Dustings #90

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Last week I mentioned a day of lectures to raise money, and I suggested they give a highlight for each lecture so people have a little better idea what they might get. As of the time of this post, you have less than 24 hours before these lectures start. But even if you’re getting to this post a day or two late, I would reach out to the email on that link and see if there’s a way to donate and get the lectures after the fact. Here, as requested, are the highlights from each performer:

Marc Weide: Marc will teach many of his comedy coin routines, including his unreleased Three-Fly. Learn all the subtleties, the thinking behind the choreography, and more from a man who's slowly becoming known as the 'master of the retention vanish' for good reason (hint: it's because he's really good at the retention vanish).

Paul Brook: Paul will teach, amongst other things, two previously unreleased effects - one for close-up, and one for stage. The close-up effect utilises a basic paper toy that challenges the audience's notion of free will. The stage routine taught will enable you to accurately discern the object eight audience members (who remain in the audience) are thinking of without technology involved, and the performer never touches anything.

Rainer Mees & Jan Becker: They will talk about their newly formulated Powerful Placebo Magic Personality (PPMP) model of performing magic. This has been a cornerstone of both Jan Becker's and Rainer's stage and television performances for many years.

Nathan Wilson: Nathan will teach an any card at any number that leaves the spectator in full control of when the trick ends. How? The deck is stuck in a glass bottle.

Christian Grace: Amongst other card effects, Christian will be sharing his routine FEELCAN where a spectator somehow intuits a thought of card and number by the use of touch and instinct.

Timon Krause: Timon will be sharing the technique behind his Which Hand effect, which has become known for being a Fooler on Penn & Teller's show. 

Jonathan Levitt: Jonathan will share a psychological force that involves 2 audience members. He will teach his psychology when working with a spectator to give the impression that a selected card is arrived at with no involvement from the magician, while seemingly taking place completely in the spectator's hands!

If you like the idea talked about in Monday’s post about “magically” directing someone to a forced location, check out the October 2013 issue of Genii magazine. On page 82 there is an effect called City Walk where direction cards are mixed by a spectator and then followed to a (forced) location.

I think the mixing procedure with the Konami code is a bit more convincing. But the method in City Walk has some flexibility that might be useful in certain circumstances. Konami code will force the destination, but City Walk will force the whole path.

One of the simplest mentalism concepts is to thumbwrite a two-digit number (simple in concept, not necessarily execution). But, “Name a random two-digit number. Look, that’s what I wrote down,” is not super interesting. So looking for more intriguing ways to generate that two-digit number is a worthwhile pursuit. This email from supporter Christopher B. has an interesting suggestion…

I know at one point you were interested in premises for simple nail writing style prediction effects. I was thinking it would be interesting to have someone input into chatGPT a topic of their choosing, along with whatever input parameters they want to give it, then to have the person re-write as much or as little of the resulting text produced by the AI as they'd like in their own voice before handing the resulting text to you. After reading it quickly, you write down an estimate of what percentage of the text you believe was AI generated. Finally, you copy and paste the text into AI Content Detector - ChatGPT Plagiarism Checker to prove that your quick mental calculation was just as accurate as a plagiarism detecting site would produce.

It’s perhaps a bit too involved for most people and most situations and possibly too obscure conceptually, but if you’re a teacher (where AI plagiarism is a huge issue) or someone who works in AI in some way, then I think the ability to sense the “humanity” of a given piece of writing could be pretty fascinating.

The Sweet Smell of Magic

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[Note: This post didn’t publish when it was scheduled to, for some reason. To give this post it’s due, I’ll wait another 24 hours to publish the final post of the week on Saturday morning.]

For a time, in New York City, I lived in a small studio apartment.

One time, my friend came to visit me and when he came inside, he noticed an aroma and said, “What are you cooking?” Big inhale. “Beef stew?”

Now, what actually happened was that a few minutes before he had come over, I had shit up my bathroom something fierce and the smell had permeated the small apartment.

Because he was walking into an apartment (and not directly into the bathroom) the smell was out of context. So he mistook the smell of my hot diarrhea for the wafting aroma of a hearty beef stew.

After I informed him what he was really inhaling, he started gagging and spit-up in the kitchen sink.

Why am I telling you this? To make your mouth water? To get your dicks hard?

No. I’m poisoning your mind with this story because it’s something I think of often.

I think of it when I’m having a discussion with someone like this:

Them: Yeah, it’s cool. They can feel your heartbeat through a pencil.

