Going Down and Getting Up

Like much of my non-magic advice—wait... like much of my magic advice too—I have no idea if this will work for anyone else or only for me. But here are two techniques I use in my life. One to fall asleep when I can't and one to wake up easier when I need to.

I'm fairly certain my body is on a 28-hour day cycle. Unfortunately the rest of the earth is not, so I need to conform to regular human cycles and can't adopt this idea.

So there are many nights I need to sleep when I have no inclination to, and mornings where I have to get up where I'd rather just choke myself to death on my blanket because it would mean staying in bed. Here is how I address both of those issues.

Going Down

Very little in life frustrates me, but not being able to fall asleep is one of those things. It's one of the few things in life that can't be addressed with action. If terrorists killed my non-existent wife and kids and torched all my possessions and left me naked in the desert 200 miles from civilization, I would think "Okay, what are the steps to move forward from this situation?" and start along that path. But not being able to fall asleep is a challenge you can't work your way out of.

One night, while frustratedly watching the time pass, I tried this technique: I started thinking nonsense thoughts. By that I mean, I started thinking the types of thoughts I would have if I was on the verge of sleep. Now, I assume most people's minds work the same way mine does (but how the hell would I know). As I'm falling asleep, my thoughts become very stream of consciousness, dream-like, bizarre and disjointed. They're not like waking thoughts, but I wouldn't consider myself asleep yet. So what I do is I force myself to think in that way even though I'm not tired. 

So, for example, I'll imagine an object, say a deck of cards, then I'll zoom into that object so my consciousness feels very small. I'm a speck on the back of a blue playing card. The playing card back transforms into the ocean and I'm on a raft. I'm cutting Oreos into slices, like pizza. And my first grade teacher is there and she says, "The last time we were here was the night Tina was born." And the ocean drains and I'm spiraling, spiraling down. 

And I just go from surreal image to surreal image and not long after, I fall asleep. I don't know how it works. Maybe my mind associates those kinds of thoughts with being tired or maybe those thoughts just prevent any real thinking from being done and my mind shuts off after a while. i don't know. But it works for me.

Getting Up

I have a lot of productivity techniques that just involve lying to myself, and this is one of them. Maybe you're too smart for this to work for you, but I'm not. 

When I had a regular day job I had to be there at around 9:30 every morning. So I'd set my alarm for 8:30, wake up miserably, get ready, and go to work. And it would get to the point where I would push the alarm forward as much as I could, trying to milk every precious moment of sleep possible. So I'd shower at night and make sure all my clothes were laid out and it would take me like 8 minutes to get ready in the morning. But then I was just miserable waking up and I was in a huge rush. So my mornings weren't any better.

Whenever something isn't working, I'll often try the opposite even if seems counterintuitive to what I'm trying to accomplish. And that where this idea came from.

If you have a hard time getting up in the morning, identify the ideal time you should be waking up, and then set your alarm for a half hour earlier. If you're like me (super cool handsome guy) you'll find you have less resistance than getting up at the exact latest time you possibly can. Now, you actually have to get up at that time. You can't hit snooze three times. You have to get up and you have to do nothing of consequence for that half hour. At first, after I realized it was easier for me to get up earlier, I tried filling that half hour with something productive, but that made it miserable to wake up again. So I removed the notion of anything useful and I'd just putter around my apartment, watch tv, eat cereal, screw around on the internet, and then I'd say, "Oh, it's time to get ready for work."

It wasn't a matter of my sleep cycle or anything like that, because I had no consistent bed time, so it must have been something else. Here is what I think was going on. Because I was setting my alarm earlier for no reason, I was getting up at a time I didn't need to. And I think my brain interpreted that as, "Well, if we don't need to get up at this time, and we're doing it, then we must want to get up at this time." And so I felt like I wanted to get up at that time, Is that a plausible hypothesis? Or does it make me sound like an idiot? Well, whatever, give it a shot. If you hate waking up when you have to, try waking up at a time you don't have to and see if it's more pleasant. It was for me.

Jerx in the App Store

The Jerx App is now available on the app store. (If you bought the book and you requested a promo code and haven't received it yet, send me an email.)

"$150.00!! Are you kidding me?"

First off, it's not $150. I'm not a monster. It's $149.99.

"Well, you're not going to sell many for that price."

