Posts

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Telly-portation
or 5000 miles in 50 feet

I always love it when my interests overlap so imagine my joy at seeing Corridor Crew do a VFX examination of a Copperfield Illusion, to show how it was done.

Technically I should be opposed to this kind of exposure but when its a trick from 25 years ago, that was on a TV special, requiring a 2000 era las vegas budget, and will probably never be done again… it’s kind of a methodological cul-de-sac. On top of all that it is also a camera trick, so fuck him.

I don’t want to talk about the method though. I wan’t to talk about the effect.

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or 5000 miles in 50 feet”

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Ourobot
or The snake that eats its tail will starve to death

I didn’t want to be talking about this again but a couple of recent events have really driven home to me some truths about the state of things in magic.

I know roughly when AI was first used to promote a magic trick, essentially as soon as the available models were good enough to get away with it.

I know how deeply ingrained it has become, now on every magic shop storefront, in countless products, and in magicians promotional materials, often to an insane degree.

What I didn’t know was when this would start to be a problem.

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or The snake that eats its tail will starve to death”

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Kayfabe Collapse
or Repent for the end is nigh

Did you hear the rapture is happening? Or already happened, I’m not sure, I haven’t been keeping up. Feels like proclamations of the end times are being spread every other weekThis one had a bit more traction because of TikTok and the faithful arrogant have been giving away their worldly possessions in the USA, all in the belief that they are going to be beamed up to heaven in the rapture any day now.

Funny stuff because every time one of these things comes around it’s related to loose interpretations of the book of revelations, casting barcodes or chip and pin as the mark of the beast, but there’s never any of the wrath of God stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria¹.

You think you’ll never see any proper signs of the end times…

… and then one day your Dad tells you Penn and Teller just became members of The Magic Circle.

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or Repent for the end is nigh”

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D.I.Y. or Make it till you make it

A short time ago I gave a lecture called Things to Make and Do, a title inspired by my childhood love of books and television programs with a similar set of contents, and sometimes that exact name.

Lots of people wanted the notes so I assume it was well liked. Some people even told me they thought it was good enough for a magic circle lecture but honestly as much as I’d like to make it my AIMC exam, I would find lecturing over a live stream like that to be too intimidating.

But I think the reason why people liked it was because I showed them how to make a few home made tricks, and in a world full of products, people are tired of being sold things by supposed teachers. It’s reminiscent of an inspirational quote I van barely remember and am about to butcher: We evolved to create but we’re forced to consume.

This is why in my magical girl post I included a link on how to make gravity defying socks when mentioning the costume.

When did we stop making things?

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Miku Miku Beam
or Fighting Evil By Moonlight

I want to start a new series of articles on this blog for alternative theme personas for magic acts. Partly to move people away from wizard acts, but also as a creative exercise.

The creative part ensures that I won’t devote any more column inches to well trodden ground such as doing mentalism as a Sherlock Holmes character, or pretending the mob broke your thumbs for cheating at the blackjack table in an underground gambling den.

Today’s alternative theme: Magical Girl.

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or Fighting Evil By Moonlight”

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That’s Not a Word
or The Importance of Clarity

What do you mean by “What”?
What do you mean by “Do”?
What do you mean by “You”?
What do you mean by “Mean”?
What do you mean by “by”?

Jordan Peterson is a funny guy if you ignore… Quite a few things actually. He’s got this weird rhetorical device that he uses in interviews whe speaks in complicated academic language to sound like he’s so smart you can’t even understand him. If the interviewer tries to repeat what he said in simpler language for the viewing public, he insists you have not grasped the full meaning of his argument and therefore any response you give is wrong by default. Then however (and this the best part) when faced with a simple question in the most basic language which everyone else watching would fully understand he will come back with “But what do you mean by ‘Do’?”

This post is about the magical writing of Ken Muller.

