Buffet Blue Balls

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For the past 3920 days I have woken up, kicked the covers off, ran out of my bedroom and through the kitchen (shoving my girlfriend to the ground in the process), sat down in front of my computer, fired it up, and went to this thread on the Magic Cafe to see if today was the day Steve Brooks finally finished the scintillating tale of how The Magic Cafe came to be. Oh, please, please, please, Steve! Continue the saga! It was November 2005 when you said the story was "TO BE CONTINUED...." And then you just leave us hanging? How dare you!

The last we heard about the pre-history of the Cafe was...

"Writing down a dozen or so ideas and concepts that appealed to me at the time, I started thinking about which theme would suit my needs the best. After some serious thought, I dumped many of my initial ideas, and chose instead to only work those that showed any real promise of becoming successful."

You little tease! I need to know what were the 11 ideas you had that were somehow worse than a Cafe theme? Tell us, Steve!

For those who weren't around back in the day, I'm responsible for that section of the Cafe known as The Buffet.

I used to write a site called The Magic Circle Jerk (it doesn't exist anymore) and Steve and the Cafe staff hated that site. It might have had something to do with the fact that I'd have contests on my site where people would write disgusting erotic fiction involving the Cafe staff. Or that I'd expose things about the site like the fact that the staff frequently reads through your "private" messages, and that their active users are a small fraction of the number they claim. I didn't really care about any of this. I just thought it was fun to get them riled up.

After attempting to get my site taken down a couple different ways, Steve had the devious thought that perhaps the best way for the Cafe to win the battle would be to have some "blogs" of their own. Thus he created the Buffet. This is a section of the Cafe devoted to eight different people. Each has their own "blog." Almost all have been dead for 5-10 years. The blogs, I mean, not the people. (Although, honestly, a couple of them might be dead too. RIP.) Steve himself was the least productive. Managing only five threads before stopping altogether. Don't sweat it, Steve. It's hard to come up with interesting or funny posts all the time.

"B-b-b-b-b-but you make it look so easy!"

I know, sweetheart, I know. But I'm like a magic blogging savant. I've written as many posts in 15 months on this site as you and seven other people wrote over 11 years in the Buffet. I was made for this. (That's a sad fact. Not a brag.)

Whenever I'm in a bad mood I remember that the Cafe used to have a staff of people called "Grammar Hosts" who would read every post and correct spelling and grammar. "But Andy, how could that be? I mean, just logically speaking. Certainly anyone who was in a position in their life where they thought that was a good use of their time would have been long dead by their own hand, yes?" You would think so. But they had them. (And apparently still do, but I don't think they actually correct grammar anymore. Who knows what they do.)

Why is the Cafe and the it's Buffet on my mind? Well, because we are now weeks away from The Jerx, Volume One being sent out and I was reminded about one of my plans for it early on. 

Originally I had contemplated just copying and pasting Steve's five Buffet posts into the text of the book and repeating it over and over for 400 pages. Then I would ship them all out and just when everyone was getting their book I would shut down this site and stop replying to emails. Eventually, a few weeks later, they would get the real book, but not before I had infuriated the people who had been most generous to me. 

I had thought this was a fine idea until my friend, who is handling the paypal transactions, vetoed it because he didn't want to get thrown in jail. And I reconsidered if it would be worth it to spend 1000s of dollars producing and shipping a book as a joke.

It was the smart choice. I have dumb ideas, but I'm not crazy. And that would have been crazy. That's like "Let's waste this one precious life we have correcting other people's spelling on a magic message board" level crazy.

8 Ways to Make Your Magic Un-Googleable

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#1 - Avoid Tricks With Distinctive Props

If all you need to do to find out how a trick works is google the main props and the word "magic" that's not a great trick for the 21st century magician.

Of all the reasons not to do the Bill in Lemon trick, you can add the fact that the first thing someone would google is: bill lemon magic.

Let's see how that would play out. 

#2 - If You Must Do Those Tricks, Modify the Props So They're Unique To You

Ok, you just have to do a Bill in Lemon style effect. Well, let's switch out the props. Let's use an orange instead of a lemon. That shouldn't be a problem as it still has the properties we need for the trick. And instead of a bill use... I don't know... anything you want. A giant fortune-cookie fortune. Whatever.

