I knew. I just remembered this story.”

---

For me, that would be the right mixture of amazing and silly. And it’s the type of trick that grows in impossibility the more they think of it.

I might not actually reveal the card myself. I might have it just as the climax at the end of the book. I’d have to give it more thought.

And yes, I’m suggesting you make a hard-copy version of a fake Sherlock Holmes story. You could use AI to do it chapter by chapter, it wouldn’t have to make complete sense. And then print up a single copy. There are plenty of places online you can do that. Here’s one. You could bang it out in an evening, and it wouldn’t be that expensive.

That’s the route I’d take.

Justification as Presentation

Joe M. writes:

My favourite maxim in magic is this:

"If you cannot hide it, paint it red."

Well - one of my interests is philosophy. And I was recently looking up the work of the philosopher David Chalmers. In the 90's - the most widely cited philosophy paper was one by David Chalmers called The Extended Mind.

In the paper - he argues that when you use either a phone or a notebook to remember something it becomes a part of your mind. 

Not just as a metaphor - but literally.

Here is a 5 mins clip where he explains his reasoning:

I wonder if this sort of idea could be used to justify having a spectator write something down in a mentalism trick?

You could say you want the spectator to remember something as part of their unconscious mind rather than their conscious mind. And then go into the spiel above. Perhaps it is easier to read a thought when it is buried in the unconscious?

If you watch the clip above - you can see how it would work well as the opening presentation to a mentalism trick where the spectator writes something down.—JM

Yeah, this is a good idea.

That video itself is a specifically good justification for why you might have someone write something in the notes field of their phone, which is a methodology I’ve been seeing fairly frequently recently.

But really I just wanted to use Joe’s email as a chance to talk about justifications more generally.

Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about….

The best justifications are disguised as presentation.

Here’s what I mean. I recently saw someone “read someone’s mind” and he went into it saying something like, “Often when people think of ‘mind reading’ they think someone can imagine any thought and the mind reader can pluck it out of their brain. But that’s not how it works. We need to get you to focus more directly on a word. Writing it down is one way to properly focus…,” etc., etc.

The message there is: “Here’s why I’m not just having you think of a word and telling you what it is.” But I think, ideally, that shouldn’t be the magician’s focus.

The justification shouldn’t come off as: “Here’s why I’m not doing X.”

It should come off as: “Here’s why I am doing Y.”

So instead of saying: “I can’t have you just think of a word. I need to have you write it down so I can focus your mind properly.”

You say something like, “When we write something down, it puts that information in our mind in a way that just thinking about it never could. There was this research study where they had people write down a phone number three times, or repeat it in their head 20 times. The group that wrote it down had far greater recall of the information when tested later on. Writing is both a physical and mental activity, so when something is written it becomes—in a way—highlighted in the mind. It makes it much easier to recall and project that information. I’ll show you something cool you can do. I want you to write down…” etc., etc.

Do you see the difference there?

The first way, I’m giving the audience an “excuse” as to why they need to write the word down.

The second way, I’m telling them something about the uniqueness of how the brain processes the actions of writing words. And then I’m demonstrating that. I’m not making any excuses. So it feels like my focus is only on this interesting thing I have to show them.

By giving the justification as presentation, it prevents the question of, “Can you do it without me writing it down?” from really ever coming up. It wouldn’t make sense to ask that given what I’m supposedly demonstrating to them.

Lead with the reason why, not the reason why not.

And if all you have is a reason “why not” then try to turn that into a reason “why.”

This might be confusing, so here’s another example:

“If I ask you to just think of a word, there’s a chance I could guess what that word is based on knowing you. So we’re going to have you choose a word randomly by flipping through this book.”

That’s a justification. That’s an excuse. That’s a reason “why not.” A reason why you’re NOT just letting them think of a word.

“Have you read this book? No? Consider yourself lucky. It sucks. In June of last year, I went on a 3-week hike on this offshoot of the Appalachian Trail with a couple of friends. And this book was all we had between us to pass the time. We thought there would be more opportunity to connect to the internet via our phone, so we didn’t really bring much else with us to keep us entertained. My friend had a copy of this book and we would just read it out loud to each other every night. Putting on all the voices. Eventually acting out whole scenes together just for something to do. We went through it at least a dozen times. We made up a sequel as we walked. It was a whole thing. I bought a copy just because I have good memories associated with it, even though the book blows. What’s weird though is that because we were so immersed in this stupid book for those weeks, I’ve noticed a bizarre connection to the material. It’s really strange. It doesn’t always work, but let’s try. Flip through the book and think of any word, go for something sort of interesting.”

