Fun!
[source: Timeless Tips for ‘Simple Sabotage’ — Central Intelligence Agency]
FUN BONUS EXERCISE: Read this whole thing, and ask yourself:
Is this more plausible as a CIA guide for resistors trying to drag down fascists in foreign nations, or as a plot to nudge patriotic Americans into suspecting organized labor and broad progressive social movements of actually being enemy saboteurs?
#LadyLiberty’sTourchIsAGaslight
. . . but either you agree that this is the greatest space alien The Twilight Zone ever coughed up, or we can’t be friends any more. This is my thin blue red line in the sand, folks.
DISCLOSURE: If you wanna argue that the alien at the end of this episode is technically the better alien, you are welcome to do so
If you write fiction long enough, interviewers will start to ask you “Where do you get your ideas?”
Readers love this question (it’s also a dreaded chestnut of con Q&A panels). Writers hate it. It’s like asking “Where do you get the time to write?” Every one of us gets the same 24 hours each day; doctors spend some of those doctoring; drug addicts spend some of that getting high; writers spend part of one of those hours writing stories. One person can be any or all of those, and more.
Likewise, we all see/hear/mis-hear/read/misread/imagine all sorts of crazy crap every day. Those are ideas. That’s where ideas come from.
But that’s maybe a cheap answer, because it takes the question too literally. I think maybe what folks are asking when they ask “Where do you get your ideas?” is “How do you store/catalogue all the weird shit you see every day so that it’s useful to you later?”
And to that, my answer is this:
My brain locks on to odd shiny things and hordes them.
Most of the fiction I write comes out of a collision: I’ll stumble across some interesting fact or idea or snatch of plot or dialogue, but won’t really have any use for it, and so it just sorta bobs around in my head. Sooner or later, as other shiny ideas catch my notice and get tossed into that cranial junk drawer, several will bang together and stick in some interesting way. When ideas stick together they make a distinctive POP!ing sound. I listen for the pop, then start writing.
This is the essence of the “magpie and junk drawer” approach to research and writing. I stumbled into it as a kid having to do research papers, and it’s served me well ever since. Go forth, apply this in your life, and sin no more.
Amen.
You’ve no doubt already seen a news item about those Japanese teen-nympho sex monkeys rubbing up on adult male deer:
(Aside: Is anyone else weirded out that they always look at the camera? That doesn’t seem like happenstance. Like… is it… is it part of the kink for them? ’cause that makes me sorta feel… like, I don’t want to be made a part of this without my consent. That’s all I’m saying. I do not consent to this.)
But check this parenthetical toss-off from the first—and least sensationalistic—mainstream article covering this phenomenon: “Scientists Say Japanese Monkeys Are Having ‘Sexual Interactions’ With Deer” (Thanks, NPR!)
Japanese macaques are known to ride deer like humans ride horses, for fun or transportation — behavior the deer seem to tolerate in exchange for grooming and discarded food.
So, just an FYI: Japanese monkeys are in the midst of domesticating deer—you know, for fun, or transportation, or (as we did before them) to increase their travel range and capacity to haul loads. Loads, like, I dunno, the lifeless bodies of the defenseless denizens of Tokyo, after marauding teen-nympho sex monkeys start raiding that once grand metropolis, charging in under cover of night astride their deer consorts, cutting us down, smashing our skulls, and feasting on the goo within!!! IT’S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!!!
Anyway, point being they’re are only two ways this story ends, and neither of them is good. Our future is either this:
or this:
2017 has indeed been a rough year.
Found this in a stack of unlabeled 78 rpm records I bought off eBay, like, a billion years ago. No time to lay down a new track this week, so I just digitized this instead. Mysteries within mysteries, etc.
I’ve seen several recorded performances of this trick, and watched it live at least once—and yet this is the first time it dawned on me that there is no trick to this trick. (i.e., I’d bet that if you take just a moment to think about this—even if you’ve never touched a nail gun before—you can think of at least two totally different ways to modify a stock nail gun or fabricate a fako, and once you accept that the nail fun is gaffed, then there isn’t a memory trick at all, just some patter).
In fact, there’s a degree to which this trick is about the trick’s tricklessness, if you catch my meaning: It’s about delivery and panache and the fascination that comes with the risk of grievous bodily harm. It is an amped up, thoroughly Modern America version of Barnum’s wonderful(!), stupendous(!!!), incomparable(!!!) Egress.