You offer your spectator a choice of a dozen fortunes. Each are (conveniently) on a dollar bill sized piece of paper. They choose one and sign it. You say that you were hired by the Chinese Food Association of America to make a healthier alternative to Fortune Cookies, so you created a way to get a fortune inside an orange. They pick an orange from a bowl, you cut it open and inside is their signed fortune.

Is this a good trick? I don't know. I'd give it a C-. But it's at least better than "I MADE A DOLLAR GO TO A LEMON FOR NO REASON!" Which is the standard presentation.

And it has the added benefit that if someone searches: orange "fortune cookie" magic, they come up empty.

#3 - Recontextualize Effects

You don't have to change the props. You can also redefine what the effect is. An example from this blog is Cryptophasia. What is, essentially, the effect of a magician predicting a spectator's freely named number was changed into a spectator being able to interpret a language he didn't think he knew. The other two phases of the effect recontextualize two other classics of magic/mentalism.

How about ambitious card. If you do four phases and talk about how the card always "rises to the top." It doesn't take much for someone to google the method to make the card rise to the top. So what if, instead, you said the card was drawn to the palm of your hand. And, in fact, this was some new type of "super-palming." "I can actually palm the card through half of the deck." Now you draw the card to the top a couple times. Draw it to the bottom once. Draw it to the top with a bend so they can see it this time. And then you say, "Even if I put my hand in my pocket the card is still drawn to it." The spectator pushes (what they believe to be) their card into the deck and you remove your hand from your pocket, there's nothing in it. You empty out your pocket, but no card. "Huh," you say. You poke through the items that were in your pocket, eventually opening up your wallet and finding the card stuck in there. "I haven't perfected the technique," you say.

Again, this is just an idea I'm making up as I type. But it's a little more interesting than "the card rises to the top." (It also justifies the card to wallet some people end an ambitious card routine with.) And it allows you to perform one of the most classic effects in card magic with no trail to be found online. If they start googling "card drawn to hand" or "superpalming" they'll find nothing. 

Well... now they'll find this post. Sorry bro. 

#4 Combine Effects

By combining two effects you may be able to blur the line of what each individual effect is. Thus making it harder to google.

The two effects mentioned above—Cryptophasia and the Ambitious Card presentation—would also be examples of that. Another is the previous post, All Seeing Eye of the Beholder.

#5 Overwhelm Them With Possibilities

The previous ideas have looked at ways to make your performances more unique and thus less googleable. But you can go the opposite way as well. If you do a poker routine or a routine where coins change, these effects are so generic that anyone googling will just be overwhelmed with avenues to explore and won't be able to find that specific coin change or poker routine.

#6 Don't Buy the Latest Big Thing

Sorry Penguin and Ellusionist. I love you, but you're just too good at marketing. Many of the effects you release, and really get behind, end up overexposed. Not only that, but a good portion of your customer base are the most pube-less members of the magic community. And so you have a lot of shifty 12-year-olds uploading videos of themselves performing the latests sensation in their dull monotone to youtube. So not only can your audience quickly discover that your little miracle is available to anyone with $15 dollars. They can immediately learn how it's done via some kid's poor performance which serves as an explanation.

#7 Get Your Material From Books

This is the flip-side of #6. I don't want to sound like Grandpa Jerx here, but there is so much good material in books that there is no record of online. 

Honestly, I'm as guilty of eschewing effects found solely in books as anybody. I will overlook an effect in a book for years and then hop on it once it's released as its own instant download. I know it's lazy on my part, but sometimes it takes someone really shining a spotlight on an effect for me to give it the attention it deserves. 

So do as I say, not as I do with this one. If you're looking for material with no online paper-trail, look to books.

#8 Remove Yourself From the Magic

This has been a theme of this site since the beginning. The most tolerable and enjoyable amateur, informal magic presentations are the ones that aren't centered around your ego. They're the ones where you shift the focus off yourself and let the audience put as much of the focus back on you as they choose to.

This style won't necessarily make your effects un-googleable, but it will make them less likely to be googled. It pulls the rug out from under the 10% a-holes I mentioned above. Their compulsion to "expose" you goes away almost completely when you're not looking for credit or validation. 

If this post has its detractors it will be people saying, "Oh, come on. You're worried about a few people googling a trick and finding out... that it's a trick? As you said, they already know that, so who cares? It's all a bit of fun. You're taking it way too seriously. Isn't your ego the thing that is dictating you scramble to make all your material seem original and not traceable on Google?" 

