Category: Magic

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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”

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The Work is not The Work
or The Curse of Technology has Doomed us All

I went to a lecture recently which simultaneously blew my mind and made me very sad.

The lecture was by Magical Katrina, who you may know as the sexy magician from the Chappel Roan Red Wine Supernova music video.

But the lecture wasn’t about music videos or lesbianism analogies. It was about… search engine optimisation and automated ephemera generation.

But before I explain what those are I need to back up a little to tell you about my local magic club.

Continue reading “The Work is not The Work
or The Curse of Technology has Doomed us All”

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Lady Spade
or She Lives In His Throat

I try to keep my feelers out on the world of the arts¹.

I follow a fair number of comedians, illustrators, poets, writers, and musicians on social media to keep myself up to date with whats going on at the leading edge of the creative world. I’m also in a group called Queer Creatives who meet online every fortnight to learn about aspects of queer media and the arts².

I’m mentioning all those facts upfront as an explainer for how I came across this story of a performance which initially I thought would be great inspiration for a magic act and in hindsight may have simply been a magic act.

The person who posted this gave me persmission to talk about this on the condition that I didn’t link back to them or reveal their identity³.

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or She Lives In His Throat”

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Crowd Control
or The act that writes itself every night

Years ago I went on a course run by Wayne Goodman on how to work a restaurant residency, and the latter half of this was actually working a restaurant, and trying to put us in the kind of situations that may arise. For example he would tell us to work a table which, unbeknownst to us, he had visited a few minutes prior and told them to refuse a performance.

I never had to face this particular fate as the table he told to reject me was so keen to see me perform that they ignored him and eagerly asked me to continue.

One challenge he set however was to approach a table and not perform a single trick until he gave us a signal. In short, we had to use the time to build rapport. We all just used the opportunity to make small talk, explain that we are magicians, just sweat it out until we could finally do the one thing which we thought gave us value as human beings.

But it needn’t have been that way.

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or The act that writes itself every night”

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Do It Yourself
or Sloppy Seconds

On October 15 2015 I attended a one day conventionette called Lost Patrons of the Mother Black Cap. It was hosted by Dave Forrest’s Full52, and was honestly the best magic event I’ve ever been to.

During that convention I saw Dave Forrest perform one of his signature effects REM. In REM a bunch of decisions are made by a spectator leaving an arrangment of items on the table, which is then revealed to match a photograph. When you buy the trick, you get a method and a photograph.

But when Dave Forrest performed it at the Lost Patrons of the Mother Black Cap, he had one extra prop which you don’t get with the effect as sold. That prop was a 2 foot by 3 foot painting of himself with the props arranged in front of him.

It was, after all, his signature effect and so while all the hobbyists bought it as trick number 237 to half heartedly perform in front of bored colleagues, Dave was closing his cabaret shows with it, and the painting was something so permanent, so hard to fake, that it left no doubt in the minds of his spectators that this prediction was as good as set in stone.

But now… I’m seeing a lot of these…

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or Sloppy Seconds”

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Angels and Demons
or The Ballad of Tyler and Nikola

I feel like I need to start this post with a disclaimer that I have met Nikola Arkane multiple times, got on just fine with her and while I don’t know her well enough to arrogantly describe her as a friend, she is an acquaintance that I have almost entirely positive feelings towards.

Which is why when I needed one, she made a perfect nemesis.

Much like my earlier post on hatred as a motivating factor, I feel like recasting a person whose success you are envious of as a villain in your head allows a much stronger drive to defeat and surpass them than any kind of aspirational idolisation might offer. It didn’t really work out¹ so I am currently nemesisless, but in the peak of her villain era there was one thing she did about 5 years ago that I really didn’t agree with, and I want to contrast and compare it to something which is happening right now, as a kind of learning exercise.

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or The Ballad of Tyler and Nikola”

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Outies
or The Severed Floor

It was pointed out to me that the effect presented in my previous post bore a striking resemblence to an effect from The Jerx.

I mean the fact that the effect is Jerx inspired should be obvious by the fact that the password for Nulanima is Jerxian but bizarrely I was actually thinking of a totally different Jerx routine at the time of writing as well as two non Jerx effects.

The differences are so important I think it’s worth revisiting briefly.

Continue reading “Outies
or The Severed Floor”