Sundry Drive No. 15

We've all seen the disturbing before and after images of heroin addiction, which is why I was quite disturbed when Connor Jacobs wrote in to bring Thom Peterson's Penguin Live portrait to my attention.

Why on earth Penguin would think it's appropriate or responsible to include drug paraphernalia in the image is beyond me. But what's even sadder is to see how Thom has deteriorated in the short while since this lecture occurred.


I watched Casshan Wallace's At The Table lecture earlier this week and it was definitely one of my favorite ones so far. I wasn't too familiar with Casshan, other than his effect Melting Point, so I want to bring him to your attention if you haven't followed his stuff either. His lecture is more of a collection of ideas than, like, hyper-polished routines. But I actually prefer that sort of lecture. One of my favorite things he taught was this ungimmicked, impromptu card change in the pocket.

His youtube channel has some great stuff and is criminally under-watched. I like when anyone challenges themselves to come up with tricks in a certain amount of time. Casshan had one project on his youtube channel where, for a month, he was trying to come up with a trick a day.

Then he went completely off the rails and challenged himself to come up with a new trick, every hour, for a full day (and to film and upload them to youtube within the hour). Yeah, some of the ideas are sort of half-baked, but so what? I like seeing magic ideas in their embryonic state. 

I always feel like we should do a better job supporting creativity in magic, so I hope you'll check out Cash's youtube channel. I want this guy to stick around and keep inventing new stuff because if this is what he's coming up with at 19, I can't wait to see him with another 10 years of creating under his belt. 


As per the Distracted Artist presentation, here's a dog I "absent-mindedly" folded while getting lunch with a friend. "That's awesome!" she said.

"Huh? What is?" 

"That dog."

"Where?" I look at the bill. "Oh, this? Hmmm.... I don't see it." I'm holding it upside-down. Then I turn it over. "Ah, okay, yeah now I can kind of see it."


Get yourself one of those new extra-bright D'lites. Then, the next time you're going down on a woman (You know, if you save up enough money for it or something) in a dimly lit room, gently slide it inside of her on one of your fingers and leave it in there. Then pull back a little and calmly say, "Huh, this is weird." Don't fucking alarm her, for god's sake. She's in a vulnerable position. She will prop herself up on her elbows and look down at you. "Look what happens when I touch you right here," you say and then put your finger inside her and inside the D'lite and she will see light come pouring out of her vagina. "Is that your g-spot or something?" you say, innocently.

Dear Jerxy: What's Your Origin Story?

Dear Jerxy: I'm curious how you got into magic in the first place. Your approach seems a little different than the norm. Is there another magician who inspired your way of performing/thinking about magic? Thanks!

Writing Your Biography in Wolverhampton

Dear Writing:

This is going to be an underwhelming answer, I'm sure. No, there isn't really another magician who has inspired my point of view. 

The story of how people get into magic is almost universally dull. "Well, I was 8-years old," they'll say, "and I got a magic set for Christmas." Ooooohhhh... okay. Well, that explains it. 

Yes, I had a magic set when I was young. I also had fucking Perfection. But that didn't make me spend the rest of my life shoving little shapes into similarly shaped depressions. (Oh dear god, I just found the explanation for my sex addiction.)

Everyone had a magic set, just like everyone had legos, and everyone had a nerf football. I think when we ask, "How did you get into magic?" what we're asking is what was it about magic that captured you as a young boy or girl. Possession of a magic set doesn't really answer the question. Millions of kids have magic sets, so using that to explain your interest in magic is like if I said, "What got you into carpentry?" and you said, "My dad owned a hammer."

What got me into magic is that I was a genuine, Dennis the Menace style, little troublemaking kid.

When I was 7, my friend's dad taught me how to vanish a cigarette. I carried this information with me and would use it from time to time when I could snag someone's cigarette, but it wasn't some big life-changing moment for me. Cut to next Halloween and I've dumped my candy all over the floor and I'm doing the cigarette vanish with a roll of Smarties (the American version -- chalky candy in a cigarette size roll). Now it's the next summer, and I'm a candy-hungry, rambunctious 8-year old, with no money, walking around the little convenience store on the edge of my neighborhood. I looked at the container of Smarties and thought, "What if instead of vanishing the Smarties completely, I did the 'vanish' but then pretended to place them back in with the rest of the candy?" And thus began my notorious weeks-long career as The Cylindrical Three-Inch-Long Candy Bandit. 

