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Would You Like Fries with That
or STEM the Flow

I studied engineering in university. Software and Electronic to be exact.

This is not an uncommon story. Dai Vernon studied mechanical engineering, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin built automata, and Robert Harbin is the most well known of a long line of illusion designers working from mechanical know how. Even Jesus started out in carpentry¹.

And isn’t that kind of weird?

In any other performance art, the technical side is relegated to backstage. Set builders, lighting technicians, audio engineers. The actors, musicians, and dancers on stage very rarely entered the arts because they loved the working of curtain pulley systems, valve amplifier schematics or shoe construction.

The obvious reason for this is that magic most commonly instills in its audience a desire to know how it works, and wanting to know how things work is also a strong drive in engineering and science education.

But this has further implications, linking my previous post to the world of STEM education, elitism in academia, and Gamergate. Yes, Gamergate.

Buckle the fuck in. It’s going to get bumpy.

Continue reading “Would You Like Fries with That or STEM the Flow”

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How We Got Here
or Entry Points and Exit Wounds

This is going to pull together a number of threads, so forgive me if it takes a while to make any kind of definitive statement.

In my last post I mentioned the concept of magician’s ego, the fact that when presenting what appears to be a strange or coincidental occurrence, the natural urge is to fabricate some narrative in which there is zero doubt that the magician is the root cause, even if the power of the effect is in the appearance that the magician does nothing.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Continue reading “How We Got Here
or Entry Points and Exit Wounds”

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F.E.G.
or If Tricks Could Kill

Back in October 2023 I posted a two part intro to what would have been my next post, a video about a trick I had been working on. However upon performing this trick in a magic competition it did not have the impact I had hoped for, a fact that was mostly down to my volunteer selection.

He didn’t get into it, so it didn’t land. I have since performed it again in a different competition and while it went much better, I’m now of the opinion that this kind of magic is kind of wasted on an audience of magicians.

Continue reading “F.E.G.
or If Tricks Could Kill”

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Blow Back
or A Funny Story About Tachycardia

I have a heart condition. I mentioned it ages ago. This week I went in to hospital to have an operation to make it not as bad. Not fix it, that would be a much bigger operation, but make it not as bad.

However, before having this procedure I had to spend 5 days off the drugs that prevent me from heading sudden unexpected tachycardias.

Guess what happened?

So when I was in tachycardia, the paramedic said he wanted to try me with a special technique for stopping it. Apparently if you sit up and blow into a syringe as hard as you can for as long as you can and then immediately fall back into lying down, it can stop tachycardia.

He tried it with a small syringe and it filled up without a problem, having no effect, at which point he said “When we get in the ambulance I’ll give you the big syringe, no one can blow that all the way.”

Readers, I filled the syringe.

“Jesus,” he said, “You must have amazing lungs. No one has ever done that. This isn’t going to work.”

In my stupor of low oxygen saturation well I could say was, “I make balloon animals.”

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Crystal Balls-Up
or I swear I am not psychic

This is a brief addition to say that it is a huge coincidence that on the same day I name-checked Vanishing Inc as the magic shop which would probably outlast others in a crumbling economy, it had a fire take out their warehouse and HQ. Even greater coincidence is that that same post mentioned another magic shop burning down shortly after I visited it.

I swear I am neither psychic, clairvoyant or an arsonist.

I may just be cursed.

Vanishing Inc is still trading and even declared a fire sale on downloads to raise money for rebuilding. Like I said before – use ’em or lose ’em.

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Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works

Sometimes I read something and wonder if I’m having a brain heammorrage.

It’s like the words in their particular order make so little sense that either I have forgotten how to read or the author of the words is insane, and I am surprisingly not egotistical enough to assume the latter every single time.

Thats the sense I had today when I was told that Dan and Dave, one of many famous sibling groupings known colloquially as the Buck Brothers, were putting all their work in the public domain, a statement backed by a post on their Instagram.

Continue reading “Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works”

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Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it

Fay Presto is a scuba diver.

This may come as a surprise to many readers (should they exist) as it’s common knowledge that Fay Presto is a magician, but whereas most magicians work some shitty 9 to 5 to earn the money to buy magic tricks which they perform on the weekends, Fay Presto performs magic around the world to earn money for her scuba diving trips.

She told me once about the odd economics of scuba gear, that almost every piece of scuba equipment from tanks to masks to wetsuits is far cheaper on the internet, but no experienced scuba diver would ever buy things that way. Not because the online products are lower quality or difficult to judge sizes and compatibility or anything like that, but because the one thing you can’t do online is fill up your air tanks.

On a suba diving holiday everyone’s airtanks get re-filled a few times a day, and the only place to do that is at a physical scuba gear suppliers.

However, here’s the rub: there is no money in filling air tanks. If people don’t buy their scuba gear from the physical scuba store where thry dive, the scuba store goes bust, no one can fill up their air tanks, and scuba just kinda… Ends.

Continue reading “Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it”

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Star Lore
or When Better is Worse

Star Wars was a good movie. Its got space lasers, space wizards, space ships, and funny googas. Over time the funny googas would have diminishing returns but… We’ll get to that.

Star Wars ended fairly satisfyingly with the good guys getting medals from the princess¹ and had two sequels, expanding it into a trilogy with the protagonist’s three father figures all turning up as ghosts at the end to nod and smile by the campfire.

For decades thats all Star Wars was, three movies².

But then in 1999, it was decided that we needed another Star War.

But here’s the thing, the result was considered by many to not be a very good movie, even though it had even more space laser, even more space wizard, even more space ship, and the purest distillation of funny googas.

It was refined Star War. Purified, distilled down to the essence.

And it sucked.

This is an essay about convincers.

Continue reading “Star Lore
or When Better is Worse”

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[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches

This entry is tangentially related to David Regal’s new tarot deck. But not entirely. Perhaps not even legitimately. I currently have a question pending on the Vanishing Inc. website which may prove that my fears are unfounded. This time.

Indeed the last time I was super concerned about a technological innovation it was NFTs and despite my fears only one magician ever released an NFT project to my knowledge, and it was so hilariously bad that he sold none of them and pivoted to passive income training course scams.

But with the launch of Phill Smiths Fusion Mosaic Phenomenon and Marc Kerstein’s Subliminal the dawn of the AI generated magic product has truly begun.

Continue reading “[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches”

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I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner

SIn my previous post I talked about The Magic Circle’s rules regarding exposure and teaching magic on public platforms, and I did it on the basis of controlling access to information to only people directly seeking it. And I ended with “Maybe you could even start a Discord”.

Today I want to drill down into that a little more, in terms of one of the things I think is lacking when you teach magic on a public stage like a youtube channel or even a website:

Community

Now you can get your hammer and sickle out.

Continue reading “I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner”