And Then There Were None

A lot of the movies I like are pretty dumb. And one of my favorite types of dumb movies are the ones where a group of people, usually strangers, find themselves at a location and then they need to figure out why they're all there and what they have in common. (And usually they're being killed over the course of this.) So it's like, "Oh, I just came to this dinner party of strangers at this fancy mansion because I got an invitation in the mail. Because that's what a rational human would do, right? Just show up to a random dinner party of people they don't know? Well, anyway, now I'm being stabbed to death." This is Ten Little Indians, And Then There Were None, Saw 2, Identity, and about 400 low-budget movies on Netflix at the moment.

I always thought it would be fun to bring that dynamic into a real-life moment, and I recently came up with a way I'm going to try and do so in the future. Perhaps this will inspire you to do something similar.

Imagine you're in some situation where you're in a group with people you don't know well (you could just as easily do this with friends, but I think it's more fun if they're strangers). Maybe you're at a wedding reception but it's not someone you're super close with and you end up at the table of mix n' match leftover people who don't really fit at any other table. Or maybe it's a business conference, and you're at a table with people you haven't met before. Any situation where you're waiting around with a small group of people. 

You want to get four people to give you a dollar. This idea came to me this weekend when I was at a wedding reception and I was teaching this young girl seated next to me how to fold an origami dollar flower and then other people at the table pulled out their own dollars and wanted to learn. So your goal is to create this type of situation. It's not difficult to do at a table full of strangers. They're looking for someone to take the lead and keep them entertained. So maybe you show a simple magic trick with a bill and offer to teach them how to do it. Or you can say, "My brother-in-law works for the treasury and he showed me this way to tell if a one is counterfeit. I didn't even know people counterfeited ones. Do any of you have a dollar?" Or you can say, "I have an interesting logic puzzle with a few dollar bills. Can I get a bill from a few of you?" Or you can offer to show people some of the "secret images" on a dollar bill. (Google it, and prepare to be underwhelmed.)

Whatever the situation, some people are pulling out dollar bills and you remove one from your pocket as well. You take the first bill from someone and look at the back and say, "Hmm... that's strange," as you place it on top of the bill in you hand. You take three other bills as well and with each one you act a little more confused. You spread the bills in your hands, portrait side up. Everyone is waiting for you to show them your little stunt. "This is weird," you say. "Did you all get these bills here? From the bar or something?" You look at the bills then talk to yourself. "No... I think this was part of my change at the Exxon on Route 12. Did any of you recently go to the Exxon on Route 12?" People are looking at you and wondering what the hell is up.

"Look," you say and turn the bills over. "All of our bills have these little markings on one edge. What is that?" You spread out the bills to show random lines on the back of the bills. You hand a couple out and then toss the rest on the table. "That's weird, right?" You look at the bills with everyone. "Is that supposed to be football lacing? Or a train track or something?"

Eventually someone will start putting the bills together like puzzle pieces. If not, you kind of nudge them in that direction. When they're done, they'll have this:

"That can't be good," you say.

Spend the next few minutes trying to break it all down. How did you each end up with a piece of this picture? You're strangers. No one could have known you were going to be sitting together today, could they? Did you all shop at the same place and get change from there? Could someone have been following you around in the days before this event? Or maybe they snuck the bills into your wallet/purse somehow? And what does it all mean?

At some point, people will examine the bills more closely, or you pick them up to look at them again, and you notice a message written in small letters on the portrait side of each bill. 

"Tonight. All but one will die. Choose who lives."

You pick your butter knife up off the table and stare at everyone. "I'm not going to have this decision made for me," you say, pointing your knife menacingly.

The End?

Now look, I know a lot of the effects I write up don't read like "tricks" in the traditional way. But fooling people is not the only way of giving people a magical experience. I love performing tricks and working on tricks, but that is just one aspect of creating magic.

If you google "magical," the second definition is the one that guides my relationship with magic:

mag·i·cal - beautiful or delightful in such a way as to seem removed from everyday life.

Or, from dictionary.com: Magical = mysteriously enchanting.

When someone sees a performance of Cups and Balls, or 3-Fly, I don't think they're being delighted in a way which seems "removed from everyday life." They may be fooled and entertained and amazed, but they know they're watching a performance as opposed to taking part in an experience. There is nothing wrong with that, but it's a distinction you may want to make if you're interested in giving people a different type of "magical" moment. 