That’s a presentation. That’s a reason “Why.” That’s a way to keep the spectator from thinking, “Can I just think of any word in the world?” without specifically focusing them on the fact that they can’t just think of any word in the world.

Dustings #98

The Do Not Eat Imp

From the toe of your new sneakers, a silica gel packet falls to the floor.

“Oh damn. Sweet,” you say as you take the packet and tear the top open and go to dump it in your mouth.

Your friend grabs your arm. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s cool. I’ll show you.” You start to lift the packet to your lips again.

Your friend stops you again. “It specifically says ‘Do Not Eat’ on there.”

“Oh, I know. Yeah, don’t eat this. It will kill you,” you say as you dump the packet in your mouth and swallow.

“It actually doesn’t taste awful, like you might expect.”

Your friend stares at you.

“Okay, here’s the deal. For the past… almost 20 year—well, closer to 18 I guess—I’ve been building up an immunity to silica gel. You see… if you can get past the toxic properties, it actually has some really interesting side effects.”

You then proceed to read their thoughts, levitate, or move an object with the power of your mind.

Candy filled silica packets are available here.

If you’re worried about your dumb friend actually believing you and maybe poisoning themselves, you don’t have to worry. Silica gel is non-toxic. It’s just a choking risk for little kids.

Thanks to Kyle O. for tipping me off to this product and suggesting its use as an Imp.

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Does anyone know of a good locking drawer box? I have an idea for a trick with one. What I mean is something like this, but that locks so that it’s examinable/handleable by the audience.

Or maybe you’re someone who could make one?

---

That reminds me, I’m going to put out a call for any regular readers who are also craftsmen or artisans in some respect. It’s been a couple of years since I asked about this, but if you have a skill that might be useful in the production of props/gimmicks/etc., let me know. Now that I’ve started producing one-off tricks for supporters, I will have the opportunity to maybe take advantage of some of your skills in the future. You’ll have to be able to produce items at scale, but at a relatively small scale (more like 100-200 than 10,000). If you have an expertise or proficiency in anything you think might be useful and would want to partner up on something, let me know.

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A couple good suggestions from Pete “Red-Red” McCabe inspired by yesterday’s post.

One thing I used to do to deal with my nerves was to open with a version Nick Brown’s Wonderland Dollar, because: you do not do anything secret. The audience sees everything you do. The result is not actually impossible but it really looks like it is.

You can not get caught.

I found this quite effective in getting me over the initial bump of nervousness. If I was going to do a few card tricks I would start with Gemini Twins for the same reason.

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If you buy any new magic from the big magic retailers over the next couple of weeks, you’re a sucker. Wait for the black friday deals where you will undoubtedly get some bonuses for spending your money. The Jerx… saving you money. Just call me…

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This is an interesting video by Lloyd Barnes.

And yet, it’s also sort of depressing that we’re now trying to expose a trick before it even fucking happens.

I’m going to up the ante. I’m going to expose a trick before it’s even conceived of.

Here’s how it’s done: A double lift and the spectator has an identical twin who was given up for adoption as an infant that he doesn’t know about.

The Attitudinal Key to Social Magic

I’ve often written that in order to strengthen the casual feel of a trick and to make it so the interaction comes off as more genuine, you need to eliminate the theatrical trappings that so often go along with the performance of a magic. The overly-rehearsed patter, the bad jokes, the obvious magic props, etc.

But that’s the easy part.

The most important—and for some the hardest—things to eliminate to give your magic a more “normal” quality is going to be the feelings of fear and discomfort. Audiences can smell this all over you, and it completely undercuts a naturalistic style of performance.

I was listening to the Fly on the Wall Podcast which is hosted by Dana Carvey and David Spade where they talk to people from Saturday Night Live. On Amy Poehler’s episode, she says this about hosting SNL...