So let me preemptively say no, that's not what this is about. I don't want an effect to be un-googleable for my sake. It's for the sake of the person I perform for. I want them to feel the experience we just had isn't some cookie-cutter thing that comes in a box.

Have you ever watched Dr. Phil when he has some older woman on who's involved in some Nigerian catfish scam? She's always a hefty woman in her late 60s who thinks she's talking to some handsome silver fox across the sea who is perpetually just days away from visiting her. She's about $200,000 in at this point (but he's assured her she'll get it back). Dr. Phil will read some of these love-letters the guy has sent the woman and she will just be beaming at how romantic they are and how special they make her feel. Then Dr. Phil plugs the love-letters into Google and he shows her 100s of results for the same email and you can see her crumble inside. I think, on a much smaller level, some spectators can have a similar letdown when they realize this is just a "routine" and not a genuine rare moment.

You want your spectators to feel like what just occurred was unusual in some way. You want every performance to be a little love-letter to your audience that hasn't been sent 1000 times already. And it turns out the best way to do this is to actually strive to make something unique. If you look at those steps above, that's what most are designed to do. That's why, if an electromagnetic bomb takes out the internet tomorrow and you don't need to worry about people googling anything, it's still a good idea to follow many of the suggestions above. 

All Seeing Eye of the Beholder

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What follows is one of the strongest word/drawing revelations I've ever done. Although it doesn't involve a big time commitment, I would consider it an immersive effect due to the levels of deception and intensity of the effect.

Dan Harlan and I have been collaborating. You're probably pretty excited by that idea, and you have every right to be, given that we're two of magic's best thinkers. 

I should be clear that Dan doesn't know we're collaborating. (So what? Does the lady whose bushes I stand in and masturbate while I watch her change through the window know she's my girlfriend? No. But does that mean she's not?)

What follows is my version of Dan's effect All Seeing Eye which was recently released as its own download, but was also explained in Dan's second Penguin lecture. It was probably also released back on one of his old VHS tapes. The ones you used to watch and mistakenly think, "Well... his hair can't possibly get worse than this."

Dan's All Seeing Eye is essentially a billet reading technique whose choreography gives you a nice long peek at a full billet's worth of information. What it looks like in performance is that your spectator writes down something (a word, picture, or anything else) on a blank business card, folds it, and holds it in her hand. You draw a picture of an eye on another business card (your "third eye"), fold it, and drop it in her closed hands with the other billet. Then, via the "All Seeing Eye," you are able to tell her what she wrote down on the billet. 

I think it's a really solid routine. I don't know that I would use it by itself in lieu of another peek because the "third eye" thing doesn't really mesh with any routine I use at the moment. But I do think it's good and I wanted to build a routine around it because there are some features of the method that can be taken advantage of to produce an even stronger effect when combined with something else... which you shall see below. 

Imagine

You ask your friend to draw a picture on a the back of a business card while you are turned away. Something not too simple and with some unique detail to it. When they are done you have them fold it in half three times. This little packet is placed in their non-dominant hand to hold tightly.

On the back of another business card you draw an eye. You then remove a red marker from your pocket and ask your friend to scribble in the iris of the eye with the red marker. When she finishes you have something that looks like this.

"Have you ever seen anything like this before? If you've ever been on an Indian reservation you might have. It's called the All Seeing Eye. When I was in high school one of my friends lived on the reservation and from time to time we would go there to screw around and we would see this image everywhere: above the doorframe going into the mini-mart on the reservation, on the street signs, just everywhere. And I asked my friend Running Bear about it... I'm just kidding, his name was Kyle. I asked Kyle about it and he said it was the All Seeing Eye. And he said that, historically, the chief of the tribe would be able to look out from wherever he was and see through this image of an eye. Not only see which was visible, but what was hidden too."

"And me, being 16 and a prick, took great delight in mocking this notion. And I was saying how this is the type of stuff that holds native americans back, relying on symbolism and that sort of thing. And he stopped me and said it wasn't symbolic. It was something real. And I didn't believe at first, but then he demonstrated it and now I believe."

"I'd like to try something with you, if that's alright. You see, it's not just an Indian custom. This is something that is still used today all over the world. Let me show you."

"I'm going to use the All Seeing Eye to see the drawing in your hand."

