A Strange Video I Found

Guys, I’m kind of freaking out a little. I found this weird thing online last night and it really has me unsettled. I was just doing some mindless clicking around, looking at some old defunct magic sites. Thinking maybe I would find something dumb to post on here. I was watching tv at the same time, so I wasn’t paying too much attention. I was clicking random ads on some old magic blogs and I found myself at this site that looked like it was from the early 2000s.

I couldn’t figure out what language the site was in. It didn’t use normal letters. It looked maybe… runic or something? If that’s even possible.

I didn’t give it too much thought. I recognized a bunch of old products from about 15-20 years ago. So it just seemed like a strange old magic website. But it’s hard to get too creeped out when you’re seeing ads for sponge fruit or pictures of David Regal. That’s about as unthreatening as a thing can get.

Then I saw an ad for something and the thumbnail for the video said, “Social Distancing Mask.” I was like, Huh? The site was clearly old. And I was wondering if somehow this was a targeted ad that was being populated from somewhere else. Or maybe that’s a term that had some other meaning 15 years ago, and it was just a coincidence that I was seeing it in the middle of all of this.

So I took the ad copy and put it through Google Translate. It said: Language: Unknown. But it also gave me a translation. How is that possible?

The translation for the ad was this:

“2020 may seem like a long time from now. But as sure as the peacock strums the guitar [What?], that year will come. And when it does, you will wish you had bought this mask to help you deal with our virus [Our?]. This mask is guaranteed to keep people 15 feet from you at all time. It will repel people as sure as the peacock strums the guitar. “ [Again with the peacock thing?]

And here is the video that was in the ad. Don’t watch it if you’re alone. I had to turn all the lights on in my house and couldn’t get to sleep all night.

Now, that’s definitely mid-2000s era Penguin music and graphics, but then it says “Available at Vanishing Inc,” which didn’t even exist at that time.

And that mask is of modern-day Joshua Jay, right? I’m not going crazy here, am I?

I downloaded the video and I wanted to link to the site, but when I went back today I got an error message that said, “This site does not exist. In fact, it has never existed. Quit looking into it.” That seems super sketchy.

I’m not sure what’s happening. This is a weird time and things just seem to be getting weirder.

My Italian Grandmother Boiled, Peeled, and Mashed All Those Potatoes... for This?

Okay, fine. I’ll stop making this sort of joke. (Only because I can’t think of another variation.)

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Friend of the site, ML, has passed along a helpful nugget for anyone interested in playing around with anagrams.

Open a google spreadsheet. Put the alphabet along the top row, and the words you want the anagram for along the left column, then, in all the other spaces, put this formula:

=IF(REGEXMATCH($A2, B$1), "X", "")

There will be an X in the box if the word contains that letter and it will be blank if it doesn’t. Then you can take it from there. In a previous post I described the process I use when I want to create transgressive (as opposed to progressive) anagrams.

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Reader mail:

I know that you don’t particularly like ReaList [Andy’s note: ReaList is an app by Greg Rostami that let’s you force something into a position from a list on a website] as there is friction in the selection process but it can be performed over the phone. I am fascinated by your routines and I was just wondering how would you perform ReaList over the phone? —CE

You know, I’m stuck on this one. I still haven’t bought the app, but my friend has, and I’ve talked with him a little trying to crack something really cool to do with it, but I haven’t had much luck. My primary problem with ReaList, as I mentioned in this post, is that it’s a better way to do the worst things that people are doing with Digital Force Bag. “Name a number, and I’ll predict the thing that lies at that number.” Is not something that I find inherently that interesting. It’s not a bad trick, it’s just a bland trick.

And it’s sort of an illogical trick. Pick a number. We’ll map that number to some other object (in a way in which you have no say). Then I’ll show that I predicted that other object. Huh? Why didn’t I just cut to the chase and write down the number on my prediction in the first place? That would have saved us time and been the exact same trick.

“You said 14? Okay… now scroll through the list. What’s at number 14. Goodfellas? If you had said 13 it would have been something else. If you had said 15 it would have been something else as well. Scroll all the way through, there is no other Goodfellas on the list. Now open my prediction… It says Goodfellas!”