Good! That was the idea.  

When I first had the idea for the functionality of the Jerx app, it was to allow for moments of dual reality for one person as described in this post. And it was specifically made for an effect in The Jerx, Volume One. And thus it was created for the buyers of that book.

Over the months of writing the book and working on the app I discovered a number of other uses for the app other than the one I had originally come up with. It's a true utility app. I consider it the thumbtip of magic apps. The Jerx App - The Thumbtip of Magic Apps™. And I thought some people were going to want the app who had no interest in my style of magic or my thoughts on magic, so they would not be book-buyers. So I put a price on the app that was high, but not unheard of (there are magic apps that are much more expensive that absolutely suck dong). 

So, the app is priced at a point that makes it available to people if they really want it, but also keeps it at what it was intended to be: a bonus for the people who buy the book.

To me, the interesting thing about this app—and I think what makes it particularly versatile— is that, for the most part, the effects don't take place on the phone. While a phone is used in the effects, that's not where the climax of the effect happens (most often). So the idea that an app is involved is, I think, significantly less likely to occur to people. 

I'm not going to bug people here with more posts about the app. And I'm not going to be emailing the owners if there is a new effect added to the half-dozen or so that are currently in the instructions. Instead I will just be utilizing the yellow announcement bar at the top to let people know they should check back in on the effects page.

I will mention that I will soon be adding at least one new effect by a guy whose work I've appreciated for a few years now, and that's Michael Murray, author of A Piece of My Mind. That should be on the instructions page sometime next week. 

Have a good weekend. It's the first full weekend of fall. Go eat a pumpkin, ya blockhead!

Ward Clever

I get it. But the thing to realize is this: they think they're giving you a compliment. They're trying to say something nice. You're like a fat girl with a pretty face. And you're sick and tired of people telling you you have a pretty face or a great personality. You want to hear how sexy you are, or how great you look in that dress. But we don't get the compliments we want; we get the compliments we deserve. 

Most magic, performed in a magician-centric style—that is, a style where you are directly taking responsibility for what's occurring—is designed to make you look clever or to celebrate the cleverness of the trick itself. So what else would we expect? "No, no, magic is designed to AMAZE people," you say. Okay, maybe. But the majority of magic is designed to amaze people with how clever you are. You're able to make cards change. You're able to read my mind (as long as I follow the procedure you've delineated). You're able to make the coins go from one hand to the other. Clever stuff!

Honestly, if you're a professional magician doing walk-around magic, "clever" isn't that bad. "Clever" is the smart person's way of saying, "I was fooled. I'm not emotionally vulnerable enough with this person to suggest I'm in awe of what they've done. But they fooled me. And I'm no dummy. So that was pretty clever."

But you want more. You want people to express the same awe with you as they do with the magicians on TV. People don't say, "David Copperfield is so clever." They don't say, "Criss Angel is so clever." In fact, they're more likely to say, "Criss Angel is functionally retarded." And yet they still freak out at his tricks. If you're a professional magician and you want people to come away with something other than your cleverness, then you have to offer something other than than your cleverness. Good fooling tricks = cleverness. What are you emphasizing other than the tricks? Every superstar magician (in the U.S., at least) has had that "something else" that people are really responding to. David Copperfield put emotional resonance above the tricks. David Blaine valued an enigmatic presence and artistic tests of endurance over tricks. Penn & Teller put comedy and commentary above tricks. Criss Angel put overall weirdness and getting his hair cut at the same place my mom's friends do above tricks. 

Those magicians are considered amazing and incredible and awe inspiring not because their tricks were the most fooling, but because they put something else above the magic. Mat Franco will not achieve that level of cultural relevance because he doesn't have that other thing (at least he doesn't now). He just has tricks.

If you are an amateur it's a whole other story. You have a whole different set of tools you can use to engender other reactions to your effects and to ward off the idea that it's just a bit of "cleverness". Tools that aren't available to the professional. For example, you can perform things in a way that seems genuinely unplanned or unexpected. When you're standing on stage with one of those hoops around your neck that holds a microphone, it's very difficult to pull off the "this was completely unplanned!" schtick.