A personal experience is generally more affecting than a performance, even if the performance is stronger. A woman buck-naked and spread-eagle on a stage, fucking herself with an eggplant is less sexually charged than that same woman sitting next to you and resting her hand on your leg, even though that's less sexually explicit. And it's true with magic too. Something personal will often seem more magical than something more amazing but less personal. 

The purpose of this trick is not to convince people that you were really all singled out by some mysterious madman to be murdered that evening. On some level they will realize the situation is orchestrated by you and it's a little production that they're taking part in. That's 100% okay. It's not about convincing people of the reality of the situation, it's about having them engrossed and intrigued in this brief interlude while you wait for your food to come or whatever. There is a magic trick (borrowed bills all have secret markings on them), but that's not what makes this magical. It's the way the situation unfolds and the implication of a broader connection between strangers that makes it "magical." 

The method is Richard Sanders' Extreme Burn 2: Locked and Loaded. You pull out the gimmick as your bill and take the other bills on top. The switch now becomes an invisible switch and there is absolutely no heat on your bill, the switch, or the handing out of the bills because, as far as they know, nothing has happened yet. The bills you switch for should include at least one new-ish bill, and one old bill. That way you're covered no matter what types of bills you borrow. It's like the Tossed Out Deck principle. Anyone who remembers giving you a new bill will assume the new one is theirs, and anyone who remembers giving you an old bill will assume the old one is theirs. Make sure to draw their attention as you collect their bills. The switch is so invisible that you want them to remember that you simply gathered up the dollars, noticed something weird, and then handed them back out. As I said, there's no heat on the switch, and the markings on the bills are ten times the misdirection you need to ditch the gimmick.

A lot of you have had enough experiences with disengaged spectators that you think this type of thing will never connect with people, but I've done similar things frequently enough that I can tell you it does. I've found the more you can remove yourself as the magician from the experience, the more on board people will be. In this presentation you are not "the magician." You are not looking for acclaim or appreciation. You're just facilitating this magical experience.

People want to play. They just don't want to be forced to play, like in some corporate team-building exercise. This presentation allows people to play along if they want, or sit back and let the situation unfold without their input. Either way, I think they'll see it as a welcome break from the potentially awkward and dull chit-chat that they may have been dreading at a table full of strangers.

---

Tomorrow is halloween, everybody! Make sure to eat some candy. It's good for the soul.

Also egg and TP some deserving a-hole's house tonight. That too is good for the soul. Where I'm from, October 30th is called Devil's Night. I guess in some places it's called "Mischief Night." That seems like a big fall off in intent. Like around me you were expected to be inspired by the Devil himself in your antics. But those of you who celebrate Mischief Night? Who are you emulating there? Pippi Longstocking or some shit? No, it will always be Devil's Night for me. Although I heard in some places it's called Cabbage Night which is so stupid it almost comes out the other side to being great again. 

At any rate, enjoy the holiday, and I'll see you soon.

Friends of The Jerx: Pipo Villanueva

["Friends of The Jerx" is where I highlight people who have contributed to this site, the projects they're involved in, or the subjects they're interested in.]

Our first friend is Pipo Villanueva. Pipo! Is this a common name in parts of the world? I don't know. It seems like it would be common for a cartoon mouse. But a human? This is my first Pipo.

Pipo has recently released a video download called Magic for the Shortsighted. It is self-produced but it is of equal, if not greater, quality to anything coming from the large magic video producers.

The type of magic Pipo creates is very different from the type of magic I usually do. He is working with, for the most part, traditional plots performed in a traditional setting. That being said, these routines are beautifully constructed, and I will be working on at least a couple of them. 

My favorite effect on the video was Reset 180º. I've been playing with versions of Reset since I was a kid, and this is the cleanest version I've seen. The changes and the clean-up at the end are so smooth that I thought he was using double-sided tape or something like that, and I thought, "Oh, that's lovely, but I'll never use it." In general I don't do any tricks that require exposed tape or sticky dots or things like that. It's just not my scene. I've had some bad experiences with sticky stuff. No, I don't have to explain it. Leave me alone. Okay, so my grandfather died in the Great Molasses Flood, and one time a kid with Maple Syrup Urine Disease whizzed on my close-up case. Does that satisfy your grim curiosity? Geeze... Where was I? Oh yeah, so I watched the explanation and was waiting for him to pull out the repositionable glue stick or whatever, but it never came. It's all just in the handling. The clean-up that you deal with at the end of most Reset routines is particularly well constructed. In fact it's invisible and completely fooled me.

