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Giftitude
or Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width

Tis the season, so to speak.

To be honest I don’t really enjoy Christmas, appreciation of this season requires a level of childlike wonder I no longer find easily accessible within the dusty corners of my cynical mind. I tried to hold onto it for as long as I could but ultimately the well just ran dry. Call me Ms Grinch, I guess.

The one thing in my favour however is that I love buying people presents. It’s curious because I don’t really enjoy receiving presents so much anymore, perhaps because my interests have grown so esoteric that I’m remarkably difficult to buy for. I come from a long line of people who are difficult to buy for, and as such I have picked up a few pointers on how to select a gift for a person you barely know.

It’s all about learning to identify Giftitude

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or Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width”
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Noteworthy
or Be Like Bill

By far the best stock line I’ve heard from a professional walk-around magician is a response to offers from spectators who offer to buy her a drink as a sign of appreciation for her work. That line is “I’m afraid the only drink I can accept is one I can fold up into my pocket and take home with me.”

One day I hope that I will be an audience member in a show who makes such an offer, receives this line, and can immediately hand them a Capri Sun.

Of course the line is a request for tips, something which to those of us who work for a fixed wage kind of balk at. Indeed the general assumption of the corporate classes is that anyone who is offering a service must have been offered payment upfront or they wouldn’t be doing it in the first place, as such asking for recompense after the fact seems at best naive and at worse downright cheeky. I did a busking course a few years ago and it really did feel kind of dirty to ask for money after the show, like I’d somehow conned people into watching something they thought was free and then delivered a bill.

I was no better than a hotel minibar.

On an intellectual level, I know this is nonsense, people deserve to be compensated for their labour, and asking at the end allows people to decide the value provided with full experience of the product. There’s just something visceral about it though, a idea that runs so deep in the psyche of the capitalist wage slave mindset that it affects us on an emotional gut level.

The same magician who told me the line about folding up drinks also had some advice for performing bill in lemon, which was to leave returned banknotes as messy as possible. Covered in bits of lemon sticky juices, to make the audience less willing to take them home and more likely to just hand them over.

Sadly I can’t think of a pay to replicate that in a post cash society but as a magical purist, who is in it for the art, we need to think about how we can perform bill in lemon at all. Come on a journey with me.

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or Be Like Bill”
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Slice of Lith
or An Acquired Aesthetic

The year was 2004 and a group of cosmopolitan, metropolitan, Neapolitan (we all liked ice-cream) friends invited me to visit them in London, from whence we travelled to Camden Lock Market and I tried on many cool articles of clothing, none of which would comfortably stretch over my corpulent frame. I did however obtain some jewellery made from old circuit boards, all mounted in fixings that turned my skin green. 3/10, should have gone to Cyberdog.

Cyberdog wasn’t really my aesthetic at the time, but what IS an aesthetic?

Aesthetic is often used as a complicated way of referring to a look or fashion style, such as vapourwave, steampunk, goth, bdsm or the cultural appropriation of the Harajuku fashion scene.

Believe it or not this is a continuation of my series on the future and subversion of coin magic, but I’m coming at it from the other direction so buckle in as I explain a little art history.

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or An Acquired Aesthetic”
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The Piggy Bank
or Tomorrow’s Antiques

Most of the coins we use in magic aren’t really circulating modern currencies. The big two are the American half dollar and the old English penny. I call them the big three because their size is what makes them uniquely suited for coin magic, and the third is fake Chinese currency minted in that exact same size.

Most of the sleights described in the foundational text of coin magic were formulated and refined around the currency in common use at the time of its publication in 1952. Both the old English penny and the American half dollar left common circulation in the 1970s, which is why to get one now you have to buy them from a magic shop. Or do you?

American half dollars, though no longer ordered in bulk for circulation, are still minted for collections. Circulated half dollars are still out there, though far rarer, and while checking my facts on Wikipedia, I discovered that the circulating supply has been topped up in 2021, presumably to counter the reverse quantitative easing of the coins being sent around the world for the purposes of arbitrage through magic shops.

Meanwhile, old English pennies often turn up in antique fairs by the bagful and are in demand for use in vintage coin operated machines. The old English pennies I use (other than the first five I bought for 20p each from a magic shop in London) all come from a vintage arcade in Great Yarmouth where a pound will net you a bag of fifteen. The intention is that you use them to play the old arcade machines on site, thus allowing the owners to recirculate them, but fuck their business model, mommy needs some copper.

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or Tomorrow’s Antiques”
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Cryptonumismatism
or Confounding Sociological Infohazards

Sometimes I have to drop apparent non-sequiturs to prime readers for a topic, and the post about Tenet is one such topic. This is technically part of the series on money but it’s more a kind of primer to a totally non magical subject which doubtless came to some peoples mind’s at the moment I mentioned the yawning abyss of a cashless society. This subject is dangerous to mention online however, and I wanted to explain why that is, in a way that magicians might find helpful.

