It was pointed out to me that the effect presented in my previous post bore a striking resemblence to an effect from The Jerx.
I mean the fact that the effect is Jerx inspired should be obvious by the fact that the password for Nulanima is Jerxian but bizarrely I was actually thinking of a totally different Jerx routine at the time of writing as well as two non Jerx effects.
The differences are so important I think it’s worth revisiting briefly.
The Jerx routine I actually had in mind was from the books, in which two people perform the invisible deck to each other over a video call. The idea of pairing it with missing time and and unwilling participant come from Derren Brown’s Showman act, in which he does card in box by hypnotising someone to just put it there themselves, as well as a similar thing from a television special I vaguely remember where David Blaine hypnotises someone into putting their shoe somewhere¹.
The difference between Innies and In Search of Lost Time is that much like in Severence there is no communication between innie and outie, even subconscious, so theres no way to plant a hidden thought like “If I ask you to name a card, say this.”
Nulanima is entirely about implying a sequence of missing events.
It also incorporates another Jerxian idea which is sort of simultaneously a rep and an imp. So whilst the imp is the innie taking over with the app and the rep is the missing time, these are both tied to an extra convincer of a sound that only the person being controlled can apparently hear, a high pitch whine which builds to something and then just seems to abruptly stop with a chunk of missing time. As someone who has blacked out before, I can tell you this is pretty accurate.
I have a big list of ideas for how to use this after someone’s first induction into using it, but I’ll save that for later as this update is already overdue².
When I showed this to a friend of mine his first response was that I should add the extra presentational flair of recreating the top of a phone screen, with a 4g symbol, notivication icons, battery level and clock. That way I could have the time on the clock display incorrectly when it first loads up and have it update to the real time during the timeskip, deepening the missing time illusion.
Personally I think that’s overkill, because no one pays attention to the time unless they’re late. Apollo Robbins proved this in his TED talk where he asked everyone in the audience if they remembered their phone background, told them to remind themselves, and then said “You were all just looking at your phones, which have a clock on the lockscreen. What time is it?”
And no one knew.
No, I think the reason he suggested this is that a few years ago there was a magic phone app which apparently shifted you through time, by initially presenting the wrong time and then animating it forward or backwards to the actual time. This made a feature out of the time shift, indeed it was the entire effect. Nulanima is more set dressing and if you focus too much on the actual time it sort of takes over and people will ask you to do it again.
But also the reason I dont wanr to is that I could meticulously design it to look exactly like the top of my phone and all you Apple loving degenerates would complain that it looked all wrong on your iPhone 26 or whatever.
Its free, just enjoy it.
¹ So I say vaguely remember because I’m only 50% on whether it was even David Blaine. It feels like more of a Derren thing, but when I tried to find a clip I realised that David Blaine had done self tying shoelaces so often that it was flooding the search results.
² Okay I’ll give you one now, set the app to give 10 whole minutes of time, and then perform the vanishing deck with it. Yes, the one with the gaff box with a window. Put the gaff deck into the gaff box, put it on the table with their hand on top, activate the app, they turn over the box, deck is gone. They ask where it is and your response is “I don’t know, I told you to hide it.”
This could be particularly strong if you can hide an actual deck of cards in their house in a really inappropriate place, like slowly decaying in the toilet cistern or in the bottom of the freezer. It might take them months to find it.