My other favorite routine is the Atomic Coin. It's Pipo's handling of a Copper/Silver/Brass effect based on a routine by Jeremy Pei. It is one of the most straightforward CSB routines I've seen. You give your audience three coins to examine: one copper, one silver, one brass. You then introduce a fourth coin and have that examined as well. This coin, when squeezed together with any other coin, replicates the attributes of that coin (i.e., it changes into that coin). So you transform this coin into each of the other three one at a time by squeezing them together. Then, for a finale, you squeeze this coin on its own and it essentially replicates itself, growing many times its original size. The fact that everything is in full view the whole time (no coins are ever put back in your pocket mid-routine) and yet everything is examinable before and after the effect is what makes this so strong in my opinion (in addition to the usual beautiful changes you get with a CSB set, and one of the best uses of a jumbo-coin that I've seen).

Do Pipo and me a favor: Go to Pipo's site and check out the trailer for this video.

If it seems like something you'd enjoy, click the link on the right-hand side of the page to order it on Vimeo. It's 6 effects and over 2 and a half hours of instruction. 

You can also check out two performance videos on his site. The cups and balls video is in Spanish, but everything on Magic for the Shortsighted is in English, and his English is near perfect. (Don't worry. As you know, I don't support anything other than English-only magic instruction. I won't ever lead you astray. USA! USA! USA! #Trump2016 #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.)

You can also find Pipo's blog on his site which he updates at the adorable pace of once or twice a month. 

Matrix or Treats

A few weeks ago I asked if anybody knew of any place to find foil-wrapped chocolate quarters that could pass for real quarters. After talking to a few people I think it's safe to say that no such product exists and would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to produce in mass quantities. This is too bad because I had a good idea for how I wanted to use them. 

I want to tell you about the trick, because even as an aborted idea, I think it's still pretty good. 

This summer I came up with a choreography for a matrix routine where -- in the process of the effect itself -- the coins you started with were secretly switched for four other coins. But what to do with this? 

The idea of switching them in for  chocolate coins really appealed to me because as much as I like very detailed, immersive presentations, I'm always looking for tricks that are so visually interesting and bizarre that they become like surrealist art, and they don't need a presentation. And this would have been one such trick.

Imagine you borrow four quarters, and lay them out in a square formation. Then you spread a deck of cards and have someone slide out any two. With the selected cards and the borrowed quarters you perform a matrix routine. When you are done you unwrap the "borrowed" quarters and toss the chocolate coins inside into your mouth. Then you pick up the two selected cards and fold them into your mouth, chew them, and blow a bubble with them. 

That was the effect. I had the switch of the coins worked out. I had found a way to print card backs on thin sheets of bubble-gum, and had a simple switch worked out to ring these in for the selected cards at the end of the performance. The only thing I didn't have was the chocolate coins. 

I'm now throwing the idea out to you. Perhaps you have coins in your country that would work. Or perhaps there's some way to make an edible quarter that isn't foil-wrapped chocolate. I don't know. Maybe this will inspire a whole FISM act for you, where you borrow all the props and then eat them at the end. Go ahead and use that concept. It wouldn't be the first time someone took my idea for their FISM act. (I'm looking at you, Cornel & Monique, 1964 FISM World Champions in General Magic. You know what you did.)

Loose Ends

The Brooksies - Also known as The Magic Cafe Golden Idiot awards. These will still likely happen someday. I just have less interest in general in writing about the Magic Cafe these days. But I do have a bunch of emails full of nominations and will continue taking them whenever people want to send them along. The Cafe as a topic is what we call an "evergreen." 

Friends of The Jerx - You will start seeing posts labelled this in the near future. These posts are highlighting something that someone who donated to the site has asked me to write about. These aren't quite ads or sponsored posts, really, because I'm going to be the person writing them. And the person who donated has no input, other than the subject matter to be covered. Some people aren't even offering a product or service, they just want me to write about something. My hope would be that if someone is offering a product, and they support this site, that you, in turn, would take the time to check out what they have to offer. This is not about looking at everything in terms of producers, consumers, and advertising. This is about uncovering a community of like-minded people and presenting them the opportunity to not only support this site, but also each other. 

