Category: Personal

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Sour Lemons
or Pull Back and Reveal

I am a bad loser. A terrible loser, like absolutely dogshit at handling competitive failure. I’ve had post-competition meltdowns that made a magic club briefly decide to stop holding competitions.

I am also a bad winner. Once I was so chuffed to win one award at a magic club that I carried the trophy with me at the next competition and used it as a prop in my act. These are trophies which you get your name engraved on and give back. Giving it back was hard. So hard that when I next won one of these and went to get it engraved, I simultaneously bought a miniature copy of it to keep.

I’m a fucking freak in any kind of competitive situation. It’s a miracle I’m allowed to compete in these things at all.

And what makes it worse is when I put in a lot of effort. Like… 7 years of effort, to make an act as original as possible, and lose to slightly altered commercially sold routine.
Continue reading “Sour Lemons
or Pull Back and Reveal”

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The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac

A rarity for you all today. not only am I clearing a backlog of old topics by posting 3 times in one day, this post has TWO embedded videos featuring yours truly.

At the start of May I used a new routine I’d been working on to enter my local magic club‘s closeup competition. Within this post you will find a recording of my act AND a separate video giving details of my creative process in coming up with it.

Later today I will post some sour grapes about coming second masquerading as a treatise on creativity.
Continue reading “The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac”

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The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Over time, I have accumulated a lot of DVDs containing magic instructional videos. So many that I have now reached the point where I only have shelf space for half of them, and most of that shelf space is out of reach. A while ago I started to keep my DVDs instead in plastic sleeves inside a large ring binder, with the case inserts kept in regular A4 sleeves alongside them. I used to have a mere 40 or so DVDs in this type of storage but after a recent concerted effort I have now got two 65mm ring binders, each with 20 pages of double sided 2 pocket dvd sleeves. For those unwilling to do the maths, that’s 160 DVDs, and it is still not my entire collection.

But this time around I did something else alongside the action of putting DVDs into binder sleeves and collecting a huge box of empty black keep cases. I also digitised the video onto a big hard drive.

And I wish I’d done it earlier
Continue reading “The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”

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Returning from Hiatus
or Did I leave the oven on?

It’s been a while since I posted here. You may have thought I was dead, a few times I thought I wasn’t far off, but I made it through in the end.

I’ve been through some personal changes, we’ve all been through a global coronavirus epidemic, and for a while keeping a magic blog seemed a little pointless in the grand scheme of things.

But now I’m vaccinated¹ and things are beginning to tend towards normality I’ve once again learned an important lesson: pointless bullshit is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Continue reading “Returning from Hiatus
or Did I leave the oven on?”

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Taking a Step Back

So you might have come here looking for a magician (and you found one) but if you were looking to hire a magician, I’m not the one.

For the last couple of years I’ve been having trouble with my health which has put me on indefinite sick leave from work, and whilst I can still perform like I used to I require a kind of entourage with the knowledge to assist should things go sideways for me. This has made doing paid gigs a pretty much impossible feat but I can still perform with the clubs I’m in, since I’ll have a number of friends backstage to keep an eye on me, and occasionally I join in on the Bifrost Cabaret at Nineworlds, again because they have a super attentive backstage crew.

One day it might be nice to host my own show, since I could bring a crew with me in case it all goes pear shaped, but that’s a task for the future.

For now this blog is here to share my thoughts on various magical matters, and the world in general. maybe one day I’ll even have tricks to release. Who knows?