Me: Ah, interesting. My issue with tricks like this is that it’s just so easy to find on google with the most obvious search. If they google heartbeat pencil magic, they’re going to find a link directly where to buy it. Not that they’re going to buy it. But still. Just finding it like that is going to make it feel less special.

Them: Yeah, but, I mean… what can you do? As long as they’re entertained and enjoy the trick, I don’t worry about what they do after.

To me, this attitude feels like, “Hey, as long as they enjoyed the smell of the beef stew for a moment, I don’t care if they realize it’s shit later.”

This feels like giving up.

And it feels like a misunderstanding of what the performance of magic should be.

I think it’s a mistake to think of a magic trick as being something with a traditional story structure.

This is not how a magic trick works.

What we think of as the “climax” of a magic trick isn’t where the trick ends, it’s where it begins.

Think of a magic trick like a campfire. When building a fire, you clear out a little space; you go and gather tinder, kindling, and some larger pieces of firewood; you pile up the tinder; you build up the kindling; you light the tinder; you blow on it; you add the firewood; and now you have a fire. And that fire can burn for a long time, if you’ve set things up correctly.

But the preparation leading up to the fire is not the fire. And the preparation leading up to the magic is not the magic.

If you have a trick that falls apart after a little thought by the spectator, or the most basic google search, it’s like having a fire that fades right after you light it. Why bother?

If your goal is just to get to the finish line without getting caught, you can’t then be bothered that nobody really cares too much about what you just showed them, and that it’s soon forgotten.

But if you're showing someone a trick to give them some sort of feeling, then you’re going to want to take the extra steps to try and make that feeling durable. To try to remove “Easy Answers” so they can’t just logic their way out of the feeling. And to search for more obscure effects, or find ways to camouflage popular ones, so they can’t just search it online and say to themselves, “Ah, that was nothing special. It’s just something he bought online.”

Otherwise, you’re really just serving them this…

[See Also: A Story With No End}

Spex Mix: False Shuffles - A Thought Experiment

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I was searching through tricks I’ve performed that I’ve collected data on over the past eight years, looking for any patterns in the strongest material. This is something I do every 12-18 months or so, like a prostate exam. (I know you don’t have to do them that frequently, but my doctor really loves it.)

This time through, I noticed something that connected a lot of the strongest card tricks that I do: they all have an element where the spectator controls and mixes the cards in some way.

More and more, I’m beginning to think that time spent on false cuts and false shuffles is totally wasted time. These techniques only fool other magicians and professional card cheats.

That might seem like a weird statement, but consider this thought experiment…

I put up a video on Twitter of Barack Obama saying that he supports Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Everyone looks at it and says, “This can’t be real. It’s a deepfake. Obama would never say that.”

Now, the truth is, it is a deepfake. But I have deepfake technology that is 100 times better than any in existence. It’s masterful. It creates a video with none of the telltale signs of deepfakes. There are no glitches. There’s no distorted lighting. There’s no blurred edges. The audio and video sync up perfectly. Even Obama’s blink rate is spot-on.

Remember, this technology is 100 times more powerful than anything that is currently out there. In fact, it’s alien-technology from the future that nobody but me knows about. The video has every hallmark of being real.

When deepfake experts take a look at the video, they say: “This is genuine.”

When non-experts look at the video, they say:

“Oh, it’s a deepfake.”

The only ones fooled are the experts.

I think a similar thing happens with false shuffles. You can get good enough to convince a magician or card cheat that that your shuffle is legitimate. But you can never get good enough to convince non-magicians.

If they’ve heard of “false shuffles” (and most have) they don’t know about Zarrows or Push-Thru shuffles. They just know that there are some ways to make it look like you’re shuffling when you’re really not. And if there’s a way to do that, then every shuffle that you do is potentially suspect. Especially if you’re focusing on the cards when you do it.

The false shuffle is like the deepfake. People know about them, but they’re not experts enough in them to know when a shuffle (or a video) isn’t fake. So anything can potentially be fake. No matter how good you get.

Outside of taking people’s money in a card game, the only point in getting really good at false shuffles is to say to people, “Hey, look how good I am at false shuffles!” There are people who do make a living at that, but in social situations, this is of limited value. And, in fact, the more you do it, the bigger a loser you’ll seem.

The only solution is to get the cards into the spectator’s hands for all, or at least part, of the mixing procedure. I’m pretty convinced that allowing them to cut the deck in their hands a few times gives them a greater sense that the cards are in an unknown order than if you were to spend five minutes doing the most perfect false shuffles ever performed.