Speaking of which, be sure and sign up for The Jerx Convention 2016.

Project 8X - This is my big super-secret personal project I alluded to a couple months back. It originally started as a halloween-related project, but it has evolved beyond that, into something that I hopefully will be able to extend for a couple months. I can't say too much because a couple people who are affected by it are readers of this site. I will definitely tell the story eventually. If nothing else it will likely be the last chapter in the hardcover book. If this project works as I hope, it will be one of the greatest magic stories of all time. How do I know? Well look, I've heard that story about Max Malini producing a block of ice a couple dozen times in my life, and that's just a story about a guy sitting around with a block of ice on him over the course of an evening. That's one of our greatest anecdotes? I mean, I get that it's a nice story about being willing to prepare and wait around, and we're not sure exactly how he did it. But it's not like sitting around with a block of ice on you for 90 minutes is some huge investment of time or energy. It's only slightly more difficult than sitting around without a block of ice on you. At best it requires a modicum of dedication.

It reminds me of that song, Groovy Situation, by Gene Chandler.

Hmmm... that Side 1 track list tells a pretty sad story.

But getting to the lyrics of "Groovy Situation."

That girl I'm gonna make her mine
If it takes all night
Can you dig it
Can you dig it
Can you dig it
Can you dig it

Oh, I can "dig it," Gene. You're so crazy about this girl that you're willing to invest "all night" in wooing her. You're a true romantic. A whole evening? Gee, she must be really special. How honored she must be that you'll devote a whole few hours to her seduction. 

Tell me, Gene, would you say this is "true love" or do you just want to see that booty clap?

I thought so.

The Trajectory of Expectations

Take a look at the demo for Rip and Fold by Rick Lax.

What is the problem with this trick?

If you don't see it immediately, then I bet you spend a lot of time with other magicians. I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that it can cause a sort of magic tunnel vision. This tunnel vision causes us to examine routines based largely on their appeal to other magicians, and not how they reverberate with regular people. The whole clamor for "propless" mentalism, for example, is part of a desire to be jacked-off by other mentalists -- it has nothing to do with appealing to real humans. (I hate to break it to you, but a convoluted mental process is a more obvious "prop" than a pencil to laypeople.)

If I can offer something with this blog it's that it's written by someone with a fairly extensive understanding of the workings of magic, and someone who performs magic a lot, but someone who exists almost completely outside of that subculture. I'm like a spy for magicians, living amongst the laymen. So I don't develop that tunnel-vision.

So going back, what is the problem with that Rick Lax trick?

Here's a hypothetical. Imagine I was your boyfriend. Yes. We're gay in this hypothetical. Deal with it, you homophobe. (Unless you're one of the three ladies who read this site, in which case... Enchanté. And feel free to view this hypothetical as a completely hetero flight of fancy. Which you would have had no problem doing had I not used the very gay phrase, "flight of fancy.") So you're my boyfriend (or girlfriend) and your birthday is coming up, and on the day of your birthday I say. "I have something very special for you. I got you... a new car!" And you are flipping out because your previous car was about 6 years old and a little beat-up and you were thinking of getting a new one but weren't sure if you could afford it. Then we go outside and in the driveway is... your old car. But it has a new coat of paint and I had some dents removed and had it professionally cleaned. "It's practically like a new car," I exclaim. You can't help but be let down, at least initially, no matter how appreciative a person you are in general. On the other hand, if I had said that I wasn't really in a position financially to get you a gift this year, and then you stepped outside to find your car had been cleaned, repaired, and repainted, you would be thrilled. And we would spend the night slapping our dicks together, or whatever gay guys do.

The problem with Rick Lax's trick -- or at least the presentation of his trick is -- as one of the people I correspond with regularly put it:

"The specs are hoping the fold and tear change places and they get something sub-par... A signature transposition."

The reason the spectators are hoping for the fold and tear to change places is because Rick implies that's what's going to happen. I'm not sure why he tells them this. I think it's because he was happy to have come up with what he feels is an interesting and clever method, and he became blind to how presenting it this way will come across to the spectator. The tunnel vision I talked about above. 

