Draw Cycle

This is a post about a new feature on the Jerx App that will be coming out today (or very soon).

First, a brief history of the app for those of you who are new here.

The app was initially designed as a free bonus for the people who purchased my very first book, The Jerx Volume 1. At first, it was going to be an app with one simple purpose to be used in one of the tricks in that book. During the process of creating the app, I realized there were many more uses for it than I originally anticipated. The main function of the app is really a utility function that can be used for a number of very different effects. (There are 10 or so effects listed in the instructions.)

The Jerx App is also a place where I dump other app ideas occasionally. Simple ideas that it wouldn’t necessarily make sense to release as their own app. So I just drop Marc Kerstein a line and ask him if some idea or another would be easy enough to program. And if so, he works on it and it’s added to the app.

I’m not trying to sell anyone on the app. It’s priced at a premium, and intentionally so. If I had people buying that first book for $250 when I had zero track record of putting out a physical product, and part of the allure for some was a bonus app—and then I go and sell it later for $15 or something, that would devalue the faith they put in me back then. For me the app is worth the cost it currently sells for because I use it all the time. And I intend to add more little ideas to it as time goes on. But it’s certainly not something anyone needs to have. As I said, I’m not trying to sell the app. I’m just giving some details about the history of the app for new readers. I don’t make any money when the app sells. Marc does, but there are plenty of other great apps you can buy if you want to give Marc some dough.

Draw Cycle

Here’s what the new feature in the app does:

It’s designed to look like a drawing app. And it cycles through a series of options while the phone is facing you, but then it locks onto one when you move the phone.

So, a boring way to use it would be to make your prediction, ask someone to roll an imaginary die and tell you what number came up. By shifting the phone when that number is on the screen you lock it in place and the phone can be given to the spectator and it acts just like a normal drawing program.

There are, of course, much more interesting ways to use it. I, for example, will be using it to perform my Fuck, Marry Kill routine I wrote about years ago. I used to use the iForce app for that effect, but the method was too complicated to remember if I didn’t do it for a couple of weeks. This will make it much simpler.

Obviously you don’t want to be staring at your phone while it’s cycling through the options. What you want it to feel like is that you’ve written something down on your phone and now you’re just holding it towards yourself until you’re ready to reveal what you wrote. You want to be able to spot what you need using your peripheral vision. (Although occasionally glancing at what you wrote wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in the world.)

You can also use haptic feedback so you don’t have to look at the phone at all. That will work best with a small number of potential outs whose order you know. (The numbers on a die, for example.)

You can make as many outs as you need, and change how long each image stays on screen, from fractions of a second to two seconds.

Imagine you had this set up so you could reveal one of 20 common zoo animals. I would draw the pictures and load them in alphabetically. That way if you’re at Bear, you know you can pay less attention for a little bit if they named Zebra.

But also keep in mind when you’re deciding what trick to do with this. If—in this example—they name Zebra, and it just looped around to the beginning of the alphabet (and the beginning of your outs) that you’re going to have to vamp for a little bit. In this case up to 40 seconds, if you have 20 images set to flip every 2 seconds. Do you have a hard time bullshitting for 40 seconds? I personally don’t. My tricks are usually at least 5 minutes of bullshitting. But if you do, you may want to avoid a trick with a lot of outs.

This tool would be ideal for situations where there seems to be a lot of potential outcomes, but there’s really only a handful. The Mind Power deck. Or how about using it for the thought-of words in WikiTest? Or a Svengali-style pad that forces a list of, say, 8 celebrities (but you flip through and show what appears to be hundreds of different celebrities). So they flip to any page, mentally select anyone on that page. And it’s someone you drew a picture of on your phone. The combination of methods there would be very strong.

You get the idea. There are a million uses here.

I’m going to go email Marc and ask him if it wouldn’t be too difficult to store different sets of outs so you wouldn’t have to re-do the options when you want to change tricks. That email will start the way most of my emaIls to him start, “Okay, this seems like it should be easy enough to do…” Because nothing is better than when someone who doesn’t know how to do what you know how to do tells you that what they want you to do is going to be easy.

Oh, and if you want to do a “hands-off” version, you could place the phone in empty coffee cup or mug in such a way where you can still see the screen. “I won’t touch the phone again,” etc. Then just turn the cup/mug towards them at the appropriate time.

For those of you with the app, after you update it, you can check out exactly how to set-up and use Draw Cycle on the instructions page.

By the way, if you’d like a similar multiple outs type thing, but one where the phone is face down and you don’t need to touch it, I recommend Marc’s Amalgam app. In “season 1” of that app there is a program called Timed Out, which will let you do just that with 6 outs.