Why didn’t it just say “Fourteen”? I mean, ultimately, that’s what the trick is. It’s not a trick about movies, it’s a trick about a number (that was then translated to a movie). If it was a trick about movies, I would have said, “Think of one of these movies.” (This is why I like the Xeno app. That trick is about whatever the list is about.)

That’s why with DFB, none of the routines I’ve written about are that direct in the way things are predicted. “You said that number, and that number means this thing, and I predicted this thing.” That just doesn’t appeal to me.

As far as doing the effect remotely, it’s nice to have that option, but if I’m going to do something over video chat or something like that, I want to do something that feels very analog. You already have the distance of the webcam between you and your spectator. I think—ideally—that should feel like the only technology in the equation. I want there to be something tangible in all of this. I don’t want to be on video-chat, have you look at something on a website, and then text you my prediction. That’s just my personal preference.

I’m not trying to shit on this app. I have a feeling it does what it does well. I just haven’t thought of a use for it yet that I really like and would warrant me purchasing it.

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And, frankly, since video chat allows you to do a prediction of anything very cleanly using this method, anything less than that seems like a step backwards.

By the way, DM wrote in to suggest using an Ostin clip for the webcam predictions (search around, there are a bunch of different variations available). I don’t believe I’ve ever used one, but that certainly seems like it would work. Hang it from the ceiling by a ribbon so it’s in the shot the whole time and you’re good to go.

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The free ebook for the people who entered the Better with Weber contest should be coming later this week. I’ll make a post here when it’s ready.

Joyful Noise #2

Here are some little things that have made me happy recently.

Reaction Video

In last Sunday’s post I mentioned reaction videos. I also mentioned how there is a bizarre amount of reaction videos for the Righteous Brothers, specifically for “You’re Lost That Loving Feeling.”

What follows is maybe my favorite moment from all reaction videos.

Modern Renaissance Man is watching the Righteous Brothers who, at the start of the video, are singing in silhouette. The lights go up on the singer. “A white dude?!” MRM says. Moments later the light goes up on the other Righteous Brother. “Two white dudes!” he says with astonished glee. His delivery is perfect.

The video below starts at 1 minute in. But watch until at least 1:45.

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Horror Book

I found The Troop by Nick Cutter to be a pretty enjoyable read. Some people were grossed out by it, but I didn’t find it that bad. It came out a few years ago, but I just read it last year. If you like horror, I would check it out.

I’m going to spoil it a little in the next few paragraphs so skip to the next section if you think you might read it.

Ok. Let’s wait a minute for everyone to skip this paragraph. I’ll put a line from that Righteous Brothers song here to add some space before I tell you about my favorite scene in the book. You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips. And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips. Okay, that should be enough. So the book is about a genetically modified strain of tapeworms that are extra ravenous and fairly quickly cause you to waste away because they devour anything you eat—you can’t possibly eat enough to satiate them. So soon your body is infested with these things and they are essentially eating you from the inside out. I want to share my favorite image in the book. It takes place on an island where boy scouts are on a weekend excursion. The scouts get infested. They only brought enough food for the weekend and they’re stuck on the island (for reasons that don’t matter for what I’m telling you). Because the tapeworms are absorbing anything they can from the body, the kids are withering away. The scene I can’t get out of my head is about this one kid. His gums are receding because of the hyper-malnutrition, and all but one of his teeth fall out. But, he has braces. Here is how it’s described in the book.

“The fleshless pinworms that were his lips skinned back to disclose a dizzying grotesquerie: his gums had been eaten back from his teeth, and all but one—his left front incisor—had loosened and fallen from their gum beds; yet they remained connected by Kent’s braces, gray teeth linked like charms on a gruesome bracelet, clicking and clacking in the dark vault of his mouth, all hanging by that one tenacious tooth . . . which, as Shelley watched, slid from Kent’s gums with a slick sucking sound, a bracelet of teeth bouncing over his lips, his chin, tumbling to the cellar steps. Kent stepped on them, oblivious to his own teeth shattering like ribbon candy.”

Supposedly they’re making a movie based on the book. I hope that scene is in it.

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Live Performance Highlight

I’ve talked in the past about identifying particular moments of experiences that resonate with you.

Because this is the way I try and look at things, I tend to get caught up in specific small moments in things.

So I’m going to share with you one of my favorite moments from the Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, a film I watched recently for the first time in a while.

