Dustings of Woofle #26

There’s a new trick coming out called Initial Shock.

On Vanishing Inc., the ad copy says:

“Powerful, visual magic that ends in a unique souvenir your spectators are sure to keep and cherish forever!”

Wow! That sounds awesome! I wonder what this “unique” souvenir that the spectators are going “cherish forever” is? It must be something really special. Let’s see… if I had to guess… hmmm… I’d say it’s a small hand-painted pewter sculpture of the spectator’s first pet. No, that’s too prosaic. Unless they really loved the animal they probably would only cherish that for a few years, not “forever.” So maybe it leaves them with a short audio recording of their most beloved deceased relative sending them a message of love from the afterlife (and revealing which European country they’re thinking of). That’s probably something more like it. Something they would definitely cherish.

Hold on, let me read the ad a bit further to see what it is.

Oh, here it is.

It’s a playing card with their initials on it. How wonderful.

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Joshua Jay has an interesting new project for younger kids.

Here’s part of the ad copy:

The book itself is a "magic" mailbox that lives on the child's nightstand. Every night before bed a letter "appears" inside the mailbox teaching the reader about a fascinating place around the world (thirty letters are included in total). The letters contain cultural information, geography lessons, and of course, a little magic. Magic Mail includes a giant fold-out map so that the reader can tick off the places they've "visited" through this magic mailbox.

To be clear, there’s no real “magic” here. You, the parent, would have to slip the letter in at some point so it will be there when you look at night. But still, for $20, I think it could be a fun thing for the right kid. And definitely better than reading the same dumb book to them every night.

Josh has encouraged kids to write him back when they reach the end of the month-long project. He’s posted some of those letters on his Instagram. It’s great to see everyone having a lot of fun with this.

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I used to think the perception of magicians as losers was a more modern day phenomenon. But then I was watching The Lady Eve, from 1941, and they make a big point early in the movie of explaining that Henry Fonda’s character is kind of a dork because he does card tricks.

Here’s Barbara Stanwyck, early in the film, describing her ideal mate.

Naturally.

Stumble. Pause. Answer.

In my post on March 2nd, I wrote about justifying selections. Specifically in the case of a mentalism trick where having someone select something might not make much sense. Think of a standard “pick a card and I’ll tell you what card you’re thinking of” trick. What’s the purpose of the selection? If you’re reading their mind, why not just have them think of a card in the first place?

If a spectator were to question that, my response, as I wrote in that post, would be along these lines:

Them: “Why do I have to choose a playing card? Why can’t I just think of one?”

Me: “Hmm… okay. I think I see what you’re getting at. I suppose what it comes down to is the difference between asking myself, ‘What card is she thinking of?’ vs, ‘What card would someone like her be likely to think of?’ When you actually pick a card at random, I can just focus on the thought itself. But if I asked you to imagine a card, then it becomes less of a process of thought transmission and more of an exercise in personality assessment or a guessing game based on statistics. That’s not really the sort of thing I do.”

Pete McCabe wrote in to say,

Your answer is excellent, but when you explain why it works, I think you may have left out a key part. It’s in the first sentence:

“Hmm… okay. I think I see what you’re getting at.”

I think it’s valuable that when asked, you respond as if the question hadn’t occurred to you before. This is a bit subtle, and it’s exactly the kind of “acting” that many magicians are terrible at. But if you have a pat answer to this, it makes it seem like a pre-planned performance/trick, as opposed to something happening organically in the moment. Plus, if you’re ready for that question, maybe it’s part of the secret.

Not a huge point, maybe, but useful, I thought.

It’s a good point, and one that I didn’t stress enough in the original post. It’s actually a good way to handle many of the questions you’re asked by a spectator, not just the one I was addressing.

For the amateur, I think it’s good to anticipate the questions and challenges a spectator might come up with, but when they do come up, it’s best for your attitude to suggest, “Oh, I hadn’t really thought of that before.”

There is something that feels very right (very real, very truthful) when you seem to not have an explanation, followed relatively quickly by an answer that makes some sort of logical sense.

If you answer too quickly, that feels like you were planning to have to cover for this issue.

If you don’t answer at all, or only come back with an answer later on, it suggests that you had to create an answer.

Imagine you’re a detective interrogating a murder.

“Where were you last Friday eveni—”

“I WAS AT MY DAUGHTER’S DANCE RECITAL AND THEN I GOT A MEAL AT BURGER KING AT 9:36 PM! I HAVE MY CREDIT CARD RECEIPT RIGHT HERE.”