You fold up the All Seeing Eye into a packet and ask your friend to open her hand so you can add it in, but before you do, you open it again and stare into the eye drawing with your left eye. "This helps align then energy," you say. After 10-15 seconds you refold the eye card and toss it in your spectator's cupped hands with the card that has her drawing on it. You ask her to shake them up for a moment then clench both cards between her hands.

You close your eyes and place one of your hands on top of hers.

You breathe deeply in and out three times. Then you stop mid-breath.

"I'm in," you say.

You open your eyes and your left eye is now a deep red.

Your eyes jitter around, seemingly looking at something far off in the distance. You then begin to describe the drawing.

"It's... okay it's a tree. There are three, like... roots at the bottom. There are four lines on the trunk. The first three are mostly straight, but the fourth is bent at, maybe, a 30 degree angle. There's like a cloud shape thing denoting the leaves of the tree and it consists of one, two, three, four, five, six... seven curves."

It's clear that this is not just something you "peeked." You are somehow looking at this image in this moment and describing it in complete detail.

You sharply exhale and look down. "Can you hand me the eye card?" you ask. 

She opens her hand and dumps out the cards, unfolds one (or both) to find the eye card and is shocked to find that it is now drained of all the red color she drew in (or she could find that the eye isn't red anymore but it's the color of your natural eye).

You take the eye card, fold it, and press it to your eye for a few seconds, then toss the card onto the table. You open your eye and it's normal again. When the spectator opens the card, the drawn eye is red again.

"So that just happened," you say.

Method

As mentioned, this is Dan Harlan's All Seeing Eye, and half of Berk Eratay's Biokinesis. And I think it is perhaps even greater than the sum of its parts. 

A couple nice things about Dan's effect is that you get an extended peek (essentially as long as you want) of the whole card. I really wanted to take advantage of that so when you recall the information later on it feels like you're seeing it in real time. In addition, the method behind Dan's peek allows the eye card to seemingly change in the spectator's hand.

The only thing not mentioned is the uncolored eye card changing back to the red-eye card. And that's just any billet switch you know. The trick seems over at this point. Attention is still on your eye and how you could know the information. You're in a good position to switch at that moment.

There it is. 

UPDATED: Sweet Christ, Someone Actually Did It

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From the June 19th post about Jerx Points:

"A GLOMM tattoo. With video proof. You're an idiot - 100 points"

Well, folks, it's been done. 

Courtesy of Jean-Thomas Sexton, the very first GLOMM tattoo.

It's time to step your game up, Jerx point collectors. I look forward to seeing future tattoos. A full back piece. Your forehead. Your scrotum. Keep them coming.

There should always be at least one unobtained Jerx point goal to keep everyone hungry. So I've added the following:

Name your child "Glomm" - 150 Jerx Points.

UPDATE: I've been asked if the 100 Jerx Points are still on the table for tattoos. Yes, absolutely. Also, if you want to go the tattoo route to 150 Jerx Points, here's how you do it (you must document everything on video). First, go and get a Magic Cafe tattoo. Wait for it to heal. Next, go back to the tattoo shop and tell them how embarrassed and ashamed you are of your tattoo and ask to get it covered up with a swastika.

UPDATE 2: Jerx Points don’t exist anymore.

Gardyloo #11

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Book fuck-up-date

So we're still looking towards an end of August delivery of The Jerx, Volume One. The most recent delay came after looking at the page proofs. I was all about to give them the okay, when I looked again at my computer from a sharp angle and what I thought was a clean illustration now had a muddy yellowish tinge to it. What the hell was going on? I could only see it when I tilted my screen away from me. Otherwise it was pretty much invisible in InDesign or looking at it on a pdf.

So we had to go in and clean-up the illustrations which was sort of easy, but sort of hard because you couldn't see what needed to be cleaned up unless you were on a laptop with the screen tilted back. 

Hopefully it's only a setback of a day or two. And a couple hundred dollars to re-run the page proofs. But it's okay because it allowed me to make a couple changes to the text as well. And I want the books to be as clean as possible before you get them. Look, I'll leave it up to you to soil the book with your ejaculate and vaginal fluids. But until that time, you deserve a tight, clean product.

In Michael Murray's book A Piece of My Mind, there's an effect called Sublime Influence. It's an effect that I've always enjoyed performing. But there weren't enough opportunities to perform it in the wild, so I bought a set of these shot glasses.