It comes in the song, Once in a Lifetime. There’s a part near the end of the song where David Byrne isn’t singing. He’s sort of moving to the music and begins to lean back, limbo style. As he moves back his movements slow and become out of sync with the music, and his back is almost parallel to the ground. As this musical break comes to an end there is a drum fill, and in time with that drum fill, Byrne rises and whips the microphone out of the mic stand in one perfectly timed motion. Simultaneously the camera shot changes and we see that not only was Byrne doing that lean-back thing, but so were his back up singers. And we see these two singers slowly rise back up, almost as if they’re floating back into place. And there are two keyboard players coming out of the darkness above them. It’s a very striking moment. If you just saw a snapshot of it, you could maybe mistake it for an image from an old spiritualist ceremony.

It’s a great moment. It starts a little after 4:00 in to the clip below. But watch the whole thing, it’s worth it.

The Juxe: "In No Time At All This Will Be the Distant Past"

I’m not a huge Father John Misty fan, but the songs of his I like, I really like.

The title of this post comes from his song Ballad of the Dying Man. It’s a sentiment I try and keep in mind. When times are good it reminds me to be present and to enjoy the moment while it’s here. When times aren’t good it reminds me that those times will soon be over.

The song itself isn’t really about that idea, necessarily. But it’s a really good song. There’s no real music video for it, and the live versions are nowhere near as pretty. So here is the official audio from the album itself.

Here are some of my other FJM favorites.

Hollywood Forever Cemetary

The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment

The next couple of songs sort of go together. They’re from his album God’s Favorite Customer. It’s an album he wrote while holed up in a hotel for a couple months dealing with depression and delusions. The song, “Mr. Tillman” (Father John Misty’s real name is Josh Tillman) is kind of an amusing/creepy look at this time (with an amusing and creepy video as well). “Please Don’t Die,” is a more raw, vulnerable take on the same time, with the chorus coming from his wife’s perspective as she was dealing with him during this period.

And the Winner Is...

It’s time to announce the winner of the Better with Weber challenge. There was no judging. This was just a random draw from all the entries to the contest.

Here’s how it worked, so you know I just didn’t fix it to let one of my friends win.

I labelled every email that came in for the contest with the label “Contest” in gmail. So far, so good.

In the end, there were 247 entrants.

(There will be slightly more trick recommendations than that in the ebook, since some people came in after the cut-off point.)

But who could be trusted to pick the winning entrant? I went with the man himself, Michael Weber. He used random.org to select a random number and sent me this screenshot.

So now it was just a matter of seeing who submitted the 35th entry into the contest.

Counting up from the bottom in this next image (which is the first 40 or so entrants) we see that the winner is Richard I. Congrats, Richard I! I’ll be contacting you soon.

Now here’s something a little strange. The winner, Richard, was number 35. If you look below him, it’s someone named Michael. That’s Michael Weber. He entered a contest for his own material! Ain’t that some shit? And he almost won! He was number 34 and the winner was 35.

When I told him this he said, “Turn your laptop around.” And when I did I saw, scrawled on the back, “Off by one.” He Kenton Knepper’d my ass!

No, that’s not true. Well, everything is true up until that last paragraph.

So, thus ends the contest. Get your submissions in by the end of today if you want the ebook but haven’t yet given your recommendation (see Tuesday’s post).

And just a reminder. All of you who entered the Better with Weber contest are now on the clock for the Better with the Jerx contest. You have a much better chance of winning this one as I would guess most people will flake out when it comes to accomplishing their goal. We’ll see.

Abduction

[The coin I mentioned in yesterday’s post was briefly marked as being sold out due to it getting the jerx-bump in sales. But it is now available again. See that post for details.]

Last night while taking a walk around my neighborhood, a van drove up and these two guys got out and put a bag over my head and threw me in the back. Now they have me blindfolded and locked in a cage and they’ve told me I have to write magic blog posts for them. They won’t say who they are, but from the amount of Phil Collins music and tickle fights I’m overhearing, I’m almost positive it’s Josh and Andi at Vanishing Inc.

Follow this link for a post on some of my favorite card tricks.

Stasia's Decision Making Talisman

Our friend and go-to illustrator for all things Jerx (including all three books), Stasia, has a product out that I think has some potentially interesting magic uses.

