Category: Personal

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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”

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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.

Continue reading “Culture War
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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Coinkidink
or Everything’s Connected

I realised after posting it that my diagram of the Trapezoid of Professionalism might have baffled a few people, and honestly I fear the explanation may baffle some of those people even more but I think it’s important to explain none the less.

The Connection between Paul Allen and Jon Allen is pretty obvious, they share a last name and a predilection for perfection, but other than the fact that Jonny Paul has both of their names in his name, there’s no other connection to either of them, nor is he really a counterpoint to any of their common aspects.

In fact, before seeing him by chance on a random episode of The Paul Daniels Magic Show, I had never even heard of Jonny Paul, so the fact that he entered my consciousness on the same night as the Jon Allen lecture is apparently pure coincidence.

But there is something bigger going on that I didn’t really want to get into in that post, and that bigger thing is this:

Coincidences are actual magic.

Continue reading “Coinkidink
or Everything’s Connected”

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Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here

This post sat in my drafts for a year, because I needed to work through some thoughts, which I did in these three posts.

A number of people have brought the following recent article to my attention:

Magicians Less Prone To Mental Disorders Than Other Artists

Given that the Magic Circle has a whole mental health programme to look after its members mental health I can’t help but feel that suggesting magic is a ticket to good mental health might be papering over some actual problems, but that’s not what this is really about.

Because everyone knows to be an artist you have to be nuts, right? You have to be so tortured by the delusional visions visiting you at night that the only respite is to capture them on canvas or in writing. The music of the damned plays in your head until you can share it with other people to alleviate the burden of being alone with forbidden knowledge.

Right? That’s what we all know about being creative, its a curse.

Right?

Continue reading “Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here”

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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”

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Blow Back
or A Funny Story About Tachycardia

I have a heart condition. I mentioned it ages ago. This week I went in to hospital to have an operation to make it not as bad. Not fix it, that would be a much bigger operation, but make it not as bad.

However, before having this procedure I had to spend 5 days off the drugs that prevent me from heading sudden unexpected tachycardias.

Guess what happened?

So when I was in tachycardia, the paramedic said he wanted to try me with a special technique for stopping it. Apparently if you sit up and blow into a syringe as hard as you can for as long as you can and then immediately fall back into lying down, it can stop tachycardia.

He tried it with a small syringe and it filled up without a problem, having no effect, at which point he said “When we get in the ambulance I’ll give you the big syringe, no one can blow that all the way.”

Readers, I filled the syringe.

“Jesus,” he said, “You must have amazing lungs. No one has ever done that. This isn’t going to work.”

In my stupor of low oxygen saturation well I could say was, “I make balloon animals.”