You would think, “That’s someone who knew he had to cover for something, and planned and rehearsed his answer. There’s something sketchy about that."

Now imagine this interaction.

“Where were you last Friday evening?

“I have no idea.”

Then six weeks later the guy says, “I was at my daughter’s dance recital and then I went to Burger King. Here is a receipt to prove it.”

You might think, “Well, that makes sense, but the guy had six weeks to fabricate this alibi. If it’s true, why did it take so long?”

Finally imagine this exchange.

“Where were you last Friday evening?”

“Friday? Hmm… honestly I’m not sure. Usually I’m home on Friday nights. But I can’t say for certain. Oh wait… Last Friday was my daughter’s dance recital. I was there until… I guess 9 or so, and then we got something to eat at Burger King. The receipt might be in my car still.”

That’s likely going to have the ring of truth.

And that’s how I try to answer a lot of questions in magic because I feel like that’s how people answer questions in real life when they’re answering truthfully. And I want the interaction to have the illusion of truth, even when the spectator knows better.

The technique is simply: Stumble. Pause. Then answer.

Stumble - Say, “Hmm…,” or, “Huh, I don’t know,” or, “That’s a good question.”

Pause - Just a second or two. Not enough time that it feels like you’re concocting an answer, but enough time that it feels like the answer is dawning on you.

Answer - Slowly ramp up into your prepared answer.

Here’s why I think this works well…

If I ask you a question and you have an answer that seems sound and makes sense, then it is likely because of one of these two reasons:

1. You’ve given this some thought and planned to answer this question.

2. You’re just stating something true. And truth should seem sound and make sense.

Now, by stumbling when the question first comes up, you’re taking #1 off the table. So when you do have a sound answer it’s going to feel like #2. Meaning it will have the flow of someone expressing something true, even if what’s being stated is preposterous.

Morning Pages

Imagine

Stacie, my first houseguest in months comes over to get some dinner and watch a movie. The dinner is Thai food (pretty decent). The movie is The Lovebirds on Netflix (pretty funny—better than I expected).

After dinner I ask for her help with a trick I’ve been working on. Stacie is someone I’ve only known since earlier this year and she’s only seen me perform a couple things in that time.

I give her a deck of cards, have her shuffle it, and then cut it into four piles.

“Okay,” I say, “So there’s a pretty famous trick where the magician is able to cut to the four aces. Now, I thought—how cool would it be—if I could make the someone else cut to the four aces. So that’s a trick I’ve been working on for a few months now.”

(I figure it’s much more exciting for someone to feel like they’re taking part in something new, rather than something that has been honed by a million magicians before me. I don’t feel guilty for taking credit for the spectator cuts the aces plot. I’m doing it for the audience’s benefit. And, in this trick, it’s only a plot point, not the actual plot.)

“Let’s see how you did,” I say and gesture for her to turn over the top cards.

She turns over the 4 of Hearts, 9 of Clubs, Ace of Clubs, and 6 of Diamonds.

“Shit.”

“Well, I got one,” she says sweetly. Seemingly wanting me to feel better.

“Yeah… but I think that was just luck actually. The Ace of Clubs should have been in this pile if it worked like it was supposed to.”

“Four-Nine-Ace-Six,” I say, absentmindedly, like I’m just trying to make sense of what I I’m looking at, or what went wrong.

“Is 4 9 1 6 your lucky number by any chance? That would still be a good trick.”

“It could be,” she says. “Do people have lucky 4-digit numbers?”

“Wait, wait, wait…,” I say, shifting tone to something a bit more serious. “Look at it from this side, 6 Ace 9 4. 6 1 9 4. Isn’t that…?” I look at her expectantly, but she doesn’t say anything. I’m a little less certain now. “Isn’t that… aren’t those the last four digits of your phone number?”

“Ah! Yes!” she says. “I mean, no. But it’s close. It’s 6 1 4 9.”

We sit with it for a moment. Is this sort of interesting? Is it not? Maybe it is. Or maybe if you cut to four cards you’re bound to find a number that means something to someone in some manner some of the time… especially if you allow for the numbers to not be in the exact right order. I think the general feeling was that it was mildly interesting, but not much more than that.

I put on my “thinking face,” furrowing my brow as if there’s something that’s not making sense to me. “I’m having such weird deja vu,” I say. “This feels familiar…,” I trail off.

It dawns on me.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait. Was that…? Oh man. Hold on. Actually… come with me.”

I take Stacie’s hand and pull her into my bedroom.

