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.

Continue reading “Culture War
or Magicians stop referencing Harry Potter challenge 2025″

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.

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”