For a long time I have tracked my spectator's responses to tricks. In this post I described some of my organizational systems for magic. If you scroll down to the spreadsheet with people's names on the left and effects along the top, that's where I track them. If I click in a blacked out square it will bring up a note indicating the date and time I performed the tirck, and the spectator's first verbal reaction to the effect and their overall reaction.

What I've found is the only sure-fire way to get reactions that are more than just a nod to your cleverness is to do what I've mentioned from the beginning of this site, and that is to remove yourself as the entity behind the magic. This works in two ways.

The first way it works is that if you're not claiming responsibility for what's happening then you get to play the role of a spectator too. And, in that way, you are able to model a proper reaction to your other spectators. If you use the "power of your mind" to move something, it may come off as "clever" to your spectator.  But if you're not responsible for something moving—If a deck cuts itself and a card slides out while no one is in the room with it—then you get to react to the effect yourself and demonstrate the type of impact it might have on your spectator. If you walk in the room, see the deck has moved, and immediately turn around and say, "Fuck that noise. I'm out of here." Your spectator won't respond with, "That's clever." Instead they'll allow themselves to see the creepiness of the effect too.

There's a second way this works as well, but to understand it you really need to understand the relationship between the amateur magician and the spectator. It's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, but more importantly it's something I've spent a ton of time asking people about. I wouldn't be surprised if I've talked to people about their perception of magic and magicians—outside of a formal performance—more than everyone reading this combined. And I can tell you that it can be an uncomfortable dynamic for someone when a person in their life offers to show them a magic trick. Maybe they work with you, maybe you're  friends, maybe they put your genitals in their mouth on the regular. So when you say, "I'm going to read your mind," or, "I'm going to cast a shadow over this coin and make it disappear," they know you're not psychic and you're not a goddamn wizard, so they know it's an act and they play along. And it's easy to play along with during the effect, but at the end, what is the proper response they're supposed to give you for faking this impossible thing? Surely it can't be heaping praise on you as if you actually did it. They assume that's not something you want, that it would be almost condescending of them to act like that. So instead they describe it in terms you might use for someone's talent of faking the impossible. "That's very clever."

The three performance styles I've discussed on this blog and further defined in The Jerx, Volume One are all designed to remove that awkward moment for the spectator of just how they should react to someone claiming to have done the impossible when everyone involved knows it was just an act:

The Peek Backstage acknowledges the artifice throughout so there's no wondering how you want them to interact with you. You want them to interact with you as someone openly demonstrating deception to them. This can actually free them up for bigger reactions.

The Distracted Artist removes the magician's ego from concern because the effect happens unintentionally. And because it is only climax and no build-up you get a genuine response in the moment from the audience.

The Romantic Adventure is all about the journey, not the effect. The effect is, essentially, a real-time special effect in the greater experience you're creating. It's not meant to be commented on in the moment so there's no weird pressure there on the spectator.

So the second way removing yourself from the effect helps get you stronger reactions is that it lets your spectator off the hook. There's is never a sense of: "I'm going to do something amazing. Now what is your response to it going to be?" You've actively removed yourself and your ego from the demonstration and it frees them to give voice to what they're feeling from an effect, rather than just giving you credit for doing it well. It's incongruous to say "that's clever" or "well done" to someone who apparently isn't seeking credit. So instead they say what they're genuinely feeling. "That's crazy!" "That's amazing!" "That's not possible." "That's freaky." etc.

Of course, sometimes a trick is just going to be a trick. It's hard to play off some four-phase pseudo-memory demonstration as anything other than you being clever. So that's probably the response you'll get. That's okay. There are worse things to have said about you. 

The Buy-In

This is a foundational idea of the type of magic I like to perform. It's something that has been implicit in many of the routines I've written up here, but now I want to make it explicit. If you want to make your magic performances more powerful and have them resonate in a way that feels greater than just "a trick" then this is a concept that I think is very valuable. 

I should start by saying that sometimes a magic trick should be just a trick. And there's nothing wrong with performing that way, and only ever performing that way. (I'm not advocating for a style of performance; not with this site, or with the books I've written. I'm only giving the details of a style that has worked well for me and I think could work well for others.) Certain tricks should just be fun and light. It would be incongruent to try and make sponge bunnies some deep mystery (in most cases). 

But if you have an effect that you think could provide a small profound moment for a spectator, then I've found a good way to increase the likelihood of that moment landing with them is to include a buy-in in your presentation.