BONUS: Penn & Teller’s greatest of misdirections—They get you caught up on the idea of being live and doing camera tricks, thus distracting you from the obvious explanation revealed at the end—AND THE FACT THAT THEY DO USE CAMERA TRICKS[1]!!!
Continue reading “This Trick is Incredible Because It Isn’t Even a Trick”
I normally would have skipped this (“Vulture—Louis CK Is Done”), because I don’t particularly care for Louis C.K.’s work one way or the other. But do yourself a favor and give this article read; it’s bigger than this moment, and starts to get its arms around something that we finally need to wrestle down:
When disturbing stories about respected artists come from the distant past, we treat them dispassionately, as just one detail among many. Present tense or near-present tense revelations hit us differently because we share the same world as the artist, breathe the same air, feed the same economy. We think of them as contemporaries, even as people we know. This kind of revelation changes the relationship between the artist and the art, in a way that places an unasked-for, unfair burden on the audience. This is what’s happening culture-wide. And it’s not the fault of people who didn’t report it, or audiences who aren’t sophisticated enough to separate the art from the artist. It’s the fault of the artists for being secret creeps or criminals, and the fault of the system for making it possible for them to act this way for years without being punished.
UPDATE:If you’re the sort of person who uses storytelling to help them understand the world, then this horror story might maybe help you understand Louis CK right now: “Hello, Handsome”
…it’s that every love note is a ransom note.
If you’ve been wondering how North Korea (a nation of 26 million people with 7x the population and ~1/10th the GDP of the Detroit Metro Area) paid for a very fast-moving nuclear and ballistic missile program—SPOILER ALERT!—: You paid for it, asshole.
Episode 800: North Korea’s Capitalists
see also: “We Have Entered the Zone of Maximum Mayhem“
OK, at first blush, this seems like nothing more than a mildly sexist—but still basically harmless—”invisible touches” routine: Magician has a volunteer stand with her eyes closed as she pays super-duper sensitive attention to any physical contact she might perceive. He then steps well away—way, way too far to have any direct or indirect (e.g., creating a draft, blowing on her, tickling her with threads) contact. As witnesses watch (confirming that Magician never makes contact), he is able to make the subject believe she’s been touched (in this case, that her boobs have been squeezed)—simply by the power of his psychical abilities!
Tada!
(Here’s another vid of the same dude. Note that he puts in our heads the notion of an unambiguous boob squeeze, but that his volunteers consistently describe a tap high on the chest. That gap—between his implication that he’s honking their boobs contrasted to the women’s implication that this is more of a light tap—is the tell.)
Yes, this dude is a creep, and his impinging on women’s time and space and totally leveraging huge cultural forces that oblige them to smile through bullshit like this.
But it’s still basically harmless, right? I mean, he isn’t actually touching their boobs while they are defenseless and non-consenting, right? It’s just a trick.
Accept for the thing is, he is for real and with his actual physical flesh-and-blood hands, touching these women’s breasts without their prior consent, and only getting away with it because he’s manipulating the situation owing to an information (and thus power) imbalance. And, in a move that’s both cheap from a magic performance perspective and indicative of a guilty conscious on the part of an assailant, he mostly cuts from the video the part where he does the touching.
Because he is indeed a fucking creep of the first degree.
Back in the mid-1990s a guy named Steve Shaw was selling an effect called “Psychokinetic Touches.” Shaw himself is a really, really interesting guy (as is the pre-Internet—and even current—market in cheaply printed pro-grade performance techniques like these). Shaw he designed Penn & Teller’s famous bullet catch, although I myself first got wind of him in the 1980s, when I was a kid and he was a teen working with James Randi to fool some ESP researchers; Shaw caught my imagination then because of how straightforward and cunning his techniques were.
None of that is really germane, accept for the fact that if you maybe spend some time googling “Steve Shaw” and “Psychokinetic Touches”, you’ll dig up a blurry PDF of the old comb-bound booklet explaining his technique (which is marked by the straightforward cunning of Shaw’s work). If you do so, you’ll note that in the introduction to that work Shaw explains his inspiration: a routine from the early 1900s that is the totally obvious inspiration for the YouTube creepers stunt.