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or The Importance of Clarity”

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Antibrand
or Leader of the Opposition

In my last post I mostly provided a lot of background information for the real topic I wanted to get into. In the end explaining the situation was a whole post in and of itself, so the real meat will be here. How to break out of the expectations of cultural hegemony.

For those who still don’t agree that this is something worth doing, there’s a blog post which explains the full reasoning far more succinctly than I ever could by girl on the net. It’s called The Facile Debate About Separating Art From Artist and its an SFW post on a very NSFW website. If you don’t want to read some filthy smut, just read that post and then leave the page. If you do want some filthy smut then you’re welcome I guess.

Anyway this isn’t about whether or not you want to burn down the Hogwarts in your mind. This is about how to actually do it.

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or Leader of the Opposition”

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Culture War
or Magicians stop referencing Harry Potter challenge 2025

I need to start compiling a list of magicians doing good things for the art, culture, and diversity of magic. Through the years I’ve mentioned magicians doing amazing stuff in the field and a list of legendary magic heroes would be a great resource.

Today I’m going to plant my flag a little. As you might know, I live in the UK and I’m as queer as a bottle of crisps¹, which is why the recent news coming out of the equalities and human rights commission is so troubling.

Sure, America has a despot in the oval office using a stacked supreme court to dodge legal accountability while he makes unconstitutional attacks on minorities, but at least over there it’s recognised as an authoritarian coup using strongarm tactics to impose a christofacist regime. Here the official voice of equal rights is imposing transphobic laws, the independent press report constant fearmongering about trans interlopers, and the most left wing government we have available are that the press and right wing pressure groups have valid points and thanks the EHRC for providing “clarity” in their rulings.

On top of all this, the richest woman in Britain has vowed to fund push back for any legal case where a trans person has attempted to assert their rights, specifically for the purpose of setting case law to deny those rights more robustly. And she’s our most beloved cultural export, who people hold up as a champion for progressive politics.

📌 But put a pin in that, I’ll get back to her later.

This post is about legendary magician hero, Justin Wilman.

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or Magicians stop referencing Harry Potter challenge 2025″

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Beat The Machine
or ARTIFICIAL IMPLICATIONS

This is a short bonus for my last post, inspired by seeing yet more AI slop used in magic promos. There’s a cartoon style I’ve seen EVERYWHERE which is an instant signal that the picture is AI. If you want to see it, look at Craig Petty’s Magic TV thumbnails. There’s even a special font to look for which most AI uses. It’s as if a single artist was making all the art on the entire INTERNET… It just can’t sign it.

ANYWAY!

Thinking about the nature of all caps three or more beat words, it is a style of writing that AI is poorly suited to.

LLMs can’t even tell you how many Rs are in STRAWBERRY. You think it could ever CAPITALISE SYLLABLE LIMITATIONS?

I once asked an LLM to write only in five letter words and it failed on the first sentence. It couldn’t manage a single PARAGRAPH.

Maybe an LLM could squeeze out a sonnet simply because of the amount of IAMBIC PENTAMETER in its corpus, maybe a haiku at a push. But to maintain a style so downright IRREGULAR for an entire blog post would defeat it in a single stroke.

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What’s Your Damage
or SIMPLICITY

It’s not often I point to writers in other fields for this blog, but I want to steal an idea from one Lu Wilson (who uses any pronoun so I’m going to mix it up).

Lu writes a wiki-blog-garden, which means their posts are hard to sort or read in order. Their site branches by topic and theme, but the posts also cross link, which means the new posts feed is useful but might be the worst way to read the site.

Just today (at the time of writing) she posted about live coding synths in real time to make music much like playing a keyboard. And every so so often she would write a word in UPPERCASE for added EMPHASIS.

Except that this is all a ruse. A con to hide the truth of this format choice. The words chosen are key phrases but they also have one other common trait. They all have three or more SYLLABLES.

Continue reading “What’s Your Damage
or SIMPLICITY”