I pick up a notebook that is sitting on my night-stand.

“So, when the coronavirus started, a lot of people were having really crazy dreams. So I had the idea to keep track of any dreams I remembered when I woke up. It’s not that I think they’re interesting. Not to anyone else, at least. It was just a thing to do.” I say this as I’m flipping through the book.

“I think… I mean, I’m not really sure because I write them down just after I wake up and then they’re pretty much gone, but I think…. Wait… yes… here it is.” As I say this, I walk with her back to the living room and the cards she cut earlier.

I hand her the book and she reads the entry on the page.

Tonight I dreamt that Stacie K came over for dinner and a movie.
The movie was a comedy. I’m not sure what we ate. She was in a
red blouse or shirt. After dinner I showed her the ace cutting trick
I’ve been working on. But she only found the Ace of Clubs. Then
we realized if we flipped the nine of clubs and the four of hearts it
would have been the last four digits of her phone number. We
couldn’t figure out if that meant anything. But something about
it felt familiar to me.

We look down at the cards again.

“What in the fuck…” she whispers.

Method

This is so much fun.

I don’t share too many of my own polished effects/presentations on the site these days. I save those for the annual supporter’s reward book. But I thought I’d share this one (for a little while, this post will disappear at some point in the future) because it was borne out of someone’s submission to a contest I had on the site a couple months ago.

People who’ve read my work for a while will recognize this as just another dressing up for Spectator Cuts the Aces. I’ve written about this trick in the past, and also in general about the value of “blank slate” effects (effects that can easily be recontextualized).

You don’t have to use Spectator Cuts the Aces. You can slide in any sort of trick that ends with a known outcome. Mainly the idea I want to share is about burying a prediction in a dream journal. (I’m going to provide you with a very simple way to do this later in the post.)

I’m very happy with the nature of the prediction as outlined in the performance described above. My first inclination was, perhaps obviously, to have them cut to four cards and then have those exact four cards predicted in my dream journal. But something about that felt just a little too clean. Would I really remember four random cards upon waking up if there was nothing noticeable about them? By having the almost match of the phone-number, I get to actually name (or suggest) the value of all four cards, and the suits of three of them in the dream journal, without it feeling like I was noting the cards specifically so I could reference them later. And the almost match of the phone number feels like something that would be more likely to jog my memory of this forgotten dream than just seeing four random cards.

I also wanted to add some other subtle predictions in the write-up, but not go overboard with it. I could have said, “Stacie came over. She was wearing a red shirt and black shorts. She commented that she liked the color of my Artisan stand mixer. She ordered the pineapple fried rice. [Etc., etc.]” I could have just written that in earlier in the night (as I did write in the color of her top earlier that evening), but I chose not to. I just wanted to hint at the idea that perhaps there was even more in the dream that was accurate, but I just didn’t remember it or write it down when I awoke.

The idea for this presentation came to me after the Better with Weber contest a few months ago. That contest asked people to identify a goal they wanted to achieve for the month of April. Supporter, Lucas Jarche, wrote in to say his goal was to write down his dreams every morning. The next month, when the Better with the Jerx contest asked people to supply the proof of what they achieved in April, Lucas sent along a document describing his dreams from the previous month.

I immediately saw the potential for a strong presentation here. What if we buried a prediction somewhere in the journal?

Think of the difference between these two presentations.

1. “I had a dream last night that I performed a card trick for you. When I woke up, I wrote out that dream and I have it here on this piece of paper.”

2. Card trick happens. The ending reminds you of something. You go and get your dream journal and flip through it. “I swear I had a dream that was sort of like this.” Flip. Flip. Flip. “Huh… maybe I’m misremembering. I really thought… Wait! Here it is.”

The first way is sort of the standard magician’s way of paying lip-service to a potentially interesting premise.

The second version will go much further towards pulling the spectator into the world of the story.

Ideally, to perform this, you’ll actually create a dream journal. Either a real one that you keep for at least a month or so, or just one that you make up altogether over the course of a couple hours. The more entries you have, the better. I think it looks best with at least 60 or so. They don’t have to be long. Use different writing implements throughout the journal (there’s a reason for this). Leave a page blank near the middle.

The trick is personalized, but the prop is reusable. And that’s because I use a frixion pen to write the entry for the “prediction” dream. This is the reason for using different writing implements in the book, so it’s not just this one entry that looks a little different than all the others.

Don’t be lazy, it’s not that much work.

But, if you are a little lazy, I have another option for you.