The cigarette vanish was only good for a few things, so I knew I had to expand my repertoire if I wanted to work my way up to some Bonkers or a Zagnut bar. So I Dewey Decimal'd my way over to the magic section at my public library and found The Amateur Magician's Handbook by Henry Hay. When I cracked open the book I fell in love with the art of magic. No, I'm just kidding, I just saw a whole bunch of more ways to shoplift. I even imagined myself as an adult, walking into a jewelry store, asking to see their most expensive diamond ring, doing a DeManche change for an identical but worthless ring, and then walking out. That would just be how I would make a living, I figured. Stealing million dollar rings with "amateur" sleight-of-hand.

My life of crime was not meant to be, however. You see, I lived in a neighborhood that was teeming with kids. It is one of the things I am most grateful for in my life, to have been born in a middle-class suburban neighborhood full of young families in a time before video games and computers had really taken hold in the culture. My entire youth was endless games of street football, basketball, tag, hide and go seek, snow forts, elaborate Star Wars and GI Joe battles, go-kart races, and dirt clod wars on the site of new housing construction. And it was at the end of one of these long, sticky, summer days, when a bunch of us were strewn out on someone's front yard, under the stars, that I taught about a dozen guys how to steal candy (or, as you would think of it, the basics of sleight of hand). This, as it turns out, was a mistake. You see, one thief in town can slip by unnoticed, but a dozen? Well, it turns out that the guy who owned the convenience store was catching on to a seemingly peculiar fad that had popped up amongst 7-11 year old boys in the waning weeks of that summer. Kids would come in, pick up some candy, transfer it to their other hand, and put it back with the rest. Then they'd shove their hands in their pockets and leave. A parade of kids all with some burning desire to pick up candy and take a look at it for a moment before heading out. Then one day we showed up to the store and there was a big sign, "No Unaccompanied Minors." And thus ended our mini-Ocean's 11 heist team. Which is just as well, as my budding conscience would have prevented me from ripping people off soon anyway.

But that is where the sleight-of-hand seed was planted and I always found myself coming back to that section of the library to check out the magic books. I didn't perform much but I was always fascinated with things that weren't what they seemed so I read a lot about magic, con men, pranks, hoaxes, and anything like that. 

I do sometimes wonder if it was my unusual introduction to magic that caused me to approach it in what feels like a different way from they typical perspective. But I don't think that's it. When I watch some of these live lectures I often hear people say that what got them into magic is that they were "painfully shy" or they weren't good in social situations and that magic was a tool for them to get to know people or interact with them. I get that, but that was never the case for me. I've always been completely at ease around people. I was the funny kid, I was smart, played lacrosse and rugby for my high school, but I was also involved with the "nerdy" extracurriculars like marching band and theater. So I had friends across the social strata. And I connect well with people naturally. So for me to say, "Can I show you a trick?" that wasn't a way to connect with people, in fact it usually just got in the way of the interaction we had already established. So I learned early on that anything that was about me or my skill was less interesting to those people than just hanging out with them like a normal human being. And if I wanted to do magic that built on our interaction, I needed to make the centerpiece them, or the moment, or the experience. It took me 20 years to figure out ways to consistently do that and this site is, in part, an exploration of that process.

Here's the thing, a lot of you who got into magic as a social crutch no longer need it as one, yet you continue to perform in the same style you did when you first started. A style that is meant to be about you and your incredible abilities. A style that is alright when you're the quiet or socially awkward kid because it pulls you out of your shell. But if you've evolved past that stage in your life, then performing in that same style will keep you from developing further in that area. The leg braces that once helped you walk will also be the things that keep you from running.

Dear Mentalists: I Love this Website!

Wow! That's really kind of you to say. I put a lot of effort into it. 