If you don’t look like you’re relaxed or having fun, the audience gets very stressed. When I see hosts and they’re either nervous, or stressed… it’s like, “Oh no!” I get so stressed [by them]. Because you are hosting a party. You’re supposed to look like you’re having fun. […] It’s the hardest piece to learn because you’re pushing or you're nervous or your head’s somewhere else. And then when you actually relax, the audience just relaxes with you.

This is so true in magic as well. If you’re doing your ambitious card routine and your hands are shaking and you’re clearly nervous… you have stripped the moment of any magic and whatever story it is you’re trying to tell. Even if your “story” is as basic and dull as “I’m a magician with the power to make cards rise to the top of the deck.” The only story the audience will perceive is, “This guy is a nervous wreck and I better smile along and encourage him or he’s going to totally fall apart.” You take away their ability to get lost in the experience because they have to babysit what they perceive as your fragile ego.

So above everything, whether you’re going for a casual style of social magic, or an over-the-top immersive style, you need to find a way to eliminate fear from your performances.

How do you do this? I’m not sure, because this isn’t an issue I deal with regularly.

And I don’t know that there’s one “answer.” I mean, I think there’s an answer for each person, but I don’t think there’s a “general” way to eliminate fear and nerves. (If there were, people wouldn’t struggle with fear and nerves.) But here are some thoughts.

Don’t push the boundaries of your skill set when you perform. If you’re nervous about performing in general, don’t compound that by trying to perform something that you’re not completely comfortable with. If you do, you’re dealing with two sets of nerves instead of one. There is so much strong self-working or nearly self-working magic out there, you don’t need to push yourself to go and perform something you’re not comfortable with in order to really entertain or fool people.

Feel the fear and do it anyway. I know a lot of people who get nervous when they show someone a trick… and so they only show someone a trick a few times a year. You’re never going to break the cycle that way. For most people, the more you perform, the more you will trust yourself and the less the nerves will affect you. Perform daily for a couple of months and just resign yourself to the fact that you’re probably going to suck while you do. You will almost certainly come out the other side more confident and less fearful in performance.

Don’t fight the fear. When you feel it coming on, note it in your mind and accept it. Trying to fight it and telling yourself to calm down is a sure way to amplify the negative feelings. This is true pretty much in all facets of life.

Contextualize the nervousness. If you don’t say anything about the nerves, then you’re going to look like someone who is worried about impressing the person you’re performing for with your magic trick. But if you weave your nerves into the storyline of your performance, you can make them congruent with the narrative you’re trying to tell.

• “Okay, this guy cheated my friend out of $2500 in a poker game. This weekend we’re trying to get him back. I have a plan for how we could swindle him, but I get super nervous thinking about executing it. Can I try this idea out on you to work some of the nerves out of my system?”

• “I have this audition for a super exclusive magic club coming up next week. I’m really anxious about it. Can I try something out with you to see how it goes?”

• “Something strange is going on. It’s got my nerves on edge, but it’s also made me hyper-sensitive. My hands are even shaking. It’s like this weird sense of… I don’t know…a type of power. Can I show you?”

Doing something like this will allow you to disguise your real nerves in the story of the effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if having this safety valve built into your presentation actually diminished your nerves significantly, to the point where you need to start feigning a little fear to keep it consistent with your story.

Keep perspective. It’s just magic tricks. It’s just entertainment. The less you go into this seeking validation, the less your ego is on the line, the fewer nerves you’re likely to have.

Emerge & See Contact

This is a bad idea that you probably shouldn’t do. It comes to us by way of Eli “Quarter Horse” Bosnick.

Long ago, I posted another trick you should never do: Bill to Woman’s Vagina. That’s something I didn’t think anyone would actually ever try—most magicians can’t get close to a woman, much less a vagina—but I still put the disclaimer not to do it just so I didn’t get sued by some dumb oaf who tried it and ended up getting a bill riddled with god knows what up the vagina of the prostitute he pays to pretend to be his girlfriend.

This is an idea that may already be out in the magic community, but I haven’t seen it, nor has Eli. And, while I don’t think you should ever use this technique, I’m putting it out because at least if you read it from me, you’ll be reading it from someone who is straight-up calling you a creep if you misuse it, rather than someone who is like, “Here’s a good idea. Go nuts.”