If you have the book, then you'll understand why these work perfectly.

I set it up as if I'm going to do a numerology reading with Uno cards. "We need to invoke the elements," I say. What does that mean? I don't know. Here's the thing, after a spectator has agreed to a "numerology reading" you can say whatever the hell you want. They've already bought in. 

So I light a candle and then say, "We need a little water too." I go to my kitchen and fill up the shot glass with water. I sit back down with my friend and have her stare into the shot glass while I gently shake it causing the water to ripple. I tell her to concentrate on the rippling water while I count down from 10. 

So she's concentrating and staring at this thing that I will later claim influenced her, but she's not really seeing it because she thinks this is about the water. Then I go through the process with her to generate her "life number" or whatever. Only at the end do I bring up subliminal advertising and say this was an experiment in that. I prefer it that way rather than stating it up front like Michael does. Just a personal preference. I like the idea of getting them to think that there is one thing going on, then you flip the script at the end so they have to reorient themselves and you give them a big moment to demonstrate this different reality. "You thought you were on an alien planet full of apes, but really that planet is Earth, and that's the Statue of Liberty!"

Let's say you get the sense your friend genuinely wanted a numerology reading. Great! Now you can say, "Oh hey... do you want to try some actual fortune-telling with cards? Just as a goof, I mean?" And you can segue into an effect like that. (May I recommend Applied Cartomancy from The Jerx, Volume 1?) In this way you easily get to perform two effects in an organic way without resorting to some horrible "routining." (Routining should not be in the amateur's vocabulary. See Amateur at the Kitchen Table for more details on that.)

I'm bummed the video with images of magician's shushing people while palming a card is seemingly no longer available.

Maybe they'll re-upload it. Or make another version and include this beauty. It's Alan Rorrison in that hack pose. And, ironically, he's lecturing all of us to be more creative.

Here's an analogy I somewhat like, but ended up cutting out of the book. I was writing about what types of subjects I think make good presentations. And I was saying how it can't just be something interesting it really needs to be something fascinating. For our purposes, the distinction I was making was that a "fascinating" thing is an interesting thing but with some element of the unknown or mysterious to it.

That element of the unknown or the mysterious is a powerful thing. It essentially allows your audience the opportunity to view the presentation in a way that they find most appealing. It would be like parading a decent looking woman on stage in front of an audience of heterosexual men. Let’s say 65% of the men are intrigued by her and would like to spend time with her. But what if we put that same woman in silhouette? Ah, now maybe 95% of the men are intrigued by her. By withholding some information we are affording them the opportunity to project what they’re interested in onto this woman. Similarly, by offering a presentation that involves some element of the unknown, you are allowing them the opportunity to decide how much the presentation is meant to be taken seriously, and how much they WANT to take the presentation seriously.

The GOOD GLOMMKEEPING Seal of Approval

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We are firmly entrenched in the era of online magic demos. It's a far cry from the early 90s when I was first seriously getting into magic. Back then the information you had about an effect was limited. You were lucky if you had a vague description in a Hank Lee ad and a fucking illustration of what the effect may look like (based, apparently, on the recollection of one stoned spectator, weeks after the performance). 

There are some old fossils out there who will make a convoluted argument that it was somehow better when you didn't know what you were buying. There is no rational argument for this. This is just the blathering of people who conflate "different than what I grew up with" with "bad." This is a mental illness and is essentially a form of narcissism. "This is how thing were when I grew up, so this is how things should be. Cryptic, nebulous magic ads. Real bread, baked in an oven, by my loving mother. Songs you can understand the lyrics to. Basketball players in silky shorts, with a tidy part in their hair, making crisp bounce-passes to their teammates for a proper set-shot. Polio. Institutionalized racism. This was the America of my youth. And it's the proper America." 

That's not to say most magic demos are any good. They stink, of course. It's a lot of arty farty bullshit, followed by a couple out-of-context shots of the trick with some weird film effect laid on top, then some reaction shots by people hamming it up for the camera. (If you make any magic purchase based on the reaction of spectators in a demo, you're a total sucker. Even when the reactions are genuine (and they're often not), they're filtered through the role they're playing of "impressed magic spectator.")