What is a buy-in? A buy-in is a moment in an effect where the trick only proceeds because the spectator agrees to give you something. They "buy in" to the effect. They invest. 

A "buy in" is something that would seem unnecessary if what you were doing was just a trick. And thus the effect feels like something else. I don't want a spectator to think they're seeing "real magic," I want them to feel like they're having a magical experience, regardless of what they know to be true. A roller-coaster can feel like a scary, dangerous experience, even though your rational mind knows it's not. An effect can feel like a magical experience without asking your spectator to believe in magic. 

Here's an example:

Performance A: Let's say you write down a name on a business card and then I read your mind and tell you what name you wrote down. That might be a good trick, a great trick, or a mediocre trick. 

Performance B: Let's say you write down a name on a business card. I try and read your mind, but after a couple of guesses I fail. I think it might be Donna or Deanna, but it's actually Debbie. I consider this for a moment, thinking about why it might not have worked. Then I ask, "Would it be okay if we shut the windows and doors to this room?" You're uncertain why, but you agree to it and join me in lowering the windows and closing the door. We try the trick again. You write down a name and after a few moments of thought I'm able to nail it.

The buy-in here is you agreeing to help me seal off the room. I'm getting you to invest some energy into something that doesn't seemingly play a role in the execution of the effect. This may make the trick stronger, but even if it doesn't, it makes the experience richer. It adds a dimension to what is taking place.

[This is based on an actual consulting gig I had once where—when we were stuck for an idea—the guy leading the group would make us close the doors and windows to "trap the ideas in the room." To which I asked, "What if we're locking them out of the room?"

He had read about this technique in a book on creativity we all had to read before starting on the project. And, to be fair, once the room was sealed off, we did usually come up with an idea soon after. So who knows.]

Other examples:

The Permission Buy-In: This is often used by mentalists. Most notably, to me, Derren Brown. But I'm sure it goes back long before that. It's something I use too whenever I'm doing anything "mind" related. You're about to read someone's thoughts and you say, "Is it okay if I read your mind? I'm not going to say anything you wouldn't want me to. If it feels invasive, or if you want me to back off at any point, just let me know. Are you okay with this?" Here you're asking the person to give you their permission to move forward. Don't make a joke of it, just ask it straight. Not only would this be the polite thing to do if you really were going to read someone's mind, but it's a strong moment where they're giving you the go-ahead to complete the trick. They're becoming complicit in the fiction. It's a little bit of theater that makes them less likely to immediately think, "I guess he peeked at my drawing somehow."

The Time Buy-In: This is my favorite and the one you see used a lot in my routines. We tend to think the best magic is short and punchy, and to some extent I agree with that. In most cases I would rather do a five second trick than a four minute trick. But if you can craft an interesting hour-long experience, it will reverberate much more than the same effect done over the course of a minute. In general, the more time your spectator invests in a trick, the stronger the impact. I'm not suggesting you make your tricks needlessly long, but there's nothing wrong with having a mystery that plays out over time. 

Magicians tend to be hyper-critical about the time an effect takes. This is, once again, an example of a professional magician's concern being applied where it's not applicable: in the non-professionals performing arena. Yes, when you're performing table-side for people who might not have asked to see you, you want to be a little snappy and keep things moving. That's not necessary or even desirable for the amateur performer. "I don't do the Open Prediction effect because it takes too much time to deal through a deck." Huh? It takes 45 seconds to deal through a deck. If you get the sense that you're performing for someone who would be bothered by taking the time to deal through a deck, you should not be performing anything for that person. They're not interested. Move on.

The Procedural Buy-In: We bemoan tricks that are "procedure heavy," but there's a difference between a procedure that is required by the method and a procedure that is part of the presentation. The former is likely a weakness, especially if you don't give it a context. But the latter can often serve to make the effect more compelling. There was a time I would have believed the most direct presentation was always the best. But I'm pretty far from that position these days. "You're thinking of a card. Okay. Concentrate... concentrate... the four of diamonds!" That's fine, but it's a little too one dimensional. "You're thinking of a card. Okay, I'm going to try and find out what it is. But first, would you mind taking part in a synchronicity exercise with me?" Yes, it delays the effect. But it requires the spectator to buy in and, for me, gets a better response.

