Steal Like A Cardist

“An entertainer wants to give you exactly what you want… And an artist wants to give you what you don’t know you want.”

– David Cronenberg

This week, I’d like to tell you about my favorite commercial of all time.

It was sometime around Anaconda: The World’s Longest Dribble that I began to lose interest in Cardistry.

I didn’t fully quit; after all, I was still with The Virts at the time, and rigorous practice was still part of my daily regimen to ensure that I’d always have my chops ready whenever we were set to record our next videos.

But whereas I used to look forward to checking out new videos and staying up-to-date on what went on in the forums that were available, I found myself tuning out from those resources for a couple of reasons.

Editor’s Note: Hot on the tails of last week’s post about speedrunning, Eliot Slevin (of Run Rabbit and Clouded Paper fame) has written in with his approach on… well, you’ve read the title, so you know what to expect. On to the featured post!

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Hello! So you’re wanting to make your cuts look faster, smoother, and more natural. You might think that all that’s required is more practice – but you have to make sure you’re getting the right practice.

I’m hoping this little guide will help you get buttery smooth and super duper fast.

Remember that viral web browser game, QWOP? Y’know, the one where you had to press the Q, W, O, and P keys to control a digital runner’s legs and ferry him towards the finish line?

Well, the same person behind that game later went on to release another interactive experience that’s since captured the hearts and souls of gamers worldwide. It’s called Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and in it you play a man inside of a cauldron, trying to scale a mountain with only the help of a Yosemite hammer.

I didn’t really start doing Cardistry until 3 years after seeing it for the first time.

I was in Primary 6 when my friend Timothy showed me the Ribbon Spread during one of our exam breaks. I remember being enchanted at how cards could behave like that, especially during the turnover when the deck moved like a fluid stack of paper dominoes. Later on that day, I went home and dug up a deck of cards to practice the move back and forth on our family carpet. It was fun, but within a week I’d kind of forgotten about it and moved onto the next thing.

Even before the quarantine, I found myself spending a lot of (really, too much) time on Tik Tok, which has since become my #1 source for lols and giggles. Don’t judge me.

Anyway, amongst the hundreds of videos I have Favorited on that app, one of them is of a guy who makes videos of himself singing numbers:

In 2004, I took a tripod, camera, and a deck of cards outside and filmed every flourish I knew.

After tinkering around with the footage in Sony Vegas for a few days, I assembled something that I was pretty proud of, which I then posted onto Bone Ho’s pre-social-media social media site, The Cheater’s Cheater.

Looking back on it, the video is kinda shitty in its own charming way (Scotty 2 Hotty’s entrance music? What potato did you film this on? And why did you name it after a Blink-182 DVD?), but at the time the kind mods at TCC were gracious enough to feature it on the front page of the site, which gave my 16-year-old self a massive ego boost like no other.

Here I was, amongst the ranks of legends like Harwin and TheRainMan, with 5-star ratings and encouraging comments raining down on me like manna from heaven.

This is it, I thought. I’ve finally made it.