But magic marketers are in a tough position. Often a complete uncut demo will—upon multiple viewings—reveal the method to a trick. Or a moment that would otherwise fly by people in reality will draw attention to itself in a demo. Or you might be selling a presentation more-so than a method, so a full demo would almost be giving the trick away for free. And so what we get are chopped up demos that give you no idea of what the trick looks like in performance. Or you get a mostly full demo with one big, honking cut in the middle and you're thinking, "What on earth happens at that point?"

It's a problem for both marketers and consumers, but I have the solution.

The Global League of Magicians & Mentalists is the largest magic organization in the world. And it's a completely unbiased organization (unless you're a sex-criminal or an asshole).

Now, this is one of those things that I'm 100% serious about but people will think is a joke. And by "one of those things," I mean, "everything I write on this site."

I'm completely genuine about The GOOD GLOMKEEPING Seal of Approval.

Here's how it works. Let's say you're a magic production company. Let's say you're SansMinds. You have this effect you want to put out but you know a full, un-cut demo will ultimately be worked over and scrutinized to the point where people will understand the basics of the method and with that, people will think they know all they need to know. You want to put out a demo that won't reveal the method but that people will know is still an accurate representation of the effect.

So you email me and apply for the GOOD GLOMKEEPING Seal of Approval. What that will entail is you performing the effect for me over Skype. I'll ask you to perform it as if you were walking up to me to perform it cold. So if you need to borrow items, you can't already have them in your hand set to go. I'll want to see you get into and out of the effect.

Essentially, the GGSoA is a way to put out a demo that is incomplete in some way, but to have an independent 3rd party verify that whatever was cut out is not something that would be noticeable to a lay audience when presented by a competent performer. 

Why am I the person to be that independent 3rd party? Well, because I don't give a shit about any of you, good or bad—at least not as far as your magic releases go. I have no real grudges or loyalties. I have nothing to gain by saying something is good if it isn't. I'm pathologically rabid about being fair in situations like this. And I'm smart enough and have enough performing experience to recognize a legitimate withholding of information (e.g., "we cut the switch of the billet because it's noticeable on video, but wouldn't be when properly executed in person") from an illegitimate withholding of information (e.g., "We cut out the part after he says, 'Name any number,' when he says, 'under 50, with two odd digits, that are different.' People never remember those limitations." (Oh yes they do.))

To be clear, the Seal of Approval doesn't say it's a good trick. That's too subjective. The seal is there to say it's a fair demo. This allows magic companies to produce a demo that doesn't give away a trick. And it allows consumers to know the demo isn't keeping anything from them that would be a dealbreaker if they knew about it. So, while I might think the trick stinks, it's not because of a misleading demo.

If you are a magic producer you have nothing to lose. Apply for the seal by emailing me. We'll set up a time to have you demo it for me. Either I'll award your product the seal, or I won't. If I don't, you're no worse off—there is no anti-seal of approval. And if you get it, you can let people know that you received this seal of approval, from a pretty well-known, independent source, stating your demo is fair. There will also be a post on this site indicating your product has received the GOOD GLOMKEEPING Seal of Approval, with your demo embedded in the post. It's essentially a free ad on the most popular (by a long-shot) magic blog on the internet. 

If you're a magic consumer and you see a demo that is obviously incomplete and the person behind it is on the message boards saying, "No. No. You can place your pre-order. I swear, what we cut out isn't important." Feel free to suggest they apply for the GGSoA. If they refuse, you can be pretty sure they've got something to hide.

Will anyone take me up on this? I won't hold my breath, but we'll see.

I think these kids are about to jump this squirrel.

An Apology

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First, a book update. It's at the printer now and is hopefully going to be in my hands, ready to be shipped out at the end of August. This is my first time publishing a book and what I'm learning is that it's a series of small delays that you have no control over. That's why I like writing a blog. There's no one else to rely on. At the moment there is a delay in the processing because the way I'm doing the cover requires them to stamp flat sheets so that the debossing can bleed. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!!! That has been the most difficult part of this process—the fact that I know nothing about the process. I'm doing this primarily by myself with the help of a couple friends who are handling the interaction with the printer, but they don't have any book publishing experience either. But, thats also the fun part for me—learning something new. And I wanted to farm out as little as possible on the book because I wanted it to feel like the blog feels, like there's a person behind it that you can recognize.