I mean, you just said you love this website, which is really nice. Thank you. 

You don't love this website? No... but you said you did earlier. You read it in the first person so that means you do. What? That's not how language works? Hmmm... you make a compelling point.

And yet! There are mentalists everywhere, everyday who use Deddy Corbuzier's Free Will principle like it's something that fools people. (If you're not familiar with this principle feel free to skip this post as it wont make much sense to you.)

It doesn't. Well, it fools people exactly half of the time, when you end up reading the prediction. The other half of the time it's confusing at best and completely transparent at worst. If this isn't obvious to you, then you have been turning a blind eye to your audience. You need to get better at discerning when your audience is fooled and when they're confused or just being nice. I've probably tested a dozen mentalism concepts in the focus-testing I've done and this is the one that consistently raises the most red flags with people. Again, half the time. The other half of the time it's perfect.

We want to believe there's a logic to it when the spectator reads the prediction. There's not. I'll prove it to you. Next time you go to someone's birthday, write this in their card.

You hope I have a Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday to me.

They will be confused. This is not how we communicate with people. And yet this is exactly what we're expecting a spectator to accept at the climax of a magic trick. 

But don't worry, I've fixed it for you. 

Let's say you have a trick where you end up predicting where the spectator will choose to put 3 different objects. This is a standard effect that uses the free will principle. The one I use the most is Forced Will by Jonas Ljung off the DVD 21.

The prediction in this trick looks something like this.

Now, we are going to make one tiny, tiny adjustment that in and of itself will change the nature of the prediction.

Ah, look! We've just added quotes to it. But what does that mean? At this point, who knows. But the implication is that this isn't just a statement. No, this is something that someone said, or will say, probably aloud. And the fact that it's in quotes suggest that the person who wrote it on the card is not necessarily the "I" in that sentence.

We're on our way.

You start the effect and talk about how you're working on your ability to predict the future. "In a way, when you know the decisions people will make and the actions they will take, you are almost able to script life like it's a play. I can know well in advance just the right thing to say. Or I can know what others will say -- what words will match their actions. So as I get good at predicting the future, these interactions that I have with people almost feel pre-determined, like we're reading dialogue in a play."

The bold and italics above... you see what we're doing here, yes? We're establishing two different paths we can refer back to later in the effect.

You continue, "As of now I can't really predict complex human decisions, but I can predict simple ones. And I'll show you what I mean about scripting the future. On this folded business card I have a line of dialogue for you [the slightest possible beat] to hold onto. It's the last line of this little play we're in right now. Keep it safe. I'm going to want you to check my work later."

"Check my work" is a line I got from Jimmy Fingers' Free Will routine he does in his Penguin Live lecture. I like the ambiguity of it as it suggests both reading it themselves or looking at it after you read it later.

Now you go through the process of the trick.

You get to the end of the trick, it's time for the prediction to be read. Here is how you lead up to it.

If you read it
"Remember I said that by knowing the decisions people will make I can always know the right thing to say well in advance? Well, I gave you my last line of dialogue in this conversation to hold onto before we even started, can I see it? It wasn't just any dialogue, it was my prediction for what was going to happen. Something I wrote weeks in advance. [You read the prediction then hand it to your spectator to verify.]"

This makes perfect sense. 

If they read it
"Remember I said I had a line of dialogue for you -- your last line of dialogue for this little play? That I could predict the words for you to say that would match your actions? You've been holding onto your last line of dialogue the whole time. Read it out for us and put some pizzaz into it -- really sell it." 

This makes perfect sense too. And telling them to "really sell it" implies that this was always intended to be a line of dialogue read by someone else. 

Not only does it completely camouflage the Free Will principle, the notion that seeing the future allows you to script lines for yourself or others is just a more interesting idea than "I know where you will put these three objects," even if -- at heart -- it amounts to the same thing.

Opia

What follows is a variation on the trick Windows by Andy Nyman. That trick involves people thinking of a memory associated with an emotion and you naming that emotion. I found that some people find this trick a little too believable, (“I thought of a happy memory and you were able to tell I was thinking of a happy memory… so what?")