And it just makes logical sense, too. If my goal is to have you believe the cards are in a random order, then of course I wouldn’t be the one to do the shuffling. If you need random numbers for a trick, does the magician name them? Of course not.

With these thoughts in mind, in the coming weeks, I’m going to be highlighting ideas and techniques that allow the spectator to do some of the mixing with a pre-arranged deck of cards. These techniques will not get you the cachet with other magicians that a perfect false shuffle will. But as tools for creating wonder and mystery, I think they’re much more powerful.

To get you started, here are some of the posts I’ve written in the past on some of these types of techniques.

The Jerx False Shuffle

The Jerx-Ose False(ish) Cut

The Wash Replacement

The Myth of Audience Management

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Case One

As per a request from a number of people, one of the tricks we included in the last batch of videos for the Virtual Focus Group was the new trick Leviosa.

As with the previous batch of surveys we sent out, they received an edited version of the demo just showing the trick itself, and we got responses from 47 participants.

In the question that asked how the trick might be accomplished, the word “thread” was used zero times by the respondents. Now, it’s possible that in a real life scenario, they might be able to see the thread, and thus they would have used that word. But in an ideal/controlled situation—as on video—that’s not the specific word they come up with. For whatever that means to you.

18 participants did talk about something being “connected” to the deck or “pulling up the deck” or words to that effect, but they didn’t specifically say thread.

All 47 respondents mentioned some level of suspicion towards the deck itself, using phrases like, “not a real deck,” “special deck,” “trick deck.” Nine of the respondents mentioned small drone-type toys that float in a similar way.

So, while the specific methodology is more or less unknown to people, it’s safe to say that those who watch it will be suspicious of the deck. Understandable.

I was talking to a friend over email about why I probably wouldn’t get this. The audience is bound to have a theory about the workings of the trick that—right or wrong—I can’t disprove. All the heat will be on the deck. He said to me, “You just need to have the proper audience management.”

Case Two

At about the 12:15 minute mark in this video, Craig demonstrates a trick called Killer Colossal where the backs of four cards change colors.

In the discussion of the trick afterward, Craig says:

“The one negative, something you need to be aware of, is the cards can't be examined. [...] If examinability is an issue for you, that's something you should consider. But to be honest, with a little bit of basic audience management this is fine because as soon as you've got the cards that have changed backs you would put it away, and you'd go into something else.”

Here, Craig describes “basic” audience management as putting the trick away and going on to something else.

I’ve always felt one of the things that holds magic back is the way words and phrases are often used. One of the first things I wrote about on this was trying to establish a useful definition of “impromptu.” The way people were using the word while advertising effects made it completely valueless.

These days, the phrase “everyday carry” is similarly useless. It’s come to mean something like, “this is what I have in my pocket today.”

But “audience management” is probably one of the most abused terms in our art. When people point out an inherent weakness in a trick, they are often told this can be addressed with “audience management.”

Here is a productive definition of audience management:

Audience management is the subset of techniques in magic that allow us to control the physical actions of our spectators.

If I’m worried someone is going to turn over a card too soon, I can have them sandwich it between their hands rather than leaving it open on their palm.

If I’m standing, performing magic at a table, and I worry someone might reach out and touch a tabled double, then I can place it back near my crotch, so they’re less likely to invade that personal space.

If I’m concerned a spectator might turn around at an inopportune moment, then I may be able to “lock” them in place by resting a hand on their shoulder.

How do you keep the spectator from opening their hand too soon in the sponge ball routine? You’re going to use some kind of audience management technique.

These small techniques should mostly go unnoticed. Otherwise, it’s “Audience Coercion” not “Audience Management.”

With this understanding of “audience management” we would be able to accumulate a collection of small, practical, useful techniques. You could imagine entire books being written about the subject that compiles these ideas together.

But that’s not how we use the term. Instead, we use it as some kind of reverse-boogeyman. An unknown, undefinable entity that will magically solve our problems.

That’s in a thread about a trick where bills magically change. If the audience wants to see the bills, then you “manage” them to not want to see them. And the way you “manage” them is by putting the bills away and doing something else.

This is not useful or productive thinking. Putting props away when someone shows an interest in them, and rushing on to the next effect, doesn’t solve any issue.

Audience management techniques are used to control the physical actions of our spectators.

The desire to examine an object is an emotional/mental desire. Controlling their actions, doesn’t address this state of mind.