Tenet is a nice squishy example of what I call a Confounding Sociological Infohazard. Lets break that term down.

An infohazard is a science fiction concept similar to that of harmful sensation, where a sight or sound can somehow permanently harm you; not in the sense that a really bright light can blind you, more like the idea of a work of art so bizarre that can make you go insane, a song so sad it makes you walk into the ocean and drown, or a joke so funny that you instantly laugh yourself to death. An infohazard is like this except that it is a mere idea, knowledge you can’t unlearn, often framed as a fact which upends your entire worldview into a bleak existential dread from which you can never return.

A confounding infohazard is my term for what XKCD calls nerd sniping, the art of posing a question with no obvious answer but which feels like there should be a simple and elegant solution. Upon learning of the question a certain type of person will immediately spiral into a obsessive compulsion to answer it.

A confounding sociological infohazard then is a question which doesn’t affect individuals in this way, but will cause an argument when discussed, descending into visceral hatred and even eugenic ideation for those involved. As you might imagine, the internet is allowing confounding sociological infohazards to spread and mutate at a rate never previously known, as what would have once caused mild cursing across a dinner table for a single evening gets spun out into a global 24/7 screaming match, replete with slurs, factionalism, and maybe even profiteering.

But how does this work? To explain it, I need to give a few examples.

Content warning: This post contain 4 such info hazards, with increasing danger levels, which I am going to hopefully explain in enough detail that you will feel satisfied and not have to discuss them any further… but I cannot guarantee this.

Proceed with caution.

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or Confounding Sociological Infohazards”
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Go hang a salami, Tenet
I’m a lasagna hog

In the pandemic, when everyone was told to stay home when possible and categorically avoid densely populated enclosed spaces, one absolute maniac decided against all odds to throw caution to the wind and release a movie with a theatrical only release, insisting that the only way to properly appreciate it was on the big screen. He asked people to line up and possibly give their lives to keep the magic of cinema (and the studio stranglehold on licensed screenings) alive.

And four months later I brought the Blu-ray because time is an illusion. You’d think he would know that, given that his previous movie Interstellar was about interacting with the past from the distant future (and also something about love and space).

The movie was Tenet and its a great example of how people go wrong in trying to construct a magic trick with a sensible causal premise.

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I’m a lasagna hog“

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Dolla Dolla Bills
or Die for King Money

Can we just take a minute to appreciate the United States of America. I know their government oscillates between capitalistic neoliberals and capitalistic cryptofascists, their healthcare system is designed to funnel money towards corporate health insurance, they have actual unfiltered nazis marching in the streets and bizarre fiscal loopholes allowing billionaires with more wealth than a small country to not only avoid paying tax but actually receive tax rebates courtesy of the regular citizenry… *deep breath* but damn it if their physical currency isn’t just designed from the ground up for magicians.

The dollar bill is worth so little that it’s cheaper to make a cover for an exercise book with actual money than to use that money to buy nice paper for the cover. The one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bill are all the same size and mostly printed in the same colours, made from a soft enough paper to fold easily and hold a nice crease. If you ask the average person on the street for a coin you are all but guaranteed to get a quarter, and there’s a statistically favourable chance that the quarter will have the design used for the majority of the 20th century, that of the eagle.

Admittedly the production of state quarters since 1999 has slightly scuppered that last point but the odds are still heavily in your favour that the person you borrow it from won’t even notice if you switch it for one which does.

God Bless America… and fuck the goddamn Royal Mint.

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or Die for King Money”
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Going Dotty
or What’s Next

So this is the part where I call back to several other posts simultaneously into a crescendo like those parts of a musical where it turns out you can interleave all three of the main leitmotifs into one epic finale song.

This isn’t my last post¹, it just happens that I have now laid enough groundwork to start getting a little more meta.

This post also contains 3 trick reviews, which seems to be what magicians like²

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or What’s Next”

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Thinking Rings
or The Benefits of Hate

In my post about Troublewit I kind of wrote a cheque that I didn’t fully cash.

I said that by recognising and codifying the things you hate about a routine you can methodically attempt to fix those things and produce some brilliant shining original masterwork which has none of the identified problems.

I then listed out the problems of Troublewit and noted that it was unsalvageable garbage (which, don’t get me wrong, it totally is) because fixing those problems would take it so far from it’s origins that it completely morphs into an unrelated allied art or, worse still, gospel magic.

What happened to be benefits of hatred? Did I lie to you?

No. No I did not. I did however decide to split what I wrote in two because it got too damn long. This is the second half of that article, in which Stacy Saves the Linking Rings.

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or The Benefits of Hate”