Two Dope Freebies

Here are two free items that you should definitely check out if you haven’t yet..

The Novara Control by Ollie Mealing

This card control from Ollie Mealing is really great. The selection is tossed into a spread of cards. The cards are gathered up, and the selection is on the bottom of the deck. I think this looks just about perfect. It’s very casual and hands-off (to an extent) and relatively easy to perform.

If you gather the cards inward and pull the deck off the table towards yourself, you could let the bottom card flip off your thumb into your lap and hand the deck out for shuffling (leaving you free to fold the card into quarters, stuff it in a wallet, or whatever).

This would have fooled me. Not that I’m some genius or something. But I usually have a good radar for something happening. Watching this control, my radar wouldn’t have gone off.

TimedOut by Marc Kerstein

TimedOut is an iPhone only app that can be used as an “index” of up to six outs. These outs can be something that was apparently written/drawn in a drawing app, or they can be photos or screenshots. The out can even even appear in your real camera roll (back dated up to a week ago).

You could, for example, tell someone your baby is demonstrating psychic powers. Ask them to think of an ESP symbol, and then show them that you took a picture of your child a few days ago, and smeared in feces on the wall near their crib is the ESP symbol they’re thinking of. “I need to smother him with a pillow before his powers become to great.”

The cool thing about TimedOut is that you don’t have to touch the phone after the out has been identified. So the phone can be on their hand, face down. And then you could… I don’t know…ask them to imagine blood spurting out of one of the holes in their body: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus, penis or bergina (spelling?). When they turn over the phone, there is a photoshop mock-up of them with blood shooting out of that orifice.

And, unlike the examples I’ve given here, TimedOut can also be used for effects that aren’t related to stuff coming out of people’s bodies.

You don’t need an Apple Watch or another phone or a remote control or anything along those lines. The phone is out of your hands and you don’t touch it again. There’s no voice recognition or anything like that.

TimedOut is a cleverer version of the Draw Cycle function on the Jerx App. It was, in fact, what inspired Draw Cycle. Draw Cycle is a simpler idea and you can use more outs, but it requires you to be holding the phone and be able to see the screen. TimedOut has definite advantages and it’s fucking free!! Grab it..