The Benevolent Scam

Here's what I think is going on with buy-ins and why I've found they add significantly to my performances.

1. The first reason, as I mentioned, is that they add texture to a performance. "He read my mind. Well...no... of course he didn't. But he seemed to. But why did we have to close the doors and windows? That must mean something." A buy-in can misdirect and broaden the mystery because it's not strictly tied to the process of what the spectator sees as a part of the trick.

2. The Ben Franklin Effect. In Franklin's autobiography he quoted an old maxim that said, "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged." In other words, it's not that we like people who do stuff for us; we like people that we've done stuff for. A buy-in requires someone to give us something (time, permission, their engagement in some procedure). This doesn't make them feel like we owe them something. It doesn't make them more detached. It doesn't make them think, "Okay, I've done my part, now leave me alone." Instead it makes them more interested and tuned in to the whole process.

3. Similarly I think there is something of a benevolent scam going on. If you invest $5 in some money-making scheme of mine, you might be quick to call it bullshit and move on. But if you invest $50,000, you don't become more skeptical. You're literally and figuratively more invested in the project. You want to see it out. And if I tell you we just need another $20,000 to get the project off the ground you're even more onboard. This is how many scams work. They get you to invest so much time and energy that you don't want to see it as a scam. Incorporating buy-ins into your effects is a sweetly gentle way of "scamming" your audience into seeing the experience as not some trivial trick, but maybe something more compelling. 

Stranger Things: Multiple Buy-Ins

This is my favorite example of layering buy-ins to transform a five second trick into something different—even though it's an identical five second trick. This is not something I've done, but my friend has performed it a few times.

The original trick is a floating finger ring effect. You borrow a finger ring, lay it on the palm of your hand, it stands in its edge, then raises in the air, then floats to the other hand. I'd seen my friend do this in bars for a few years and it always got a decent response. I think it suffers from the same thing the floating bill does in that most people will naturally assume it's suspended from something, but with a borrowed ring I think there's a little more shade to it. 

Last winter I went with some friends to explore an abandoned/decommissioned nuclear power plant on Long Island.

The place had a weird, creepy, strange vibe. It was exciting. I mentioned to one of my friends (who also does magic) that it would probably be a cool place to do some kind of trick. 

A few weeks later he did just that. He was out at a bar talking with a couple friends and asked them if they would be willing to come along with him to see something a little freaky he had discovered at the old nuclear power plant. "It might be a little weird. I don't think it's dangerous, really. But I only want you to come if you're 100% onboard." Who could resist that invitation? So they drove 20 minutes out to the plant, got out and walked about a third of a mile in the snow around the fence until they got to the "right spot."

"Do you feel it?" he asked.

Standing outside in the winter in a deserted area by an old nuclear power plant you're bound to feel something. "Here...uhm...let's see... oh, give me your ring." He takes the borrowed ring places it on the palm of his hand, waits a good long while, until eventually, by the light of the moon and a cell phone, the ring flips up on its end, raises in the air and floats to the other hand. Mayhem.

They know he does magic. They know, on some level, it's a trick. But it's also something more because they've invested more in it than they would in "a trick."

You might say it was just the change in location that makes it more powerful, but I disagree. Had they already been there—had they been on some tour of the location or something—and he said, "Hey, want to see something weird?" I think it would not have had as great an impact. By giving him their permission to go off and do something potentially unsettling, by giving him their time, by giving him their energy to engage in the process, they had "bought in" to something beyond a magic trick so that's what the experience was for them. Even though the trick itself was identical to the way he performed it when he did so in a bar.

You might feel guilty taking an hour out of someone's day and making them trek out to the middle of nowhere to show them a trick you could do in their living room. I get that. But I don't think you can say that experience is a waste of their time. I genuinely think it's more worth it to take an hour out of someone's life for an adventure they'll always remember than it is to take two minutes out of their life to show them a 4-ace trick that they'll forget the details of by the following day.

The Universal Buy-In

These lines I'm about to give you are a gift. I use them, or a variation of them, frequently. They're not a gift from me, however. Unfortunately I don't know who to credit these lines to. I have a few friends I share an Evernote account with where we deposit phrases, images, and ideas that we think might be useful in some way. And this was a phrase my friend copied down from somewhere about two years ago, but now he has no idea where it came from. It might have come from a magic book or a novel or some new-age self-help book, he doesn't remember. Hopefully someone can let me know who to credit for this. 