So, anyway, my point here is I can either just say, "You'll get it eventually," or I can give estimated dates that may have to be pushed back depending on the printing/delivery process. I've chosen the latter. As of now we're looking at an end of August delivery, I'm hoping.

Now I want to make an apology. Once or twice a week I'll get an email that says, "I just found out about your site, is there a way I can still get the book? Can I get it with the bonus book? And the app? Can I get the newsletter? Can I pay via the Coffee Club." Or similar words expressing the idea, "I'm late to the game, is there still some way I can get on board with what you have to offer?" Going forward, the answer to this is sadly going to be "no." And it's not NO because I'm trying to be a dick. It's NO because I'm trying to be fair to the people who were supporting this site early on. 

I was never selling a book. In October of last year I gave people the opportunity to support the site to keep it around for the coming year. In return, early adopters got a year's subscription to my review newsletter, the iphone app, the Amateur at the Kitchen Table book, The Jerx Volume One, and I'd write a post about anything they wanted. I was following the public television model. Pledge your support and get these things in return. 

After that initial donation period, anyone who pre-ordered would get the iphone app, TAATKT, and the Jerx Volume One, until the point where the book was sent to the printing company.

It's always been super important to me honor my pledge to the people who supported this site early on. So I've taken the bonuses off the table as those offers passed. And while it may seem like a dick think to do, for example, to not offer the newsletter for free to those who bought the book recently; I'm not trying to be a dick to those people, I'm trying to be fair to the people to whom I said, "You'll get this free, but only if you order now." You know?

Now that the book is at the printers, all of that is off. There are still ways to get all of these things individually but they're even more expensive. And that's where the apology is coming in.

But first, I want to mention why the book project didn't go off as I originally planned. I was explaining this to a friend of the site via email recently so I'm just going to copy and paste it here:

I think, originally, my plan was sound. I was going to see how many orders came in and if I reached a certain level I would continue the site and then gather the best posts for a book at the end of the year. And if I didn't reach that certain level I would stop doing the site, and just write the book in my free time for those who did order. 

Then, when the initial orders came in, I was just under where I thought I wanted to be to keep the site going and I made the dumb decision to continue the site but to keep all my strongest tricks going forward for the book. So instead of just duplicating the posts from my site in the book with some rewrites and illustrations, I was in a position of making fresh content for the site and fresh content for the book. I doubled my work like a numbskull. 

So, instead of the book just becoming a "best of" from this site, the book became it's own thing. And I think it turned out pretty damn good. And so my apology is to those people who find out about this site and the book sometime in the future and they want their own copy and they find out it's now $1200 or something ludicrous. That's only because, at that point,  I'll be selling one of my last few copies that otherwise would go to my grandkids or something.

The high price and exclusivity of the book is not intended to punish late-comers, its only a result of keeping a promise to the people who had my back early on. Had I known I would be writing one of the greatest magic books ever and the bible for 21st century magic, I probably would have planned a different distribution strategy, but it is what it is. 

For those Jerx completists out there who are late to this site, here is how and when the various bonus items are available.

The Jerx, Volume One - Is currently $300 with no extras. I know, crazy, right? And it's only going to go up (with no warning) from here. See the link at the top of the page.

The Amateur at the Kitchen Table - This will be a 36-page physical book, available separately in a month or two for $20ish, shipped. Essentially it's a compilation of my thoughts on the presentation of amateur/non-professional magic. The content is all new, but the ideas are similar to what I've proferred throughout this site.

The X-Communication Newsletter - Goes to people who donated last October. People who ordered the book at a later point can also get all this year's issues for a $12 donation. Email me if you're interested.

The Friends of the Jerx post - This is essentially like an ad or sponsored post (and is marked as such), except with two differences, one good and one bad. The good difference is it actually gets read. The bad is that I write it and you have no editorial control (this is why it gets read). Email me for a price point because I just base it on the average number of readers. 

The iPhone app - This will be officially available at some point in the future. The version people have now doesn't have the main functionality, but it will at the next update around the time the book is released. There is a routine in the book that uses the app, but it's a utility app that can be used in a bunch of different situations (stage, close-up, street). I have been using it for the most convincing faux-hypnosis routine recently and it kills people. It's such a subtle idea; very different than any other magic app out there at the moment. And, as a bonus, it leaves a souvenir of the effects on their phone. There will be a free ebook with additional ideas released when the new version comes out.