Imagine you thought your wife was cheating on you. You confront her about it. You say, “Okay, if everything is innocent, then show me your phone. Let me see your text messages with that guy.”

“Just a second,” she says. And she goes out into your backyard and blows up her phone with a stick of dynamite.

Your wife has just used “husband management” to prevent you from looking at her phone.

Do you walk away thinking, “Ah, my concerns were unjustified. It’s good to know our relationship is on solid ground”?

No, you think, “THAT FUCKING WHORE! I’LL KILL HER!”

Similarly, putting your magically-affected item away and moving on to the next trick only further reduces the impact of a trick because you have now solidified their suspicions in their mind.

I understand Craig Petty’s point. He’s coming at this from the position of someone doing wedding receptions and other performances of that nature. Sure, in those circumstances, it makes sense to not slow down the “show” by having everything looked at. That can feel normal due to the natural momentum of that type of performance.

But for the sake of productive discussions, let’s just concede that anyone performing professionally understands that putting something back in their pocket or their case will prevent that thing from being looked at. That’s not “audience management.” It’s just common-fucking-sense.

The people who are wondering how they might handle the suspicion that falls on the gimmicked cards or the changed bills or the electronic fake deck aren’t people who don’t know how to put things away in their pockets. They are just people who perform in a style where that is the most unnatural thing to do.

So let’s stop using “audience management” in this profoundly useless manner—as a cudgel to prevent discussion and quell criticism.

But if not “audience management,” then how do you handle the suspicion that falls on the floating deck of cards?

The answer to that question is that there’s not an answer to that question.

With some tricks, everything is examinable. With some tricks, people’s suspicion is directed towards clean objects, and they never think to question the dirty elements of the trick. And with some tricks, you can switch in or out objects imperceptibly, leaving everything examinable.

But when a deck of cards floats up to your hands, you don’t have those options. It’s going to be a gimmicked deck. Everyone’s suspicions will be directly on that deck. And if you were to even try and take it out of their site in some way to switch it, you would only ramp up those suspicions 1000%.

So how do you handle this type of trick?

The answer is not through audience management.

The answer is through expectation management. Manage your expectations. Realize that what you’re going to be showing people is a fun visual moment. But they’re not going to walk away thinking, “That completely normal deck just floated into the guy’s hand!” They’re probably going to think it looks cool, but they’ll also probably know it’s some kind of special deck you bought.

If you're fine with that sort of experience, then you don’t have to worry too much about anything. You can put the deck away and move on.

If you’re looking to create a mystery that’s a bit more impenetrable, then this is not the trick for you. And you’ll have to get comfortable with the fact that many tricks are not going to reach that standard. Regardless of how much you “manage” your audience.

Mailbag #95

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The week before last I went to a Generative AI event at Google's offices here in the Boston area. Interesting stuff, and the perfect opportunity to use the Pseudo Chatbot in the Jerx app. Amazing results. People are so torn: They know it can't be real; but they also know it can't not be real.

I made just one small change in the app response text. AI engines would not make a mistake and then acknowledge the error in the way suggested:

My mistake, I just noticed that one of the black face-up cards is actually the two of spades.

I changed this to something like:

Exception: If the woman is Jewish, one of the Club cards is likely to be the Queen of Clubs.

Much better! Thanks for the great idea! —DK

Nice. I’m glad it worked well for you.

I understand the rationale for the change you made, but it probably wasn’t necessary. “AI engines would not make a mistake and then acknowledge the error in the way suggested.” - is a feature of this trick, not a bug.

Speaking of AI making mistakes, a couple of weeks ago I was trying to remember the term “psychometry,” so I asked ChatGPT what the term was for the mentalism trick where the performer can divine things about a person by touching objects that belong to them and this was the response I got back:

Which is kind of funny until you realize ChatGPT is probably just as inaccurate on most subjects you’re asking it about.

A few months ago, while reading some ideas you published with the Konami code from Tomas Blomberg, I came up with an idea that I wanted to share with you.

It's just the beginning of an idea, and I need to develop it further, but it's a fun concept to play with, and I believe there is some potential.

I realized that in certain cities or neighborhoods with a street layout consisting of parallel and perpendicular streets (grid street plan according to Wikipedia), such as Manhattan, Montreal, Barcelona, Chicago, etc., you can force a specific location within the city/neighborhood using the Konami code.

For this, you will need:
- A stack of business cards (maybe 10 to 15 cards), with each card indicating one of the four directions: North, South, East, or West.
- A city with an architectural layout of perpendicular streets forming blocks.
- Knowledge of the Konami code principle.
- A specific starting point.
- A forced destination.