So this is a variation I’ve used on the premise with people I suspect might have that reaction.

The emotions used come from here.

Opia

Effect: Your spectator chooses a card with the definition of an obscure emotion on it. They concentrate on the emotion and form a picture of it in their mind. You're able to tell them the emotion they're feeling a describe parts of the picture as well.

Method: Get 10 index cards and write one of the following words and definitions on each card. Write out the cards so the word in italics in each definition is at the end of the first line on each card (don't actually write it in italics, of course).

lachesism
n. the desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire,
to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.

Rückkehrunruhe
n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.

chrysalism
n. the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.

opia 
n. the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable—their pupils glittering, bottomless and opaque—as if you were peering through a hole in the door of a house, able to tell that there’s someone standing there, but unable to tell if you’re looking in or looking out.

kenopsia
n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

vemödalen
n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

mal de coucou
n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

vellichor
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

kairosclerosis
n. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.

liberosis
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

Bring out the stack of index cards and give them to your spectator to flip through and read some of the definitions. Tell them these are new words you're trying to learn for obscure emotions. People will be interested in them. If they're not, they're probably not right for this trick.

Do a Charlier shuffle to supposedly mix the cards. You could, if you want, just force one of the cards on someone and then have them feel that emotion and you could look in their eyes and read that emotion in them. 

Or, with some memory work, you can give someone a free selection, cut the cards at the selection, peek the bottom card, and then know which one they are thinking of. Here's how you do that. It may seem like a lot of work, but it took me less than 15 minutes and I'm not good with memory stuff.

First, you need to know a rhyming peg system.

1 - gun
2 - shoe
3 - tree
4 - door
5 - hive
6 - bricks
7 - heaven
8 - weight
9 - wine
10 - hen

If it takes you more than two minutes to memorize that, you have a tumor or something.

Second you need to familiarize yourself, generally, with the definitions on the cards.

Now you are going to associate each peg word with the italicized word on the card, and a general concept of what that definition is about. So let's go through them.

1 - gun - fire - Guns fire. Being shot would be you suffering a personal tragedy. The first word is about wanting to struck by a disaster.

2 - shoe - trip - You trip over your shoes. Taking a trip. The second word is about taking a trip and having it fade from your memory.

3 - tree - thunderstorm - Picture a tree struck by lightning in a thunderstorm. The third word is about the comfort of being inside during a thunderstorm.

4 - door - eye - Eyes are the doorway to the soul (yes, they usually say window, but google it, they say doorway to the soul too.) The fourth word is about looking someone in the eye and that being an intrusive and vulnerable position to be in at the same time.

5 - hive - bustling - Bustling/buzzling. Buzz, bees, hive. Think of all of the bees in the hive, then picture an empty hive. The fifth word is about the eerie feeling of being in an empty place that is usually filled with people.

6 - bricks - photos - Think of taking a picture with a brick for a camera. How futile that would be. The sixth word is about the futile feeling of taking a picture of something that has already been photographed 1000s of times before.

7 - heaven - life - Heaven comes after life. Social life. The seventh word is about having an active social life but very few close friends. (A common cold reading concept.)

8 - weight - bookstore - Think of books being used to weigh something down. The eighth word is about the wistfulness of old bookstores.

9 - wine - happy - Wine makes you happy (you lush). The ninth word is about being happy and recognizing you're happy in the moment and dissecting your happiness and making yourself unhappy because of it.

10 - hen - loosen your grip - Imagine you hold a bird in your hand. You loosen your grip to let it fly away. It's a hen, it doesn't fly, it just falls out of your hand. The tenth word is about the desire to let go of things and care less about them.

So, let's go back. You do a Charlier shuffle. You allow someone to cut the cards and take the top card. You tell them to read that card over and to embrace the feeling it describes and maybe picture a scenario they can imagine feeling it in. As they read you peek your keyword which is the last word in the first row of the definition of the card on the bottom. Toss the rest of the cards over to the person as well.