Lucas Jarche is allowing me to share a file of his dream journal with you. So what you can do is go in and edit one of the entries so it consists of whatever prediction you need.

Then just print it out. It’s okay if the dream journal is done on a computer rather than hand-written (although it’s not as good). But either way it needs to be a physical copy that you show them for the reveal. If you just bring up a document on your computer or phone it will have significantly less impact. It’s not even really worth doing that way.

Here’s that document.

Again though, if you really want to make it as strong as possible, hand-write it in a bound journal. You want them to feel like: Well, he wouldn’t have gone to all the a trouble for just a magic trick, right? From their perspective you would have to remake the whole book to ever show the trick to someone else. (But due to the frixion pen, that’s not the case.)

You might wonder why I would act as if I’m surprised that it matches up with the dream journal, when theoretically, if I had dreamed it already, I should have been on guard against something like this happening when I performed this trick. The logic that I had in my head if I was questioned on that point was this: “I write in that book when I’m barely half-awake. I forget most of the details soon after. And because I do a lot of card tricks in real life, it’s not unusual for me to have dreams about them. They don’t really stand out when they happen.” But that wasn’t a logic leap my friend took, so I didn’t have to justify it in any way.

There it is. Thanks again to Lucas for allowing me to share his dream journal with you.

Also, if you have the charm to pull it off (I wouldn’t bet on it), you could put a description of a graphic sex dream between you and your spectator later in the book. Then, after the trick, you can be flipping through the book and be like, “Huh. Oh here’s another dream I had about you. Kind of interesting one. Especially now that I realize I’m having prophetic dreams.” Hand her the book and you’re off to the races.

My Work-From-Home Set-Up

I’ve worked from home on and off for the last decade or so, but this is the first time I’ve done it for such an extended period of time. Since the coronavirus situation started, I’ve taken an interest in other people’s work-from-home set-ups. What is yours like? —HD

On a given work day (that includes Jerx work, other magic work, and other non-magic work), I spend an average of probably 4-6 hours writing. At some points in time, depending on how the projects I’m involved with fall out, those numbers can double.

I’m too antsy to sit at a desk for a long time doing the same thing. I work best with regular changes of scenery. Pre-coronavirus, this might take the form of working for 90 minutes at one coffee shop, going to the library for two hours of work, and then another 90 minute evening session at a different coffee shop.

When everything shut down, that obviously threw me off my game a bit. I tried to work at my main desk in my “office” space of my home, but it was a struggle for me. I felt more distracted than ever.

So—and this may sound dopey—I started creating numerous work stations throughout my house.

I currently have 10 areas where I do work.

Living Room:

1. Couch - I use this laptop table. I can slide the legs under the couch and pull the table in towards me and slouch back like a slob. Or I can do what I’m doing at this moment and actually write from a laying down position with the computer above me and tilted down.

2. Chair - A standard living room chair. I usually sit in it at a weird angle, like a teenage girl, with my legs over the arm of the chair. I guess like this but with a laptop where her cat is.

3. Floor - I use one of these desks.

4. Exercise Bike Desk - This one.

5. Standing Desk - Same thing as above, I just stand on the opposite side from the bike.

Kitchen

6. Dining area table

Bathroom

7. Bathtub

Yup, sometimes I’m writing you buck-ass naked from the tub—cock and balls floating in a sea of bubbles. Those are probably your favorite posts. I use this bath tub desk. Yes, they make such things. From what I can gather, it’s primarily used by ladies to rest their wine, candles, and rose petals on while they bathe.

Bedroom

8. Bed - I use the same desk I use on the floor to work on in bed as well.

Office

9. I have a standard computer desk set-up.

10. I also have a workbench style work station that I work at as well.

So now if I have six hours of work to do, I’ll generally do an hour in one location, then move somewhere else for an hour or so, and then just repeat that throughout the day. This tricks my brain enough so that it doesn’t feel like I’m just stuck in one place doing the same thing all day.

Thankfully, things near me are opening up more and more, so I have more options each week. But this was what worked for me for the past few months.

The Juxe: Favorite Letterman Musical Guest Performances

David Letterman was well known for showcasing great music on his show until it ended in 2015. I was just going down a Letterman musical guest rabbit hole, so I thought I’d share some of my favorite performances. (I thought I had already written a post like this, but I searched and can’t find anything like it, so maybe I just dreamed it.)