This is not something you would use before a 4-item multiple out routine. Save this for when you have a big, immersive trick you want to really affect people with. The language is kind of grandiose and meant to get people in the state of mind that they're about to experience something exciting. People sometimes email me and ask how I get my friends to engage with these types of effects, and part of it may be that I use lines like this to get them in the right headspace. It's a permission buy-in. It asks for their permission to go forward. It asks them to trust me and asks them to immerse themselves in what's to come.

Here it is (and if you know where it comes from, tell me)...

RIP

Do you have a family member going under anesthetic for a medical procedure anytime soon? If so, I think you should try this, and, in fact, I will spot you the money to do so. 

When this person wakes up from the anesthetic, have a nurse say, "My god, it's a miracle," and run out of the room. 

Then have a doctor (or someone pretending to be a doctor) come in the room and say something like, "Karen... it's... it's so good to have you back. My name is Dr. Roberts. Karen, do you remember why you came to the hospital originally?"

She'll say it was to get her appendix out, or whatever. 

"Yes. Yes, good. It seems your memory is still intact. Karen, I don't know how to say this, but there was an issue with your surgery and you slipped into a coma. You've been asleep for 25 years."

"We've notified your family." He points to a dusty stack of presents in the corner. "They never forgot you, they would bring you a gift every year on your birthday and they'd throw such a fit if we tried to move them. They had faith this day would come." 

There's a knock on the door and you and another member of the family come in wearing full old-age prosthetics. Ideally you have some 30-year-old playing your friend's grown-up five-year-old kid. 

Just cry a lot and at some point ask your friend if she wants to see what she looks like now. Reluctantly hold up a hand-mirror to her face which you've pasted a picture of the Crypt Keeper or Zelda Rubinstein or something to.

This isn't a magic trick, of course. I guess it's a practical joke. But really, I'd like it to be more than that. I'd like it to be something people do even if the target knows what's coming. This may be ambitious for something so complicated to pull off, but I'd like it to become a fad that sweeps the nation. Like planking or Tebow'ing once were. VanWinkl'ing.

Non-Magicians Talking Magic: Tom Scharpling on Criss Angel's Vegas Show

I'm a big believer in the benefits of listening to non-magicians talk about magic to other non-magicians. I think they speak a lot more candidly. If you can ever get someone to talk about magic before they know you do it, it can be very enlightening. At the very least it's much more worthwhile than listening to other magicians jabber on about magic. That echo chamber produces logic like, "If you're a good magician, people don't want to look closely at your props because they think you're real." That's magicians talking to magicians about magicians. And magicians aren't known for the keen insight into the ways real people think.

This audio is of Tom Scharpling who hosts The Best Show—a weekly, three-hour, radio show turned podcast—as he talks for 21 minutes about going to see the Criss Angel show in Vegas (the story doesn't end there, if you listen to more of the show you'll hear about the next night when he goes to a benefit show put on by Criss Angel which sounds insane). I think it's rare to hear a non-magician talk about a magic show for that long, and I think there are a couple good insights into how a layperson perceives certain effects, and there are some good laughs too. If you've got some time to kill, give it a listen.

"His style is like a dude who saw a Nine Inch Nails video and then saw the movie The Crow, and he's like 'Yeah, that's everything I need right there. Got it.'"

And if you're not familiar with The Best Show, here is one of the classic moments from the show as Tom Scharpling and Paul F. Tompkins discuss the upcoming Gathering of the Juggalos in 2009.

Jerx On Your Side: Forcing Pads

It's always a little odd watching trends come and go in magic. When I had my old blog there was a deluge of self-levitations and torn and restored card tricks. Then there was a haunted pack phase. And in the past couple years there have been a lot of "slide a card thru a dollar bill" tricks for whatever reason. Unlike trends in movies or music, magic trends have nothing to do with the audience and what they want, nor are they about a bunch of artists boldly following their muse. Instead it's just the insular and incestuous magician-centric creative process. 

A recent trend comes in the form of pre-made force pads. A year or so ago, a professionally made pad came out that was universally praised. And it wasn't long before someone came out with something very similar, but quite a bit cheaper, cleverly called The Force Pad. Then, a little while after that, Alan Wong released The Svengali Notebook.

