Twenty Years

20 years ago this week, a plucky, handsome, young upstart named me, went onto Blogspot, chose the worst color palette they had, and started a blog called The Magic Circle Jerk.

You can read the full story of that blog by scrolling wayyyyy down on this one to December 2015. That month tells the full story of that site through a daily advent calendar structure. (The old blog itself no longer exists.)

When that site started, a lot of my content was making fun of The Magic Café. That’s back when the Café was relevant. Well known magicians would post there and do monthly Q and As. There were other message boards devoted to magic, but none were as big as the Café. It was a perfect subject to write about because it was relatively popular and it was a total clusterfuck of a place. I don’t know that we’ll ever see the likes of it again.

At the time, my issues with the Café were always handled publicly. Their issues with me weren’t handled publicly. They weren’t even handled with me. They only talked about me and got hysterical in their private Café Staff section of the message board. Which is just as well. If Steve Brooks had ever written me an email and said, “Believe me… no one knows better than I the failures of the Café. You’re right that we shouldn’t have arbitrary standards that are applied haphazardly.” That probably would have been the end of The Magic Circle Jerk. And this site never would have happened. I never would have become the most prolific writer in the history of magic.

No, if that had happened, I’d probably be working at Cold Stone Creamery. Smoking fentanyl. Mixing the fentanyl into the ice cream with those little spatulas like I’m busting up a Heath bar.

Yeah, I’d probably be blowing any guy in the Cold Stone bathroom for $5 who says the secret phrase (“What that mouth do?”). Cold ice cream and warm spunk drying together on my apron.

Look, there’s no doubt things worked out for the best. I’m just saying things could have easily gone another way.

One of my favorite stories about the types of intellects behind the scenes at the Café is the Pornolizer Story. I don’t know if I’ve told this one before.

On January 5th of 2004, I was mentioning my New Year’s resolutions and I wrote:

My other resolution is not to make fun of Steve Brooks and The Magic Cafe so much. They look like they've made some recent changes that make the site actually pretty good. Take a look.

And “Take a look” was a link.

Now, to explain the joke, there used to be this site called The Pornolizer. (There still is, in fact, it just doesn’t work all that well these days.)

What the pornolizer would do is take any URL you put in it and spit out a version of the same site with a bunch of dirty words in it.

Here’s what this site looks like when pornolized.

The pornolizer no longer works very well. It was really designed around 2003 internet conventions. And at that time, it worked pretty well. All the links would work, and the design stayed consistent. But it was also just randomly putting in dirty words, so it was kind of clear there was no human thought behind it.

Now look, I’m going to make an exception, if you were born and your parents accidentally put your head in one of those machines from the 70s that scrambles an egg while it’s still inside its shell, and your brain has been whipped into a frothy lather, then MAYBE you would look at the “pornolized” Magic Café and not know that this was something done automatically and arbitrarily. But even then, you probably wouldn’t be fucking dumb enough to think I had gone in and edited every post on the Café. And yet that’s exactly what some of the staff there thought happened.

In their secret back-room forum, back in 2004, genius Scott Guinn wrote:

That’s right. He literally thought I had gone and “stolen content” and “made my own site” and not only edited every post on the Cafe, but also every site that was linked to from the Cafe. What a perfectly reasonable assumption.

Harry Murphy, a member of the Cafe “Staff” (and no-doubt Mensa as well) gives us his take…

Oh, come on, Harry. Be fair. With a quarter of a million posts on the Cafe at the time, if I had spent just 30 seconds reading and editing each post, then I could have gotten the whole site done in just 86 days of working 24/7.

Fortunately, “Grammar Supervisor,” Jon Gallagher comes in speaking some sense…

Actually, this was more insulting to me. The idea that I might spend three months of my life working on an alternate “dirty” version of The Magic Cafe from scratch makes me insane. But the idea that it would take me a fucking half hour to copy and paste a URL makes me sound damn near braindead.

Jon wasn’t done. He reached out to his lawyer.

That’s right! He suggested trying to get my site taken down as “child pornography.” Let me see if I can understand the logic here… Because the Cafe sometimes “refers to kids” then me putting the Café URL in this third-party site that randomly inserts words like “muff-muncher” and “finger-blast” into websites MIGHT fall under child pornography laws.

“Hey… what are you in for?”

“Me? I’m a pediatrician and I took naked pictures of my patients and sold them online. You?”

“I made a video of myself drugging and raping the little league team I coached. Hey… guy in the corner… what did you do?”

“I pornolized the Magic Café.”

What kind of person offers that as a suggestion to take down a magic blog? I would have loved to see someone try to take this to the “district attorney.”

But don’t fret, his “lawyer” had another idea if the child porn angle didn’t pan out.

Sadly, it never came to pass that any Café staff tried to “beat the holy snot” out of me. I would have loved to see that crew try.

To be fair to Steve Brooks, he never seemed to entertain these moronic ideas. There were a number of calls by the Café staff to sue me over my old site. But if he ever looked into it, nothing came of it. He probably just used those people to know what not to do. There are some people who are so dull and unsavvy that you’ll sometimes look to their advice to know which path to avoid. And I’m guessing anyone who volunteers their time to correct grammar for a magic message board falls squarely in that group.

So happy anniversary to Steve, the Café staff, and those of you who were there 20 years ago and somehow found me again after a ten-year absence.