Now you have some time to do your mental gymnastics. You peeked the word "trip." You trip over your shoes. Shoe = 2. That means she has the next card, card three. Three = tree. You imagine a tree struck by lightning in a thunderstorm. She's thinking of the word that means taking comfort indoors during a thunderstorm. You ask her to close her eyes and let this feeling wash over her then ask her to open her eyes and look directly in yours. You stare deep into her eyes.

"I feel a sense of... contentment or calmness... I think. But there's something else going on too. Are you picturing yourself in a certain place? You're in your home, right? In bed or on the couch or something? There's something else going on though... oh, I know. The thunderstorm one, yes? You are feeling the comfort of being inside during a thunderstorm."

Most of these words will give you a little more to talk about than if you're just guessing a standard emotion. You can usually picture the type of place they're in physically where they might be feeling this. And a lot of these feelings are multilayered, which is a nice thing to be able to pick up on if you claim to really be absorbing the emotion coming from them. Whereas if someone is just thinking of "happy" that's really a kind of straightforward emotion. 

Another nice thing is if they pick "opia" you can say, "You're not just imagining this feeling, you're actually feeling it right now." Which is kind of an interesting moment where they are genuinely feeling the emotion they're supposed to be thinking of.

Don't bother learning the words themselves. The fact that you don't know the actual words just reinforces the notion of you picking up on the feeling itself, rather than you having peeked the word somehow.

As to why you have the cards in the first place, you can make the point that reading more obvious emotions like sadness and happiness is less of a challenge because that's something we're trained to do since the time we're children. So you're trying to learn to read these more subtle emotions.

Like most of the effects I describe here, it's probably best used in a casual, informal setting (although, depending on the audience, there are probably other places to use it as well). Unlike Nyman's great trick, this isn't a simple, impromptu effect, which is its main drawback. But if you make up this set of cards, you'll have an interesting and rich effect that can easily lead to some deep and engaging conversations. (And without the possibility of someone having to stir up emotions related to a botched circumcision, a favorite aunt being trampled by a marching band, or some other legitimately painful memory.)

Mad Man

I've been having a lot of fun performing this trick. I was going to write it up like I have others, but I realized what I liked most about the trick was the presentation which just gives you an excuse to ramble on like a dipshit. And I knew I probably wouldn't be able to convey the tone of the patter through writing alone. So below you will find a pseudo performance done by my friend for a picture of a squirrel. 

The inspiration for this trick is Ad Space by David Regal. The effect is pretty much the same, but I use different sleights. My presentation was indirectly inspired by the Twilight Zone episode, Time Enough At Last.

You can probably figure out your own sleights to make this work. What I do is:

  • A one hand bottom deal to force the card without showing its back

  • A deck switch when I get the marker

  • A multiple turnover

Predict Tomorrow's National League Wild Card Game

Tomorrow night, the Chicago Cubs will play the Pittsburgh Pirates in the National League Wild Card game to see who gets to continue on in the MLB playoffs. The game starts at 8pm Eastern Time and you are going to predict the result.

So meet up with some friends to watch the game, or if you don't have friends, which is likely the case, go to a sports bar and sit yourself on a barstool. Start talking to whomever is around you and say, "If I could give you the results of this game before it started, would you give me $20,000?" If they say yes, try and get 20 grand out of them. If they say no, then just be like, "That's what I figured."

Now give that person a sealed envelope that looks like this and tell them it's your National League Wild Card prediction. "You're going to hold onto the prediction for the entire game," you say.

Ask them to hold onto it throughout the game. 

You have two ways to play this. You can play it like a demonstration of magic/precognition. Or during the course of the game you can mention your "prediction" a number of times, but each time say it with a wink. In this case you're going to play it off like you've fixed the National League Wild Card game. If you decide to go this route, then at one point during the game you should make a phone call and let people overhear you. Say something like, "Everyone is on board, right? They got their money? I just want to be sure. There are going to be some very unhappy people if the... prediction doesn't come true."

When the game ends, let out a long sigh of relief and tell your friend to open the prediction. He opens it and pulls out a slip of paper that says, "A fun time will be had by all," or something equally meaningless. Or the envelope can be empty. 