The basic idea is as follows:

Let's say you and your friend want to go to a restaurant, but instead of always going to the same place, you suggest playing a game to randomly find one.

You and your friend leave your place and start walking towards the next street intersection. Then, you take out the stack of business cards and you ask your friend to shuffle them and give you the first card from the stack. Let's say it indicates "North." You then proceed to walk in the North direction until you reach the next intersection.

At each junction, your friend takes the top card from the stack and follows the direction indicated, then hands you the card to signify that it has been used. It will create a weird and fun way to walk in the city.

You continue this process until your friend has used every card in the stack. By the end of it, you will have reached a street intersection determined by the "randomness" of the shuffled cards. From there, you try to find a restaurant around you. Of course, you managed a way to land in an area where there is only one restaurant (your forced one).

As you can read, it's not a finished idea, but I think it's a pretty fun concept to use if you want to force a place in a city without the feeling that the place has been forced. If you play with it, you need some work to be sure it will work in your area. —CLR

Yeah, I think there’s something here.

While this situation wouldn’t arise that often, a great use for this idea would be to direct someone to their own surprise party. You say you want to take them on a “random” walk to determine where you’ll take them for their birthday dinner. “They say the best way to ensure a positive start to the year is to do something spontaneous to kick it off.” Then, in the closest restaurant to where you end up, they find all their loved ones waiting for them.

You don’t actually have to walk the route, if that’s not possible. You could just do it with a map in front of you, and mark off the route on the map to find the eventual destination. This could allow for a lot more “movements” because you don’t actually have to walk it in real life. You would just use it to determine your destination and then go there. (Although, as you might guess, I prefer the time it takes to do the walking.)

Also, if you’re using a map, you don’t need to only perform this in a city with a grid layout. Many maps and atlases have the area laid out with grid references on the top on bottom, so you can use that to guide yourself to a specific location.

Or, if you don’t have a map that works for that, you can just make your own. You can get an overhead map at the scale, that you want it to be, lay a grid on top of that, and then figure out the necessary cards you would need to start from your house (or another logical starting point) and get you to the destination.

Dustings #89

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On Wednesday, I finished writing the final chapter of Book #6. It’s such a crazy feeling to wrap one of those up. All is on schedule for the October release. I don’t mention this to pimp the book. It’s been sold out for 14 months, and the waiting list easily exceeds the number of overage copies that might get printed. I just mention this to keep the supporters in the loop. Now you’re in the loop. Like this guy.

Our buddy, Stasia has her “decision-making coin” back in stock on her Etsy store. Now in gold and silver.

I wrote about it and one of the most deceptive versions of the PATEO force you can do with it in this post.

The Jerx Makes A Bet

My first instinct is that this looks great…

My second instinct is that it’s going to be a fucking nightmare of broken thread, janky electronics, and even more heat on the deck than there normally is with a haunted deck.

So even though I was ready to pull the trigger on this immediately, I’m going to bet that my second instincts are more likely correct, and that this might be something that’s great to demo for magicians, but is a pain in the ass in the real world.

Again, this is just my own speculation. I hope I’m wrong. Maybe I have trust issues because the ad says, “The performer starts and ends 100% clean.” Which is most definitely not true. You start and end with a whole fake-ass deck in your hands. Literally the opposite of clean. The fact they would include that in the ad makes them beyond sketchy in my opinion.

If you end up picking this up, email me and give me the straight dope on if you like it or not.

Joe Mckay sent along this video of Chris Ramsay breaking down some one-shot magic tricks from the television show he was on last year. They’re fun to watch. There’s nothing thirstier or more desperate than a magician exposing tricks, but in this case, what else are you going to do with these performances besides expose them? That’s what they were designed for. If I thought anyone really gave a shit one way or the other about the tricks themselves, I would say that exposing them is a net negative. But this is magic done to demonstrate cleverness, not magic done to evoke mystery. So I have no issue with the exposure in this case.

Here’s a chance to help a guy out and get seven, hour-long magic lectures in the process.

See the details here.

And I challenge each lecturer to really bring it, don’t just half-ass it because it’s for a charitable cause, and you figure no one will be too bothered if you just load up your lecture with your C-grade material. Don’t take our money and our time by asking us to sit through 7 hours of all throwaway shit. I’ve donated to charitable magic causes in the past and received some slapdash garbage in return. I’m happy to give my money, but less happy to give the time it takes to consume something that wasn’t intended to be that good in the first. So please, each of you, give us at least one idea that’s actually really good. In fact, it might help if you say, “Okay. Enough of the c-grade material. This idea is actually really good.”

