Category: Personal

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Ban Hammer
or Throwing the baby out with the bath water

I was planning for my next big post to be a video of my latest routine with a further video explaining its origins, similar to the post I made for the tooth fairy act but watching back the performance, I just wasn’t happy with it yet.

Needs longer to cook.

However it got me thinking about video content and specifically about magic youtubers and such, which all led to with this video my friend and long time reader sent me.

Continue reading “Ban Hammer
or Throwing the baby out with the bath water”

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Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, there are two kinds of computer hackers.

White hat hackers are tourists, explorers, defenders of digital space. Yes they will use their knowledge of technology to gain access to places they shouldn’t be but they won’t take anything or damage anything and often will tell the organisations after the fact what vulnerabilities they exploited to gain access, so that the systems administrators can improve their security.

Black hat hackers are using similar skills and access to steal confidential data, sabotage the systems they infiltrate and exploit unknown vulnerabilities entire for personal gain.

You know, goodies and baddies.

And I decided a while ago that since magic is just theatre… Why aren’t there more magic baddies?

Continue reading “Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people”

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Moonshot Magic
or Words that leak from the page

To briefly recap my last post for those of you who found it to hard to read, there are a number of feelings I wish to capture from the past book I read.

Confusing non-linearity aside, the main feeling it left me and other readers with was a lingering sense of interest that continued past the end of the book. I described it before as a madness affecting the author that infected the reader and drove them to pass along. This took on various forms for different people but it’s something which I would love to incorporate into my magic.

I had sort of been working on this already with the idea of souvenir tricks but it’s all coming together in my head now, and I’m going to start by confessing that until a few weeks ago, I didn’t understand the Pothole trick.

Continue reading “Moonshot Magic
or Words that leak from the page”

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House of Cards
or This Blog is now Ergodic Literature

Occasionally I have cause to comment not upon what’s going on outside the blog but on the blog itself and while usually this means I’m apologising for not updating it in over a year, this time it’s to explain a change you might have noticed in a couple of previous posts.

I temporarily altered my footnote style such that the footnotes were linked using clickable tags, so if you click the number it takes you to the footnote, and clicking the footnotes number takes you back to the text. This was to facilitate a cleaner user experience and following footnotes as the reader progressed through the text. I now have at least 2 readers after all and I have to continually refer to them in order that they keep coming back.

This was quite difficult to do especially as I do almost all of my blogging on my phone and typing html on a touch screen keyboard is an absolute nightmare, and when I finished off my post about hypnotism, faced with the task of adding all these links I decided not to bother. Not because it was too much effort, but because I had read House of Leaves.

Spoilers ahead for House of Leaves I guess, as if most people didn’t know about it entirely from internet videos explaining the entire plot.

Continue reading “House of Cards
or This Blog is now Ergodic Literature”

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The Time Machine
or How Long Has This Been Going On

I know a bunch of my recent posts have been about that competition, and I promise this is the last one, but what you need to remember is that I don’t really do much because of the state of my physical health. Annual magic club competitions with 6 amateur contestants are basically all I have. That and this here website.

In the scope of my life, The Pentacle Club is Hollywood, the close-up competition is The Oscars and this blog is Variety magazine.

Which means this article youre reading right now, as far as I’m concerned, is the scandal of the century. Maybe your club has suffered the same issue and you didn’t even know. I guess you’d better keep reading…

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or How Long Has This Been Going On”

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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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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”

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Returning from Hiatus
or Did I leave the oven on?

It’s been a while since I posted here. You may have thought I was dead, a few times I thought I wasn’t far off, but I made it through in the end.

I’ve been through some personal changes, we’ve all been through a global coronavirus epidemic, and for a while keeping a magic blog seemed a little pointless in the grand scheme of things.

But now I’m vaccinated¹ and things are beginning to tend towards normality I’ve once again learned an important lesson: pointless bullshit is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Continue reading “Returning from Hiatus
or Did I leave the oven on?”