Category: Uncategorised

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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.”

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Crystal Balls-Up
or I swear I am not psychic

This is a brief addition to say that it is a huge coincidence that on the same day I name-checked Vanishing Inc as the magic shop which would probably outlast others in a crumbling economy, it had a fire take out their warehouse and HQ. Even greater coincidence is that that same post mentioned another magic shop burning down shortly after I visited it.

I swear I am neither psychic, clairvoyant or an arsonist.

I may just be cursed.

Vanishing Inc is still trading and even declared a fire sale on downloads to raise money for rebuilding. Like I said before – use ’em or lose ’em.

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Star Lore
or When Better is Worse

Star Wars was a good movie. Its got space lasers, space wizards, space ships, and funny googas. Over time the funny googas would have diminishing returns but… We’ll get to that.

Star Wars ended fairly satisfyingly with the good guys getting medals from the princess¹ and had two sequels, expanding it into a trilogy with the protagonist’s three father figures all turning up as ghosts at the end to nod and smile by the campfire.

For decades thats all Star Wars was, three movies².

But then in 1999, it was decided that we needed another Star War.

But here’s the thing, the result was considered by many to not be a very good movie, even though it had even more space laser, even more space wizard, even more space ship, and the purest distillation of funny googas.

It was refined Star War. Purified, distilled down to the essence.

And it sucked.

This is an essay about convincers.

Continue reading “Star Lore
or When Better is Worse”

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[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”

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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”

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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.

Continue reading “Ban Hammer
or Throwing the baby out with the bath water”

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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”

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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”

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Wizard Product Revue
or The Alakazam Cinematic Universe

You might not know this but when I was a bit healthier, I went on a wild road trip to visit as many of the magic shops in the UK as possible; brick and mortar shops which advertised themselves as selling magic as a main product. I’m explaining that because some of them were kind of 50/50 magic shop and joke shop, magic shop and costume shop, or in one specific case, magic shop and cheap jewellery (you know who you are).
As these visits went on I took more and more footage at each and started making a documentary series about them, until I got utterly fed up of the whole thing and stopped. Still, I made it to about 32 shops, and put out 11 episodes (plus a few minisodes). I still occasionally get people asking if I’m going to put the rest out.
I got backstage access to quite a few places, including the set of the World Magic Shop Wizard Product Review during their live studio audience years.

And recently, while archiving a few Wizard FX DVDs, I put together something that isn’t often talked about.

Continue reading “Wizard Product Revue
or The Alakazam Cinematic Universe”

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The Time Machine
or How Long Has This Been Going On

I know a bunch of my recent posts have been about that competition, and I promise this is the last one, but what you need to remember is that I don’t really do much because of the state of my physical health. Annual magic club competitions with 6 amateur contestants are basically all I have. That and this here website.

In the scope of my life, The Pentacle Club is Hollywood, the close-up competition is The Oscars and this blog is Variety magazine.

Which means this article youre reading right now, as far as I’m concerned, is the scandal of the century. Maybe your club has suffered the same issue and you didn’t even know. I guess you’d better keep reading…

Continue reading “The Time Machine
or How Long Has This Been Going On”