The Orwells play Who Needs You

The Orwells were a pretty good garage rock band from the Chicago area. They went on Letterman and performed their song, Who Needs You. It was a memorable performance. The lead singer laid on the ground and humped the air and later stumbled over and sat in the guests’ chairs. At the end of the song, Dave—I think getting a sense of the band’s (or at least the lead singer’s) self-seriousness and pretension—immediately asked them to play the song again. The Orwells—I think getting a sense that Dave was messing with them a little—turned down the request, despite much cajoling. Eventually, the Late Show band just starts playing it instead and 65-year old bandleader, Paul Schaffer, gets on the floor and starts humping the air as well.

This became a somewhat well-known moment, and I think the band took a little heat for the way they came off. Even though I think they were probably just more confused about what to do than anything else. The band would return a few months later to play another song. This time, when Dave asked for an encore at the end, they indulged him.

Radiohead plays Karma Police

Jonny Greenwood on the Rhodes piano really makes this performance particularly great.

The New Pornographers play Brill Bruisers

The New Pornographers are one of my favorite bands to see live. If you get bored looking at one person, there are a whole bunch more to look at (even more true in this performance, where they have four people on stage just for hand clapping purposes). And this is one of my favorite songs of theirs.

TV on the Radio plays Wolf Like Me

Wild Flag plays Romantic

Carrie Brownstein has such great, high-energy stage presence, that it’s always a joy to watch her perform, whether here, with Wild Flag or with Sleater-Kinney. At the end of this performance, Paul Shaffer announces, “This is my new favorite band.”

Pulp plays Common People

Janelle Monae performs Tightrope

What a revelation she must have been for people that night.

Weezer plays Say It Ain’t So

The story goes that Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, had recently had surgery to extend his left leg. The surgery was so recent that he was more or less immobile and felt uncomfortable being on national television without being able to put his all into the performance. So he asked his bandmates to really rev up the energy and put on a show to distract the audience. Bassist Matt Sharp delivers.

Letterman Asks, “Are Those Your Drums?”

Stretch Testing

Of all the tragedies surrounding the coronavirus situation, by far the worst—I think we can all agree—is that it has put on hold the focus group-style magic testing I’ve helped conduct for some time now.

And that’s a particular shame because I recently received a very important question that needs research.

Ellusionist has released [an] effect called Stretch Cards. I went to look at the reviews on their site, and saw something that has me curious:

"The effect is so powerfully new to the mainstream eye that it can be used alongside pick up artistry. I have performed this trick to random women, and every single one of them has asked for my number, or reciprocated interest and given me their number. The wonder that it creates in the mind of the spectator is so powerful, so stimulating, that the memory it leaves behind leaves you glowing with an enigma of mystery and curiosity that is irresistible to the opposite sex."

Perhaps you could test if this is equally effective for attracting members of the same sex. I'd like to know if it would be best for me to save my money and just leave this effect for all the suave heterosexual magicians out there.

Thanks,

Ryan M

Before you ask, yes, that’s a real review on Elusionist’s site. And what exactly is this panty soaker the reviewer is raving about?

It’s this.

A deck of cards that has been cut and printed in a way that it looks like one corner is stretched. If you hide that corner in some manner, you can then pretend to stretch the card by slowly revealing the corner.

The ad says:

THIS IS METAL BENDING... WITH CARDS

Huh.

I’m not sure that statement quite packs the punch they intended it to. And judging by the fact this product is now over 50% off on Ellusionist’s site, that tagline probably didn’t capture magician’s imaginations as they would have hoped.

I sent a clip from the demo to some female friends. I think they were playing coy with me, because they barely seemed turned on by it at all.

But I’m smart enough to see through that sort of thing. For example, here is one of my conversations.

“Is there more to it?” Oh man. This horny little slut couldn’t get enough. She totally wanted to see more so she could finger herself to the imagery which is “so powerfully new to the mainstream eye.”

So yeah. I think that reviewer probably was right.

But will it work on men, as the question asked? I’m not sure. My plan now is to invest in a Rigiscan Penile Tumescence monitor.

Then I’ll get 500 testees (which would be 1000 testes), strap them in, have them watch the demo, and just see how hard it gets them. Hopefully from there we can extrapolate how likely it is to leave you “glowing with an enigma of mystery and curiosity” to members of the same sex.

New Organization Scheme: Part Two

Okay, so now here is the advanced organizational system. This is in Notion (as discussed yesterday). And it’s a way to not only track your repertoire, but also your performances.