But this post isn't about which of these force pads is the best, this post is about if it's even necessary to buy a commercially available force pad in the first place. That's why I asked The Jerx On Your Side Consumer Action Squad to make one of these pads to evaluate the cost and feasibility of making one yourself.

What I wanted to determine is if a homemade pad was workable or if it would be too clumsy and finicky to use in the real world. So Chip, Tina S., Trent, Marsha, and Tina P. went out to see if they could make one of these pads. 

First they went to Walmart and bought a 4-pack of notebooks (3 pictured).

Chip from the Jerx On Your Side team says, "Yes, you can buy notebooks at Walmart." That's a hot tip, Chip.

Then they went to a print shop and asked if they would use their guillotine chopper to cut a millimeter or so off the bottom of one of the notebooks (cut next to uncut).

Tina S. from the JOYS team tells us, "Yes, a print shop will cut a millimeter off the bottom of a notebook for you. They will ask you, 'What is this for?' You'll be like, 'Uhhh....' They'll say, 'You trying to fit it into a box or something?' You'll say, 'Sure, that's it.'"

Next they took a pair of pliers and bent up the end of the wire on both ends of the spiral from two notebooks (the cut one and a normal one) and twisted out the spiral.

Trent from the JOYS team astutely points out, "Yes, you can do this. That's how spirals and holes work. It's kind of fun."

Next they alternated sheets from the short notebook with sheets from the long notebook.

Marsha chimes in, "This just takes a few minutes, but it is the most time-consuming part of the process. And it is not fun like twirling around the spiral."

Then they took half the pile they just made, squared it up as best they could, added a back and front cover, reintroduced the spiral, bent in the ends of the spiral, and they had a force pad.

The JOYS team's Tina P. says, "There's not really anything for me to say. You just said it. It doesn't take five people to do this."

The edges of the pad looked fine. Essentially identical to an ungimmicked cheap pad.

In fact, maybe it was too good. Maybe the JOYS team didn't cut enough off.

I decided to test it with a scintillating trick I just came up with: forcing my favorite conjunction on someone from a book of conjunctions. What could be better than getting people to think of the word "and"?

I wasn't particularly confident as I held the notebook in my hands. Would it work?

Yeah, it worked completely fine. 

The Jerx On Your Side Consumer Action Squad's Final Thoughts

Chip: "If you're performing professional shows, you may want to buy the commercially available pads, but these homemade ones work pretty much perfectly. As a bit of an amateur magician (with the ladies) I would be perfectly content to use the homemade version."

Tina S.: "Even the pros might be content with the homemade ones. Especially when you consider the commercially available ones are $25 a piece and you can make your own in about 12 minutes for, literally, 22 cents (the notebooks were sold in a 4-pack for 88 cents) plus whatever you want to give the print shop for chopping off the bottom of the pad. They don't generally have a set price for such a thing. The professionally made ones might be twice as good, but they're not an order of magnitude better."

Trent: "You might think the pages would shift around with the thin wire going through larger holes which would affect the riffling of the pages. But it doesn't. There's a lot of friction between pages. We tried to get the pages to shift around or to make the gimmick not work and we couldn't."

Marsha: "Here's what I would do differently next time. Walmart also sells notebooks that look like the ones below. These are 3 for 88 cents (a bloodsucking 8 cents more per pad than the others). But these have plastic covers which will hold up better to the bending and riffling. And they don't have curved bottoms (Like your girl Marsha do. Heyyyyy!!) so the bottom of all the pages would be two right angles which would further disguise the work. I would use those in the future."

Tina P.: "Dammit. You took all the good stuff to say! Why am I even on the team?"

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After this hard-hitting investigation, I have to say I agree with Trent. If you have a big gig, and want to be extra cautious, I would go with one of the professionally made pads linked above. Otherwise, I don't really see a reason not to DIY even for someone as lazy as me. The notion that you could toss four of these on the table, have four people choose any notebook they want and flip open to any page they want, and you could tell them what word or picture they're looking at (you know which notebook is which by cover color), is a pretty nice effect to make for under a buck. At the very least you may want to put together a "rough draft" version of an effect with the homemade version before shelling out the big bucks. 

This concludes the Jerx On Your Side Consumer Action Squad's investigation.