Posts

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The Unperformables
or Teaching to the Immovable

While I was writing my previous post I had a brief conversation with friend of the blog Gwen Coney, about aesthetic (one of my favourite topics).

She said:
Yeah there seems to be a thing that some magicians like to do where they will theme or perform a trick a certain way because they like the aesthetic but they don’t really examine deeper on why they’re going for that particular look or whether it fits with how they perform

See also: why everyone who tries to perform a Tobias Dostal trick looks like utter shit

I should clarify just in case that what she means by that last part is not that Tobias Dostal’s tricks look bad, it’s that other people look bad performing them because they rely upon a kind of audience headspace which other performers don’t take the time to cultivate. You cant perform liquidfy with the same flippant attitude as an ambitious card routine.

One second while I plumb the depths of my psyche for an appropriate tangential allegory…

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or Teaching to the Immovable”

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Degenerative AI
or You are not immune to Slopaganda

In 1937, in Munich, Adolf Hitler gave a speech about the arts. Specifically about what he, and the Nazi regime called Degenerate Art. He said that the art world was full of “swindlers” who showed an “absence of adequate manual and artistic skill”¹.

Actually, I’ve gone and done it again. I’ve started this post in the wrong place. It’s too soon for my Hitler hot take.

Lets wind back in to 2013, and the Blackpool magic convention.

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or You are not immune to Slopaganda”

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Cargo Cultists
or Dream Big, Buy Bigger

I recently had an argument in a pub with another magician who had a trick to show me. I won’t go into the trick, what you need to know is that it used a deck of cards with beautifully complex illustrations on them.

Oh wait did I say illustrations? I meant AI generated images. But this post isn’t about that. This post is about one of the things he said in the ensuing argument.

He said that without the AI he never would have been able to create 52 illustrated cards, that the art would have cost too much from a real artist¹, and so this wasn’t hindering any artists careers, since there was no version of this where he hired an artist. He either used AI or the trick never got made.

I said maybe if you can’t do something without the AI, you probably shouldn’t do it at all.

He didn’t like that.

Continue reading “Cargo Cultists
or Dream Big, Buy Bigger”

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Little Boxes
or They want you to be small

The joke goes:
Minimalism is a scam invented by big small to sell more less.

This post is only tangentially related to magic and was inspired by a thought I had while writing the last part of the previous post after watching an advert for a miniature watercolour painting kit. The thought applies to magic but is actually about hobbies in general. Actually, let me show you the advert first

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or They want you to be small”

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Flattening
or Beginners’ Pluck

When I first started learning magic I joined an online forum for magicians (no, not that one ). This was back in the days before Facebook swallowed the entire conversational volume of the internet simply by its membership ubiquity. As I understand it still exists so I could go back in theory but I no longer really want to because back then I gathered a reputation of arrogance. I knew nothing. Nothing. I was an idiot who probably only really understood one trick to any serious degree¹, but I spoke with great authority in many matters of opinion, and used my one year of study to argue with professionals who had many decades of experience.

And now not only do I understand why I did this, but I have earned the fate of having to encounter it from the other side.

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or Beginners’ Pluck”

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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.

Continue reading “Ourobot
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?

Continue reading “D.I.Y. or Make it till you make it”