Here’s the idea as Eli wrote it up to me…

So this peek/preshow thing is for a very specific situation that mentalists/magicians find themselves in quite a bit. You ask to borrow an  iphone, praying to whatever dead gods you worship that it picks up the nfc chip you hid wikitest or inject in only to discover that the phone is locked.

Now what usually happens at this point is you go “Oh it’s locked. Can you unlock it?”, they say “If you're a magician can’t you just guess the password” and then you fake a laugh while trying to kill Myke Philips with one of your three wishes. [A comment so inside magic that even I don’t get it.] Well THIS is what you can do instead. 

You swipe up. Tap “Emergency” in the bottom left corner of the screen, then tap “Medical ID” in the same place. You’ll be presented with a screen that looks like this:

Now I should point out a couple things: 

1. That black spot is the emergency contact’s phone number. I’ve blacked it out in the screenshot for obvious reasons

2. What you're seeing here is about the MINIMUM amount of information you’ll see here. Most med ID screens also include blood type, medications, allergies etc. The vast majority will also include birthday.

Best of all the chances that MOST iphone users don’t have this on their phone are relatively slim. Med ID is part of new iphone set up that very few people skip. Of the 10 people I called after figuring this out every single one of them had some information on there. 

There you have it. Any time you’re alone with someone’s phone, or you have some excuse to be futzing around with it in front of them, you likely have access to some information about them.

That information might be pretty basic. For instance, if I got a peek at Eli’s info I could later “intuit” his age, his wife’s name, and that he weighs as much as 1/4 of a horse.

Getting this info is, I think, sort of ethically ambiguous. But the problem becomes that the info could possibly veer into stuff that’s clearly none of your fucking business.

Here are the fields people might fill out in the Medical ID section…

• Legal Name

• Date of Birth

• Medical Conditions

• Medical Notes

• Allergies & Reactions

• Medications

• Blood Type

• Organ Donor

• Weight

• Height

• Primary Language

• Emergency Contacts

A more fully filled out ID screen might look like this:

Now, the truth is, you probably wouldn’t be very interested in the more sensitive data here anyways. At least, you wouldn’t be interested in those things for magic purposes. You probably wouldn’t be saying things like: “Yes… yes… it’s becoming clear to me now… I’m getting the sense you… hmmm…you take… Prevastatin. It’s all coming into focus for me now. You put it…wait, no… you don’t shove it up your asshole… you put it in your mouth, I’m sensing.”

So if you could control yourself and just do this to peek someone’s birthday and maybe get their spouse’s name or something like that, then I think that could be morally justifiable. That information is publicly available, and if you were to research someone to find those things out for the sake of a trick, I wouldn’t see an issue with that. So I don’t really have a problem with obtaining that information this way. But that’s assuming you can keep your eyes on those things and not go digging through their digital medicine cabinet.

Thanks to Eli for sharing this and empowering creep magicians everywhere!

Twenty Years

20 years ago this week, a plucky, handsome, young upstart named me, went onto Blogspot, chose the worst color palette they had, and started a blog called The Magic Circle Jerk.

You can read the full story of that blog by scrolling wayyyyy down on this one to December 2015. That month tells the full story of that site through a daily advent calendar structure. (The old blog itself no longer exists.)

When that site started, a lot of my content was making fun of The Magic Café. That’s back when the Café was relevant. Well known magicians would post there and do monthly Q and As. There were other message boards devoted to magic, but none were as big as the Café. It was a perfect subject to write about because it was relatively popular and it was a total clusterfuck of a place. I don’t know that we’ll ever see the likes of it again.

At the time, my issues with the Café were always handled publicly. Their issues with me weren’t handled publicly. They weren’t even handled with me. They only talked about me and got hysterical in their private Café Staff section of the message board. Which is just as well. If Steve Brooks had ever written me an email and said, “Believe me… no one knows better than I the failures of the Café. You’re right that we shouldn’t have arbitrary standards that are applied haphazardly.” That probably would have been the end of The Magic Circle Jerk. And this site never would have happened. I never would have become the most prolific writer in the history of magic.