I.e., not only is dude a creepy perv, but he’s also an unoriginal creepy perv. *sighs*
(I myself got acquainted with Shaw’s PK Touches after seeing this Peter Boi work it into his bit on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us, which is basically 100% textbook Shaw, and an overall better effect and performance.)
At any rate, here’s an overview of Shaw’s “Psychokinetic Touches” routine:
The performer selects a volunteer from the audience, and explains that blah-blah psychic blah-blah ghosts blah-blah From Beyond—and for that reason, he is able to physically touch a receptive individual with nothing more than his mind. He then makes some gestures to “clear the volunteer’s aura” (or whatever) and steps far away. Now, standing much too far away to conceivably physical reach the volunteer, and in full view of an audience (who can be surrounding the pair on all sides), the performer makes his cooky touch-touch gestures—and low and behold!, the astonished volunteer can confirm that she has been touched(!!!)
I won’t spoil the whole thing, but SPOILER ALERT!!! [1]: Dude is not a psychic or ghost wrangler or whatever. Here’s the basic schtick: The performer gives his little spiel, then has the volunteer close her eyes. At this stage he explains a few more things—reminding her to be “psychically receptive” and super attentive to even the lightest contact. He shuts up, does his little “aura cleansing,” and steps away to do his mambo-jahambo magical passes and psychic touching, singling out certain parts of the body (the right shoulder, the left elbow—whatever). N.B. Everything he’s done since advising her to be super attentive and receptive has happened in absolute silence. The next time he speaks is to ask “Have you felt any contact?” He than has her indicate where that contact was on her body. Lo and behold, she reports being touched in all the right places. OMFG! How did he do it?! And here comes the spoiler:
HE TOUCHED HER DURING THE “AURA CLEANING.”
From the audience’s perspective, this isn’t part of the trick yet, so they are not being super diligent; he has an easy pass to brush her gently. But remember, he’s fallen silent and the volunteer’s eyes are closed: She has no frame of reference for what’s going on, and thus from her perspective everything from when he stops talking on is part of the trick. Her perceptions are temporally out-of-synch with the audiences’, and they have no easy way to rectify that, even after the fact.
Here is a more benign version of PK Touches, again performed by Peter Boie, but with a slightly disadvantageous (to him) camera angle. Now the tell is more obvious. Watch carefully at 0:49 and 0:52: when the performer waves his hands around to clear the aura he surreptitiously uses his right hand to tap the back of her left shoulder. This is largely obscured owing to how he’s positioned the volunteer relative to the audience and cameras—blocking Shaw suggests in his PK Touches. The waving-arms misdirect is also straight out of Shaw’s PK Touch. (Wondering how Boie pulls off the second PK touch, where the male volunteer feels the ghostly strokes on his nose? You can slow that video down to 1/4 speed on YouTube, and you’ll clear see that Boie never touches the dude’s nose with his hand–because he doesn’t. Put the video in slow-mo and watch the performers hands starting at around 1:44, before he approaches the volunteer. When he parts his hands and spreads them far apart, he’s extended a loop of thread between them, which is what he clearly strokes down the man’s nose. As I recall, this is not part of Shaw’s original PK Touches. I’ve read somewhere of something similar done to simulate a touch running down a volunteer’s arm, but I really like it used here in this way. Excellent misdirection to create a similar effect–the PK Touch–in two totally different ways, one of which would seem to eliminate the obvious explanation for the other. Bravo!)
Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty easy to spot the Creep-o-Perv Magician moving into the “magic passes”(/secret boobie poke) portion of his routine around the 0:34 mark in the video embedded above, when he squares up the girl’s shoulders.
And I’m gonna come correct right here: I don’t know what annoys me more: A skeevy dude using a decades-old store-bought routine to non-consensually poke girls’ in the bust, or the fact that he has so little respect for his craft that he resorts to cheap “camera tricks” to pull it off.
Naw, I take it back: What annoys me most is using a third-rate performance of a first-rate effect to make a jokey pantomime of sexual assault in order to cover up the actual sexual assault you just perpetrated, ’cause it so clearly gets to the heart of what enrages me about the “Lighten up; it’s just a joke!” attitude toward minimizing the crazy-making reality of microagressions: The problem isn’t the stupid joke, but the very real assaults the jokes conceal.
Continue reading “This is a Kinda Rapey Application of Steve Shaw’s “Psychokinetic Touches””