Take the envelope back from the person and say, "Sorry, I didn't trust you, I thought you might open it before the game ended. And I figured you wouldn't trust me either and you'd think I would switch the prediction without you seeing somehow. So I made the prediction online Monday morning. But I wasn't lying when I said you'd hold onto the prediction for the whole game."

Take out a marker and modify the envelope, adding a URL and an underscore, so it now looks like this.

Tell your friend to go online and go to that account and they'll see you accurately predicted not only the outcome of the game, but the final score as well. 

[UPDATE - So this game is now in the past, and I have deleted the method to how exactly we did this. I deleted it because someone informed it was essentially the same as Tube 2.0 by Jason Messina. So, if you're interested in seeing how we predicted the outcome of the game a couple days before it occurred, check out that product.]

When it's done, offer to tell them the winner of the upcoming divisional series for $25,000. Just tell them whoever you want. You'll be right half the time (the other half of the time you'll have to leave town for good). Send me 20% of whatever you can take people for. 

Credits

You'll notice in the navigation bar above, a new page called Credits. I wanted to take this opportunity to recognize some of the people who have helped in some way with the creation or functioning of this site over the past 6 months. This post is an extended version of what's on that page, but that page is what will get updated in the future if need be.

Andrew Steele, AC Costello, Pat Hughes, Michael Sullivan - (The first two guys also go by Andy, but it gets confusing, so we use Andrew and AC.) These are four friends and amateur magicians who have helped me with the site since it was MCJ. They help with communication, technical support, inspiration, video shooting and editing, financial matters, trick testing, site maintenance, as well as identifying and working with some of the people below. Pretty much anything that is not the strict writing of the site, they help out with or take care of.


Alex Printz is the artist behind the spot-on faux Penguin Live caricatures. He's great and I'm sure he'd be happy to do one of you in that style. If you paid him, I mean. He'd be sad to do it if you didn't pay him.


Matt Dow created the The Love Theme From The Jerx which is used in a number of the videos on this site. 


Colby Terry designed the mysextutor.com site from the post that started The Jerx. Check out his site to see what he can do when he's not mimicking intentionally bad porn web design.


And, finally, I want to shine as bright of a spotlight as I can on my friend, Stasia Burrington.

Stasia created the banner you see at the top of this site based on the famous Jinx artwork.

I met Stasia through one of the Andys mentioned above who she had worked with on a number of personal and professional projects. Since then, I too have worked with her on a number of projects and she has never failed to exceed the expectations I've had. She has a very strong personal style that is cute/sexy but she is able to work in numerous other styles as well. I can't recommend her highly enough if there is a commercial or personal project for which you need an artist. Let her know what you're looking for, give her some examples of the style you want, or let her take the reigns completely. She's an amazing collaborator and completely willing to take direction, even though her instincts are probably better than yours.

[But please, and this goes for any of the people listed in this post, if you're going to reach out to them and say you saw their work on The Jerx, for christ's sake, please don't embarrass me by being like, "Will you do my wedding invitations for $40?" If you don't know what a reasonable price is to offer for a project, then just ask for a quote. I work with freelance artists/musicians/actors etc., all the time and 95% of them will give you a very reasonable rate. And the people listed on this page are definitely in that 95%.]

She also created the banner for mysextutor.com. 

Perhaps more interesting to those of you who don't have a need for a mid-2000s stye banner for a fake porn site, she has also created a hand-painted tarot deck for my friend Andy, and a hand illustrated deck of playing cards for me.

First here are some shots from her blog of the tarot deck.

I love The Magician. We may have to work on a Jerx limited edition print with her in the future.

And finally, here are some of the cards from the deck of cards she made for me. I sent her a blank deck of cards and a bunch of colored Sharpies. Yes... she did this with colored Sharpies. We are probably the only group of people on the planet who have an innate understanding of the nature of writing on playing cards with Sharpies and how unforgiving that medium can be. If I have to duplicate my own signature on two different cards I'm like, "Fuck that noise. That's impossible." But she was able to create a beautiful deck, some of which you can see below...

You can contact Stasia via her website. She also has a regularly updated etsy store.