No, if that had happened, I’d probably be working at Cold Stone Creamery. Smoking fentanyl. Mixing the fentanyl into the ice cream with those little spatulas like I’m busting up a Heath bar.

Yeah, I’d probably be blowing any guy in the Cold Stone bathroom for $5 who says the secret phrase (“What that mouth do?”). Cold ice cream and warm spunk drying together on my apron.

Look, there’s no doubt things worked out for the best. I’m just saying things could have easily gone another way.

One of my favorite stories about the types of intellects behind the scenes at the Café is the Pornolizer Story. I don’t know if I’ve told this one before.

On January 5th of 2004, I was mentioning my New Year’s resolutions and I wrote:

My other resolution is not to make fun of Steve Brooks and The Magic Cafe so much. They look like they've made some recent changes that make the site actually pretty good. Take a look.

And “Take a look” was a link.

Now, to explain the joke, there used to be this site called The Pornolizer. (There still is, in fact, it just doesn’t work all that well these days.)

What the pornolizer would do is take any URL you put in it and spit out a version of the same site with a bunch of dirty words in it.

Here’s what this site looks like when pornolized.

The pornolizer no longer works very well. It was really designed around 2003 internet conventions. And at that time, it worked pretty well. All the links would work, and the design stayed consistent. But it was also just randomly putting in dirty words, so it was kind of clear there was no human thought behind it.

Now look, I’m going to make an exception, if you were born and your parents accidentally put your head in one of those machines from the 70s that scrambles an egg while it’s still inside its shell, and your brain has been whipped into a frothy lather, then MAYBE you would look at the “pornolized” Magic Café and not know that this was something done automatically and arbitrarily. But even then, you probably wouldn’t be fucking dumb enough to think I had gone in and edited every post on the Café. And yet that’s exactly what some of the staff there thought happened.

In their secret back-room forum, back in 2004, genius Scott Guinn wrote:

That’s right. He literally thought I had gone and “stolen content” and “made my own site” and not only edited every post on the Cafe, but also every site that was linked to from the Cafe. What a perfectly reasonable assumption.

Harry Murphy, a member of the Cafe “Staff” (and no-doubt Mensa as well) gives us his take…

Oh, come on, Harry. Be fair. With a quarter of a million posts on the Cafe at the time, if I had spent just 30 seconds reading and editing each post, then I could have gotten the whole site done in just 86 days of working 24/7.

Fortunately, “Grammar Supervisor,” Jon Gallagher comes in speaking some sense…

Actually, this was more insulting to me. The idea that I might spend three months of my life working on an alternate “dirty” version of The Magic Cafe from scratch makes me insane. But the idea that it would take me a fucking half hour to copy and paste a URL makes me sound damn near braindead.

Jon wasn’t done. He reached out to his lawyer.

That’s right! He suggested trying to get my site taken down as “child pornography.” Let me see if I can understand the logic here… Because the Cafe sometimes “refers to kids” then me putting the Café URL in this third-party site that randomly inserts words like “muff-muncher” and “finger-blast” into websites MIGHT fall under child pornography laws.

“Hey… what are you in for?”

“Me? I’m a pediatrician and I took naked pictures of my patients and sold them online. You?”

“I made a video of myself drugging and raping the little league team I coached. Hey… guy in the corner… what did you do?”

“I pornolized the Magic Café.”

What kind of person offers that as a suggestion to take down a magic blog? I would have loved to see someone try to take this to the “district attorney.”

But don’t fret, his “lawyer” had another idea if the child porn angle didn’t pan out.

Sadly, it never came to pass that any Café staff tried to “beat the holy snot” out of me. I would have loved to see that crew try.

To be fair to Steve Brooks, he never seemed to entertain these moronic ideas. There were a number of calls by the Café staff to sue me over my old site. But if he ever looked into it, nothing came of it. He probably just used those people to know what not to do. There are some people who are so dull and unsavvy that you’ll sometimes look to their advice to know which path to avoid. And I’m guessing anyone who volunteers their time to correct grammar for a magic message board falls squarely in that group.

So happy anniversary to Steve, the Café staff, and those of you who were there 20 years ago and somehow found me again after a ten-year absence.