So I mentioned in my previous post that my every day carry used to be a Professors Nightmare and I just wanted to share a couple of tips on how to carry a Professors Nightmare setup in a sensible way, so you can keep all the ropes together and lead straight into a performance, in case you wanted to try this liberating process for yourself.
Continue reading “Get Knotted
or How To Carry A Professor’s Nightmare”
Get Knotted
Censored
or Internet Posts Have Extended Range
Recently I posted about coming second in a local magic competition. Obviously I tried to make it interesting but I thought it was quite fair to the winner. Maybe too fair. Anyway, imagine my surprise when the secretary of the club called this morning to ask me to edit it slightly. Normally I resist this kind of censorship, but I did it as a favour to him, and the winner of the contest, since we are technically all friends.
Anyway, the only change he wanted was to take down the photo, which apparently wasn’t public and remove the name of the winner, as the club secretary is apparently a scared little piss baby who doesn’t want a local competition squabble to follow the winner around in case he gets famous. Reminds me of the time this happened before, about 20 years ago, when I posted a very unflattering review of my ex-girlfriend’s academic rigour. My livejournal apparently followed her around for about a decade hindering her medical career because I had written “if you ever find your self with a doctor called S******* N********* the two words which could save your life are Second Opinion.” Seems her name was so rare and her internet presence was so tiny that my blog questioning her future competence was the first thing that came up in a Google search. The last time she called was after I had shortened her name to a four letter nickname and made the page private, because Google’s cached page was still the #1 result for her full name. Really there wasn’t much I could do at that point, so I just told her to take it up with Google under the “right to be forgotten laws” which had come in recently. Obviously what I wrote about the competition was nothing like “this doctor will kill you” but if he does make it big, the tabloids will mine anything for a scandal. Now I’m not saying I’m holding back specifically so that I can cash in like a parasite when the papers are desperate for dirt on this guy, but if I was going to do that, I’d probably do some acrostic shenanigans to hide his name in this post. Good thing I’m nowhere near smart enough to pull off a thing like that.
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”
Slated
or The Spirit Of The Thing
Spirit slates are a very old magician’s tool. I say that, they’re sort of a mentalists tool really. Or arguably they’re a tool used by fake mediums… which is to say they’re a tool used by mediums. In short it’s a pair of framed blackboards (slates) which are shown blank and placed together, with a piece of chalk is sandwiched in the gap between formed by the depth of the frame itself. These are then held or bound in place and after a little theatrics, the slates are opened up again and the chalk has written the answer to the medium’s or the mentalist’s or the magician’s questions on the boards.
They are a classic of magic. And now they’re back! in pog form!
Continue reading “Slated
or The Spirit Of The Thing”
The Book of Lore
or How I learned to stop worrying and love ChatGPT
Whether or not you realise it, there is a battle going on for the creative hearts and minds of our world. The enemy is everywhere, invisibly leaking into our unconscious psyche. Sure sometimes you can spot it, a non contiguous limbs with too many joints, a fucked up hand where the fingers blur into one, a face that is way too symmetrical until it isn’t. But by carefully pruning these defects the visible results get more and more uncanny.
The efforts of our greatest creative minds are being tipped into a huge digital mincing machine and ground down into sloppy joes, which are then somehow re-crystalized into not just prime wagu beef but whole living cows, making genuine farming unsustainable as a career and banishing agrarian culture to the past.
Sorry this metaphor got away from me somewhat.
I am of course speaking about Dall-E Stable Diffusion, and the whole AI art phenomenon. I can’t draw, so I’m going to leave that whole discussion to people who can, and are having their work and livelihoods stolen outright by this process. I do however like to write, and AI has been after my turf as well, in the form of the General Text Prediction algorithm, the latest incarnation of which is ChatGPT.
And readers I’m sad to say I used it… And I liked it.
Continue reading “The Book of Lore
or How I learned to stop worrying and love ChatGPT”
Pom Pom
or Sticks, chinese and other
Occasionally my friend Eirian and I discuss unsalvageable magic tricks¹. Often such tricks are brought to our attention by an unsuccessful attempt to rehabilitate them, such as this A for effort example by Alakazam
Before continuing, I should probably explain what I mean by unsalvageable.
Continue reading “Pom Pom
or Sticks, chinese and other”
A Shining Light
or A Beacon In These Troubling Times
I saw this a little while ago but for reasons of health, both mental and physical I didn’t actually post it here yet.
This may be the best magic trick I have ever seen.
Continue reading “A Shining Light
or A Beacon In These Troubling Times”
The Phantom, The Witch and The Crushing Weight of the Modern Media Oligopoly
or Simon Says
Where to begin?
In 2019 the winner of Britain’s got talent was a mentalist called X. It was unlike other winners because throughout the competition, the true identity of the magician behind the mask was only revealed at the very end of the show. It was Marc Spellman¹.
What’s interesting about this story is that I heard from a good friend of his that before the final, the makers of the show tried to convince him not to reveal his identity at all. Ultimately the decision was his, clearly, but they really didn’t want him to.
And to understand why, we have to take a little step behind the curtain of television talent shows, into the twisted contracting of television talent shows.
Chain Gang
or How to Sell Nothing
In my last post I mentioned Babylon Band and I dearly wanted to find a video of Jay Sankey performing it. Sadly I couldn’t find one, but while searching i found some drama posts from 3 years ago featuring Daniel Madison doing one of his usual personality cult character pieces and a dark thought entered my consciousness.
At some point, one of the magicians who has made a brand around themselves is going to very openly and loudly shit themselves in public.
Sorry, I said that wrong. What I mean is it’s only a matter of time until one of them mints an NFT.
Competition Time
or I’ll Be The Judge Of That
As I write this there is a local magic competition tonight, which I would have participated in were it not for my recent hospital stay. It’s a magic competition I have had an interesting history with, as a participant, organiser and rule setter. My disappointment with its fairness in the early days also nearly got me ejected from the club.
The thing about magic competitions is that as a performing art, appreciation of any given entry is entirely subjective. Generally a small number of judges are appointed and the rules set out criteria to them judge the competitors on. These judges will have different ideas of what counts as suitable attire for a performer, what is entertaining, what is mystifying etc.
Skill should be an objective measure, as is seen in gymnastics competitions, except when Simone Biles does a backward double-twisting double tucked salto dismount (thanks Wikipedia), everyone sees it. If a magician does a multiple diagonal palm shift and everyone sees it it wasn’t very good. One year the organisers had to tell the judges that a particular routine was entirely self working, because having seen no sleights at all the judges were under the impression that they were in the presence of an absolute master of prestidigitation. This disclosure got back to the competitor and caused no end of problems as it was seen as the organisers introducing bias to the judges.
Is there a way to fix all this?
Continue reading “Competition Time
or I’ll Be The Judge Of That”