Actually, if the organizers want me to plug this again next week, try to get a couple sentences from each lecturer about one thing they’re presenting that they think will be a highlight of the lecture, and I’ll post it here.

(It may seem like a dick thing to do to judge people’s contributions to a charitable effort, but you see, I’m trying to help out everyone involved. People on the fence about donating will think, “Gee, they might be feeling a little pressure from that post on the Jerx. I bet they do up their game and include at least one really strong trick per lecture. That’s seven strong tricks. I’ll happily donate for seven strong tricks.”)

Night-Night Drawings

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“When I was a kid, like four or five, I would do this weird shit where I would pull out all my drawing supplies and hold my breath until I passed out. I’d wake up a few minutes later and there would be a drawing next to me that I had no memory of doing. But I clearly had done it, because my hands would be covered with marker or pencil smudges.

“And I thought it was just a good time, you know? I’d pass out, wake up, and be like ‘Oh, look. A picture of a guy dunking a basketball.’ Or whatever. But when I told my parents about it, they were obviously freaked out. And when I wouldn’t stop doing it, they took me to a psychologist, or some kind of counselor. His explanation was that the part of my brain responsible for artistic expression would somehow wake up before my conscious brain. Or something like that. I don’t really remember. Eventually I grew out of it.

“I went to my parent’s place a couple of weekends ago and my mom brought out a bunch of my old drawings that I used to do in that state. I called them ‘night-night drawings.’”

I show my friend some pictures on my phone of some of the drawings I did at that time.

“There was something strange to me about the drawings. But I wasn’t sure what it was. So I made a list on my phone of all the drawings so I could see if there was a connection in the subject matter. And I showed it to my friend Ben, who is a child psychologist, and asked him his thoughts.

“He said the weird thing about the pictures was that, other than the picture of the tooth fairy, there were no ‘fantasy’ drawings. It was all real life stuff. No crazy monsters, fantasy lands, or made-up creatures.

“And I told him that wasn’t the tooth fairy, I don’t think. It was my sister’s Halloween costume. She went as a fairy. I was pretty sure of it. So I called my mom to ask about that, and she told me that yes, she did go as a fairy, but that wouldn’t have been until years after I made this drawing.

“Then looking back at the list of things I drew, I realized that everything I drew was something I would one day go on to see in real life. I saw an octopus at the Georgia aquarium. That guitar looks like the one my friend Dave owns.

“It’s probably just a coincidence. I told Ben about it, and he agreed that there was likely nothing to it. But he did say that, interestingly, the part of your brain that is responsible for artistic functions is also the intuitive and predictive part of your brain. So it makes some theoretical sense that I might be able to draw something I would go on to see, if that part of my brain was larger or more stimulated in some way. And that might explain why I have such an interest in mindreading and mentalism and that sort of thing.

“That gave me the idea to try something. An experiment, kind of. Something that connects these pictures and breathing and intuition.

“This morning I made myself pass out with a pencil and paper nearby. And I woke up with this next to me.”

I pull out a folded piece of paper and put it on the table.

“I want to try something with you. I want to time how long you can hold your breath. I want you to empty your lungs. Then hold your breath as long as you can. Don’t go until you pass out, of course, but press stop on the stopwatch when you need to inhale.”

My friend breathes out completely and then holds her breath for as long as she can. Eventually stopping the stopwatch at 26 seconds.

“Okay, interesting. Let me check.” I open my list of drawing subjects and ask my friend to tell me what entry is at number 26. It’s monkey.

“Okay, okay. And what was the full time. How many milliseconds was it?” It was 26:98. So I tell her to scroll down to 98 to see what’s at that number. It’s robot.

“I’m telling you…there is something weird going on here.”

I gesture for her to open the drawing on the table that I made this morning.

Method

I originally came up with this trick because I had a method I wanted to try out. I now like the presentation more than the method and will definitely be using a variation on it in the future.

As for the method, it’s…

Chronological Force Bag

This combines two apps, Chronoforce and Digital Force Bag, so you can force two items on a list at one time. Put your second force item at number 98 on your list of 100 items (or at some other high number). The seconds are a true variable, you force your first item there in the standard DFB way. Then Chronoforce forces the 98, so you get your second force item there.

That’s all there is to it.