It’s a coin you flip for help with decision making. Sort of. I say “sort of” because it doesn’t always give you an answer.

You’ve probably seen similar coins of this type that have a YES on one side and a NO on the other. The idea being that when you face a fork in the road and you’re not sure what to do, you ask, “Should I ask her to marry me?” or, “Should I get a second pickle?” Or whatever question is on your mind, and you flip the coin and get your answer.

Here is Stasia’s version, the moth/solar system talisman.

Here’s what I like about this. First off, this has the right esthetic you’d want for use in a magic trick. It doesn’t look like it came off the press of the US Mint in Denver. It looks and feels like something with a slightly more mysterious provenance. If you said this was a one-of-a-kind piece and that you watched them pour the molten metal into a hand-made mold—that could be believed. (“And the creepy thing is what they melted to get that metal…,”) If you said it’s a token from this odd organization from the 1930s, they could believe that too. If you said, “I don’t know what this is. I just found it on the ground at this weird carnival I was at once. Long story.” These things would be a touch more believable with this object as opposed to something that looks like it was shot out of a machine with 10,000 other duplicate coins.

Then—if this thing disappears, or goes from one hand to another—there is perhaps a small part of the spectator’s brain that entertains the idea that there was more to that moment than “just a coin trick.”

But here’s the aspect of this coin that I find particularly interesting. If you look on the moth side, under the moth’s butt (?), it says the word “Yes.” But on the other side, it just has an abstraction of the solar system. There is no “NO” side. Here is Stasia’s explanation:

“One side is marked "YES" - surrounded by a moth, plants, stars and a moon. The other size is a simplified depiction of our solar system. The side can mean "NO" - but I like to think it's fuzzier than that, maybe inviting a zoom-in or zoom-out look at the decision at hand.”

I like this concept of a decision making coin that doesn’t always make the decision for you. I choose to interpret the “solar system” side as saying, like, “Go with your first instinct and trust that you carry the wisdom of the universe in you and that it has guided you to the right decision.” Or some jive like that.

You can, of course, just call the solar system side the “NO” side and be done with it.

But having a fuzzy decision making coin gives you the chance to do something interesting magic-wise.

Fuzzy PATEO

I’ll describe this as a card trick. But you’ll see how the idea can be used with anything you could do the PATEO force with.

Your friend sees the coin on the table and you give your backstory for it. You explain about the “YES” side and the other side which guides you to trust your instincts. You offer to show them something strange with it.

They slide a card out of a (marked) deck of cards. So you know what it is. You turn away and tell them to look at it. And then tell them to add a bunch more cards, like 7-10ish, and to mix all the cards up so they don’t know where their card is. Have them set the rest of the deck aside, and spread the group of cards all over the table.

Now you explain, “We’re going to go back and forth, and here’s how it will work. One of us will slide any two cards to the other person. That person will touch the coin to either card. Whichever they want. Then that person will ask one of two questions: ‘Should I keep this card,’ or, ‘Should I get rid of this card.’ Then you will flip the coin. If it comes up “YES,” then you will do whichever thing you asked about, either keep that card and get rid of the other, or vice versa. If it comes up on the other side, then you should go with your instincts in regards to which card to keep and which to get rid of.”

So it’s just the PATEO force, but there is so much more smoke here. It feels like there’s too much going on for you to be controlling anything.

First they have a free choice of which of the two cards to ask the question about, then they have a free choice of which question to ask, then there is the random result of a coin flip, and then—half the time—they will get another free choice on top of that. So with every elimination there are three or four moments of unpredictable chance or choice.

Of course, when it’s your turn, if the force card is put in front of you, you will either touch it with the coin and ask “Should I keep this?” Or touch the other card with the coin and ask, “Should I eliminate this?”

I probably wouldn’t use cards. I’d use subtly marked envelopes or billets/business cards and go from there and have the process guide them to one valuable thing in the envelopes or the one billet with the name of someone they love on it or something along those lines.

You can get the decision making talisman at her etsy store. Stasia has some other items you may find of use including, the best looking Tarot deck I’ve seen, an oracle deck with some great imagery for the mystery performer (the cards have a matte finish which makes them not good for any type of manipulation, but beautiful to hold and behold), and her cat deck which is catnip to people. Anyone who appreciates cuteness just fawns over them. (So that’s something me and that deck have in common.)