Posts

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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.

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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.

Continue reading “Kayfabe Collapse
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.

Continue reading “Antibrand
or Leader of the Opposition”