Another example of this: In the Penguin Live lecture by Lincoln, he does a trick where he vanishes a coin and tells a spectator it will re-appear in his (the spectator's) clenched fist. It doesn't. It reappears on his shoulder. And that's nice and all, but it's definitely less impossible to sneak something onto someone's shoulder than it is to sneak it into the empty hand they just clenched into a fist. So why suggest you're going to do the former? I think it's likely because he didn't consider that it was less impressive. He was just concentrating on the boldness and fun of loading a coin onto someone's shoulder. He was thinking like a magician for magicians, rather than thinking like a magician for real people.*

There is nothing to be gained by implying something impossible is going to happen, and then doing something less impressive. People's reactions will naturally follow the trajectory of their expectations. So if the climax of the trick is less than their expectations then their initial (internal) reaction will be, "Oh, that's not what he said would happen. I wanted to see what he said was going to happen." That doesn't mean they won't come around to being impressed by what you actually did, but you're forcing them to go backwards first. Rick gets a decent reaction from his trick (and you can almost see the thought process mentioned above play out on the one guy's face), but the reaction is significantly less strong than you see in Wayne Houchin's French Kiss, even though they're similar effects. I think that is partly due to the fact that Wayne's is more straightforward, there is no inhale of astonishment. That's not to say Rick's trick is inferior. I've used it and have gotten a great reaction. I just do a variation on it that I think is much stronger. **

Of course there are times when you want to misdirect the audience from what the actual climax of the effect is. I get that. I'm just suggesting that you take advantage of the inverse of this idea, and suggest that what you're about to do is less impressive. Then their momentum, when you come to the climax, is towards amazement, rather than away from it. 

* For Lincoln's trick I would vanish the coin a couple of times and make it reappear at my elbow, like that dumb move I never liked in people's coin flurry routines. Then I would say, "You can also make it vanish and come out of your shoulder." And I would make it vanish (completely) and then reach towards my shoulder -- one then the other. When it's not there I would say, "Oh, I guess I said YOUR shoulder," and I would point to them and they would find the coin on their shoulder from many feet away.

** For Rick's trick, I don't imply the cards are going to switch places. In fact I say that the reason we ripped one and folded the other is to PREVENT me from switching them, because it would be obvious if I did. "That way, the only way for the cards to change..." I say, and take the folded card from the person on my right, and the ripped card from the person on my left, and I push them together into a pile on the table and stir them with my index finger. Then I push the ripped pieces over to the person on my right and the folded card to the person on my left (i.e. I've openly exchanged them.) I then finish my sentence, "... is not for them to swap positions or for the ink on the faces to change. It's for the CONDITION of the cards themselves to exchange. So your card that was folded is now... [The person on my right turns over the ripped pieces to see her previously folded card] and your card that was ripped is now... [The person on my left unfolds her card to find her previously ripped card.]"

You see what this does, yes? Each person starts and ends with their own card (or so they think). There IS no card transposition. It's a STATE transposition. Which I think is a more straightforward and better effect.

Think of it from the spectator's perspective. How would they describe the effect?

Rick's effect is: The folded card that I had signed changed into a folded version of your card that had previously been ripped. And your ripped card that you were holding changed into a ripped version of my card that had previously been folded.

My effect is: My card transformed from folded to ripped. And your card transformed from ripped to folded.

The Jerx 2.0: Good Guys Win

Almost every person who I have communicated with over the past couple weeks has thanked me for giving them the opportunity to donate to the site. At first I was like, "This is crazy. They've just donated a not-insignificant amount of money to someone they don't know to keep a blog going, and they are being so effusive and kind about it." But actually the more nice things people were saying to me, the more it made sense. The best relationships are the ones where two people are both giving, not out of obligation, but out of a desire to give. I cook you dinner, you bake dessert. I wash your car, you rub my shoulders. I leave a love note in your bag, you write a poem on a post-it and stick it to the bathroom mirror. I go down on you, you go down on me. We tend to associate this type of reciprocation with young love. But we don't stop doing these things because our love grows old; our love grows old because we stop doing these things.

What am I going on about? I wrote this site every day for months, but not out of any obligation. When I gave people the opportunity to give back, they were grateful for it. As I said above, this give and give is emblematic of all the best relationships. And it's what makes this site different than any other magic site on the internet.

