Dustings of Woofle #21
/First, some housekeeping.
The 2019 season of The Jerx ends on December 23rd.
The 2020 season—if there is one—will start up in February.
“If there is one”? Are you threatening us?
No, sweetie. Relax. If you’re new to this site, this is how it works: There are a group of supporters who fund the site each year. In return they get a bunch of bonus content including a book/newsletter/deck of cards, etc. These supporter slots are capped off at a certain number. At the end of each season I ask the supporters if they want to sign up again for another year. If at least 90% of the supporters say they want to buy in for another year, then I keep the site going. At some point I’ll probably want to stop the site for my own purposes, but as of now I’m happy to keep it going as long as people want me to. And this 90% threshold is a simple way of determining if people are still digging the site.
So that stuff will all be figured out at the beginning of next year. Assuming there is interest for a 2020 season, any unclaimed supporter slots will be made available in February.
The 2020 season will likely have a different schedule. I’ll give more details on that in the future. Content-wise the site will be different too. I’ve talked about that in this post.
An update on my Bounty Hunting post.
Regarding the fortune-telling napkin-holder thing: I learned that it’s a real thing that used to exist (not just a Twilight Zone invention). I think I’ve got a line on one from the 50s, so I won’t have to have one made. Although I want to thank the people who offered to create one. That would have been a fun process to be involved with. But it would probably be a needlessly complicated route to take.
Regarding the 1-on-1 PK Touches routine: Still looking into this one. I’m not sure any of the commercially available routines are going to work for my purposes, but I think I might be onto something after a brainstorm with Seth Raphael and Marc Kerstein. Seth’s initial idea was very clever (I may ask him if I can share it with you in the future) but wouldn’t have been ideal of the presentation I wanted to do. But it inspired a tangential method that I’m working on now. I’ll keep you updated.
Regarding the container trick: I had a lot of good ideas come my way. To remind you, the effect would use stackable containers the screw together. You’d put something in the top container, shake it, and it would fall down to the next container, and so on. So it would look like this:
Except for the fact that something would actually happen.
A lot of the ideas sent my way might look good on video, but few would hold up if done in person. (Anything using a hole between layers would, I think, get busted fairly easily.)
Here are some ideas from reader Erik K, that I thought were pretty interesting.
I think the one labelled #5 holds some promise, although it’s not exactly what I was looking for. You could have different colored beads in each container. Force one container via some sort of counting force, like Quinta. That container is removed and one bead is taken from it. That “random” bead is dropped in the top container, and there are duplicates of that bead in the other compass positions (South, West, and East if the original bead is dropped in at North) in the other containers. Then you could shake the containers and secretly rotate everything 90 degrees to create the illusion of the randomly selected bead going down.
The Ellusionist kickstarter has ended. Congratulations to them on having such a successful product launch.
Although, to be honest, I’m not sure I 100% agree with the last “stretch goal” they offered with their Kickstarter campaign. See below…
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We’re excited to announce the final stretch-goal for the How To Read Minds kit. Now, every box will contain a pack of Black Dragon Extreme Hypnotism Pills.
Sometimes you need to pull out the BIG GUNS. Black Dragon Extreme Hypnotism Pills will make you the coolest guy in school, the talk of the office, and the envy of your church group.
Will it get people to buy you a drink? No, probably not. In fact, you’ll likely have to buy them a drink to use these most efficaciously.
But it will be worth it for the powers of seduction in a box!
Why should the guys with the personality and charisma have all the fun?
