How We Got Here
or Entry Points and Exit Wounds

This is going to pull together a number of threads, so forgive me if it takes a while to make any kind of definitive statement.

In my last post I mentioned the concept of magician’s ego, the fact that when presenting what appears to be a strange or coincidental occurrence, the natural urge is to fabricate some narrative in which there is zero doubt that the magician is the root cause, even if the power of the effect is in the appearance that the magician does nothing.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Continue reading “How We Got Here
or Entry Points and Exit Wounds”

F.E.G.
or If Tricks Could Kill

Back in October 2023 I posted a two part intro to what would have been my next post, a video about a trick I had been working on. However upon performing this trick in a magic competition it did not have the impact I had hoped for, a fact that was mostly down to my volunteer selection.

He didn’t get into it, so it didn’t land. I have since performed it again in a different competition and while it went much better, I’m now of the opinion that this kind of magic is kind of wasted on an audience of magicians.

Continue reading “F.E.G.
or If Tricks Could Kill”

Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works

Sometimes I read something and wonder if I’m having a brain heammorrage.

It’s like the words in their particular order make so little sense that either I have forgotten how to read or the author of the words is insane, and I am surprisingly not egotistical enough to assume the latter every single time.

Thats the sense I had today when I was told that Dan and Dave, one of many famous sibling groupings known colloquially as the Buck Brothers, were putting all their work in the public domain, a statement backed by a post on their Instagram.

Continue reading “Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works”

Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it

Fay Presto is a scuba diver.

This may come as a surprise to many readers (should they exist) as it’s common knowledge that Fay Presto is a magician, but whereas most magicians work some shitty 9 to 5 to earn the money to buy magic tricks which they perform on the weekends, Fay Presto performs magic around the world to earn money for her scuba diving trips.

She told me once about the odd economics of scuba gear, that almost every piece of scuba equipment from tanks to masks to wetsuits is far cheaper on the internet, but no experienced scuba diver would ever buy things that way. Not because the online products are lower quality or difficult to judge sizes and compatibility or anything like that, but because the one thing you can’t do online is fill up your air tanks.

On a suba diving holiday everyone’s airtanks get re-filled a few times a day, and the only place to do that is at a physical scuba gear suppliers.

However, here’s the rub: there is no money in filling air tanks. If people don’t buy their scuba gear from the physical scuba store where thry dive, the scuba store goes bust, no one can fill up their air tanks, and scuba just kinda… Ends.

Continue reading “Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it”

[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches

This entry is tangentially related to David Regal’s new tarot deck. But not entirely. Perhaps not even legitimately. I currently have a question pending on the Vanishing Inc. website which may prove that my fears are unfounded. This time.

Indeed the last time I was super concerned about a technological innovation it was NFTs and despite my fears only one magician ever released an NFT project to my knowledge, and it was so hilariously bad that he sold none of them and pivoted to passive income training course scams.

But with the launch of Phill Smiths Fusion Mosaic Phenomenon and Marc Kerstein’s Subliminal the dawn of the AI generated magic product has truly begun.

Continue reading “[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches”

I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner

SIn my previous post I talked about The Magic Circle’s rules regarding exposure and teaching magic on public platforms, and I did it on the basis of controlling access to information to only people directly seeking it. And I ended with “Maybe you could even start a Discord”.

Today I want to drill down into that a little more, in terms of one of the things I think is lacking when you teach magic on a public stage like a youtube channel or even a website:

Community

Now you can get your hammer and sickle out.

Continue reading “I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner”

Ban Hammer
or Throwing the baby out with the bath water

I was planning for my next big post to be a video of my latest routine with a further video explaining its origins, similar to the post I made for the tooth fairy act but watching back the performance, I just wasn’t happy with it yet.

Needs longer to cook.

However it got me thinking about video content and specifically about magic youtubers and such, which all led to with this video my friend and long time reader sent me.

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or Throwing the baby out with the bath water”

You’ve Done Enough
or stop trying to make cubes happen

For the longest time, the Rubik’s Cube did not exist. Literally the entire history of the universe until 1974. Then for a considerably shorter period of time, there were no Rubik’s cube magic tricks.
Finally in 2008 Fooler Doolers released the Enchanted Cube, and shortly after in 2013 Takamiz Usui released The Cube, and between them created the entire genre now called Rubik’s cube magic.

This was the beginning of the end.

Continue reading “You’ve Done Enough
or stop trying to make cubes happen”

Trickbait
or Sell the Sizzle not the Sausage

YouTube thumbnails are slowly coalescing to a singular form.

I remember when the thumbnail of a YouTube video was automatically generated from the middle frame of the video itself, which led to a few years where the YouTube videos with the highest production values had a flash frame in the middle of the video of a nicely designed thumbnail image with enticing text and cover art. Now YouTube lets you choose frame from your video or even upload a separate image, which many people do, leading to the rise of misleading thumbnails. These often feature provocative statements, pictures of celebrities, titillating imagery and red circles to highlight nothing in particular.

It has long been known that the eye of a particular demographic drawn to pictures of the unclad female form, and “sex sells” has long been the motto in the marketing department of masculine products.

But magic products… You want to instinctively draw the eye of a magician you need lemons.

Continue reading “Trickbait
or Sell the Sizzle not the Sausage”

Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, there are two kinds of computer hackers.

White hat hackers are tourists, explorers, defenders of digital space. Yes they will use their knowledge of technology to gain access to places they shouldn’t be but they won’t take anything or damage anything and often will tell the organisations after the fact what vulnerabilities they exploited to gain access, so that the systems administrators can improve their security.

Black hat hackers are using similar skills and access to steal confidential data, sabotage the systems they infiltrate and exploit unknown vulnerabilities entire for personal gain.

You know, goodies and baddies.

And I decided a while ago that since magic is just theatre… Why aren’t there more magic baddies?

Continue reading “Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people”