I'm sure some people had an issue with the idea of me taking donations for the site. If that's how you feel, I don't know what to tell you. It certainly suggests that you don't value your time or have many requests for it. I'm in the opposite situation, I'm afraid. Or you may think my contributions aren't valuable. That's okay. You don't get this site. And I don't mean that in a bad way. You don't get this site the way I don't get modern country music. You just don't connect with it. I don't mind that. In fact, I love it. I look at some of the boring shit most of you are doing in what should be the most outlandish, untethered art-form and I'm relieved you don't get this site.

In general I don't like blogging about blogging, but some of you may find how this whole donation period played out interesting. So here is my last post (of any significance) on the subject.

The Past

A couple months ago, Andi Gladwin and Joshua Jay wrote me asking if I'd like to publish a book with Vanishing Inc. As far as I'm concerned, they're the premier magic book publishers of our time, so obviously I considered that an incredibly flattering offer as an unknown guy who had been writing a blog for a few months. My main issue with the idea is I didn't think my audience was vast enough to support a book release and I didn't want them to be stuck with 100s of books they couldn't sell. In addition to that, I didn't want them to be guilty by association for something dumb I said in the book, or, more likely, on this site. 

To their credit they were both like, "We don't care if we don't sell many books, and we don't care what you say. We just want to publish interesting things." So that was one path I thought about taking, continuing to write the blog and then to publish a book with Andi and Josh. But I wasn't sure how the timing on that would work. The blog was already becoming a big time commitment and I figured it takes a while for a book to come out. Would I end up saddling them with a book by a guy who used to write a blog a couple of years ago by the time it came out?

Then a month ago I got another offer. This came from a semi-pro here in NYC and two other amateur magicians who work in the financial industry. They had a very interesting and generous offer for me. Essentially they wanted to hire me at close to my normal writing rate to continue the blog, but only for them. They would split the cost between themselves and two or three other people they would bring in. It was as close to a wealthy benefactor writing me a fat check as I was going to get, and would have been what amounted to a decent paying part-time job for me. But they essentially -- and understandably -- wanted exclusivity on any magic ideas I had. I would still write commentary and criticism for this site. But anything that was a routine -- even a half-thought out idea for a routine -- or had anything to do with theory, would be on a private site that only they had access too.

This appealed to my love of all things clandestine and secretive, and I'd actually be perfectly content writing a blog for 5 or 6 people. But, at the same time, I'd received so much positive feedback and made a bunch of new relationships with people from this site that I didn't want to take my ideas and run off if there was another way to do things. So the simple solution was if I could get 20 times the number of people to donate 1/20th of what these guys were offering then it would essentially be the same thing. 

The Present

So did it work? Somewhat yes. Somewhat no. And somewhat it still remains to be seen.

We made enough to cover the cost of physically creating and printing the book. 

We made enough to pay some people who have helped with the site in the past - technologically, artistically, testing ideas, etc.

But we didn't really exceed that amount, which means at this point in time I'm limited to working on the site in my spare time. (For much of the past 5 months I was turning down legitimate paid work to fuck around here with you. I sadly can't afford to do that anymore.)

And we fell way short of my goal of getting enough donations to do the really crazy shit I had in mind. Like tracking down the old L&L audience and doing a scripted mockumentary "Where Are They Now"-style web-series with them. 

The Future

The site is going to continue. Monday will start the next iteration of this site. Here is how it will be different. 

- The posts will be frequent, but they won't be daily. For those who were around during the MCJ days, it will be more like that schedule. I think I will keep the practice of putting new posts up at 3am ET, that way you don't have to check more than once a day.

- The posts are generally going to be shorter. You won't see many posts with full routines. Those are very time-consuming to write and I think, fairly, will be reserved for those who donated for the book. 

- Soon there will be two new links at the top of the page. One will say "Buy the Book," and one will say "Want More?." The first link is obvious. The second will present people with a bunch of different ways to support the site in the future if they're interested in more content than I can provide in my free time. My goal is to make the site very symbiotic. So if there is a demand for more content or content that is longer or more involved, then people will have a direct way to affect that via these two links because any money this site makes will go directly back into the site. For those people who have an issue with a blog being anything other than a completely philanthropic enterprise where I donate my time and ideas for free, this will probably annoy you. Tough. I have a gift for you. It's in my pants. It's my girthy dong. Blow me.

So we'll see what happens next. The site won't be exactly the same, and it will evolve in ways I don't even know right now. But it's going to here for some time to come.