The first step is to create a table called Friends or Contacts. In this table you can capture any information you want about the people in your life. At an absolute minimum I would have their name, the date you met (if that’s something you know), and the date of the last time you interacted. I like to keep track the last interaction, that way I can filter the spreadsheet to show me people I haven’t spoken to in the past 3 months or 6 months or whatever, and if they’re people I want to maintain a relationship with, that will be a cue to reach out to them

Then, within that person’s page (as discussed yesterday, every object in a spreadsheet in Notion can be opened to make its own page) you can put any other content you might want to capture about that person. Perhaps details about their family, their kid’s names, photographs, gift ideas for them. Whatever is important for you to capture about the people in your life.

So let’s say the Friends spreadsheet looks like this:

In reality, yours probably won’t be that simple. But the things I capture in my own personal “Friends” spreadsheet are the things that are important to me. So this is just a bare-bones look at what it might look like. You should have additional columns for the things that are important to you.

Okay, now we’re going to starting bringing it all together.

Create another spreadsheet. This one called “Performance History” or something like that.

This is where we’re going to start capturing the details of our performances.

In the first column, you will name the performance situation. I usually reference where it took place. (However if where you performed is very important for you to capture and search on, I would make that its own column.) So if I performed for some friends at McDonalds after dinner some night, I might name it: “Dinner at McDonalds.” If it was a unique performing situation then this name should remind you of it: “Christmas Eve at Mom’s,” “Kim’s Graduation Party,” “Afternoon Delight In the Park.” If it isn’t a unique performing situation, I just give it a sort of generic name and number it. For example, I have a lot of performances that happen at a coffee shop, not on any special occasion. So I might have an entry that is “Moe’s Coffeeshop #45,” the next one would be “Moe’s Coffeeshop #46.”

Also, I create a separate entry on the spreadsheet for each trick performed in a given situation. So if I did three tricks at McDonald’s that night (that would be sort of weird) I would have three rows, each with “Dinner at McDonald’s” in the first column.

Add a second column to capture the date of the performance.

Add a new column and name it Trick. Now we’re going to do something new with this column. In the place where it says “Property Type” choose Relation. What we’re going to start doing is cross referencing our multiple databases. It’s going to give you al little window that looks like this:

You’ll start typing in “Repertoire.” And then click on that page in order to link it in this column.

Now, once you’ve done that, you can click in any box in that column and select one of the items from your repertoire spreadsheet to populate that field.

Create another column. Call it Audience. And again choose Relation in the “Property Type.” And connect this column to your Friends/Contacts database.

Create another column called Reaction with a Property Type of “Number.” In this column you will rate the audience’s reaction to the effect (as best you can), on whatever scale you like. I just use 1-10.

Create a final column called Notes which is a text field for any quick notes on the performance. (Longer notes would be added on the page for each performance, which, again, you get to by clicking on anything in the first column of a spreadsheet and clicking open.)

When it’s all filled in, you’ll have something like this:

The Trick and Audience columns are being pulled from your Repertoire and Friends spreadsheet. So all these spreadsheets are connected now.

With just a few entries it’s not that helpful a tool. But think of how useful this is when you have dozens of tricks in your repertoire and dozens of people you perform for and 100s of performances. By clicking the Filter link near the top you can view the database in all sorts of different ways. If you’re meeting up with Anna that evening, you can filter the database so it shows you only the tricks you’ve performed for Anna that got a reaction of 8 or above so you can see what sort of thing she reacts strongly to.

Or you can add another field from a related spreadsheet (this is the property type called “Roll Up”). So you could, for example, bring in the tags field from your Repertoire spreadsheet into your Performance History spreadsheet and you could then filter it to show you tricks you did with a shuffled deck in the last three months of 2019 that got a reaction under four. Or whatever you may find useful.

One thing to note, once you link to spreadsheets with the “Relation” feature, you will now notice a column for that database in the other spreadsheet. So, not only is there a Repertoire column in the Performance History spreadsheet, but also vice versa. If you don’t want that column to show in the other database (or any column in any database) then just click the ellipses next to the button that says “New.” Then click Properties and you can turn off any columns you don’t want to see (but they’re still connected).

There you go. If you decide to pursue using Notion to organize your magic life, you’ll probably want to go on youtube and familiarize yourself with more of its features. You’ll find a ton of stuff there. I’ve barely scratched the surface. And you are likely going to modify what I’ve written to come up with your own system.

It may seem like overkill to track things like this if you’re just performing a couple times a month. With how much I perform (especially pre-Covid times) it’s a necessity, if only just to remind myself what I’ve shown people already. Even if you don’t perform a ton, I still think there are benefits to tracking your repertoire and keeping notes of your performance in some manner. This just happens to be the most efficient way I’ve found.