Month: May 2023

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Censored
or Internet Posts Have Extended Range

Recently I posted about coming second in a local magic competition. Obviously I tried to make it interesting but I thought it was quite fair to the winner. Maybe too fair. Anyway, imagine my surprise when the secretary of the club called this morning to ask me to edit it slightly. Normally I resist this kind of censorship, but I did it as a favour to him, and the winner of the contest, since we are technically all friends.

Anyway, the only change he wanted was to take down the photo, which apparently wasn’t public and remove the name of the winner, as the club secretary is apparently a scared little piss baby who doesn’t want a local competition squabble to follow the winner around in case he gets famous. Reminds me of the time this happened before, about 20 years ago, when I posted a very unflattering review of my ex-girlfriend’s academic rigour. My livejournal apparently followed her around for about a decade hindering her medical career because I had written “if you ever find your self with a doctor called S******* N********* the two words which could save your life are Second Opinion.” Seems her name was so rare and her internet presence was so tiny that my blog questioning her future competence was the first thing that came up in a Google search. The last time she called was after I had shortened her name to a four letter nickname and made the page private, because Google’s cached page was still the #1 result for her full name. Really there wasn’t much I could do at that point, so I just told her to take it up with Google under the “right to be forgotten laws” which had come in recently. Obviously what I wrote about the competition was nothing like “this doctor will kill you” but if he does make it big, the tabloids will mine anything for a scandal. Now I’m not saying I’m holding back specifically so that I can cash in like a parasite when the papers are desperate for dirt on this guy, but if I was going to do that, I’d probably do some acrostic shenanigans to hide his name in this post. Good thing I’m nowhere near smart enough to pull off a thing like that.

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Linus’ Blanketfort
or Every Day Clutter

A few days ago I mentioned how much I hate the term Organic as it pertains to magic. To re-iterate I get the need for gimmicked props that look natural, like a John Cornelius perfect pen, but somehow nicely engineered objects like that very rarely get categorised as organic. Rather, organic magic tricks are usually pitched at the younger end of the magic market who apparently don’t seem to own anything which costs more than £2.99, so they have to carry gimmicked bottle caps, gum packets and novelty keyrings.

Although the term gets passed around now and again, Organic has been supplanted by the new buzz phrase which if anything I hate even more – though not as much as its three letter acronym

Every Day Carry
Continue reading “Linus’ Blanketfort
or Every Day Clutter”

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Sour Lemons
or Pull Back and Reveal

I am a bad loser. A terrible loser, like absolutely dogshit at handling competitive failure. I’ve had post-competition meltdowns that made a magic club briefly decide to stop holding competitions.

I am also a bad winner. Once I was so chuffed to win one award at a magic club that I carried the trophy with me at the next competition and used it as a prop in my act. These are trophies which you get your name engraved on and give back. Giving it back was hard. So hard that when I next won one of these and went to get it engraved, I simultaneously bought a miniature copy of it to keep.

I’m a fucking freak in any kind of competitive situation. It’s a miracle I’m allowed to compete in these things at all.

And what makes it worse is when I put in a lot of effort. Like… 7 years of effort, to make an act as original as possible, and lose to slightly altered commercially sold routine.
Continue reading “Sour Lemons
or Pull Back and Reveal”

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Slated
or The Spirit Of The Thing

Spirit slates are a very old magician’s tool. I say that, they’re sort of a mentalists tool really. Or arguably they’re a tool used by fake mediums… which is to say they’re a tool used by mediums. In short it’s a pair of framed blackboards (slates) which are shown blank and placed together, with a piece of chalk is sandwiched in the gap between formed by the depth of the frame itself. These are then held or bound in place and after a little theatrics, the slates are opened up again and the chalk has written the answer to the medium’s or the mentalist’s or the magician’s questions on the boards.

They are a classic of magic. And now they’re back! in pog form!

Continue reading “Slated
or The Spirit Of The Thing”

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The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac

A rarity for you all today. not only am I clearing a backlog of old topics by posting 3 times in one day, this post has TWO embedded videos featuring yours truly.

At the start of May I used a new routine I’d been working on to enter my local magic club‘s closeup competition. Within this post you will find a recording of my act AND a separate video giving details of my creative process in coming up with it.

Later today I will post some sour grapes about coming second masquerading as a treatise on creativity.
Continue reading “The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac”

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The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Over time, I have accumulated a lot of DVDs containing magic instructional videos. So many that I have now reached the point where I only have shelf space for half of them, and most of that shelf space is out of reach. A while ago I started to keep my DVDs instead in plastic sleeves inside a large ring binder, with the case inserts kept in regular A4 sleeves alongside them. I used to have a mere 40 or so DVDs in this type of storage but after a recent concerted effort I have now got two 65mm ring binders, each with 20 pages of double sided 2 pocket dvd sleeves. For those unwilling to do the maths, that’s 160 DVDs, and it is still not my entire collection.

But this time around I did something else alongside the action of putting DVDs into binder sleeves and collecting a huge box of empty black keep cases. I also digitised the video onto a big hard drive.

And I wish I’d done it earlier
Continue reading “The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”