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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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Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, there are two kinds of computer hackers.

White hat hackers are tourists, explorers, defenders of digital space. Yes they will use their knowledge of technology to gain access to places they shouldn’t be but they won’t take anything or damage anything and often will tell the organisations after the fact what vulnerabilities they exploited to gain access, so that the systems administrators can improve their security.

Black hat hackers are using similar skills and access to steal confidential data, sabotage the systems they infiltrate and exploit unknown vulnerabilities entire for personal gain.

You know, goodies and baddies.

And I decided a while ago that since magic is just theatre… Why aren’t there more magic baddies?

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or How to lose friends and alienate people”

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Moonshot Magic
or Words that leak from the page

To briefly recap my last post for those of you who found it to hard to read, there are a number of feelings I wish to capture from the past book I read.

Confusing non-linearity aside, the main feeling it left me and other readers with was a lingering sense of interest that continued past the end of the book. I described it before as a madness affecting the author that infected the reader and drove them to pass along. This took on various forms for different people but it’s something which I would love to incorporate into my magic.

I had sort of been working on this already with the idea of souvenir tricks but it’s all coming together in my head now, and I’m going to start by confessing that until a few weeks ago, I didn’t understand the Pothole trick.

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or Words that leak from the page”

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House of Cards
or This Blog is now Ergodic Literature

Occasionally I have cause to comment not upon what’s going on outside the blog but on the blog itself and while usually this means I’m apologising for not updating it in over a year, this time it’s to explain a change you might have noticed in a couple of previous posts.

I temporarily altered my footnote style such that the footnotes were linked using clickable tags, so if you click the number it takes you to the footnote, and clicking the footnotes number takes you back to the text. This was to facilitate a cleaner user experience and following footnotes as the reader progressed through the text. I now have at least 2 readers after all and I have to continually refer to them in order that they keep coming back.

This was quite difficult to do especially as I do almost all of my blogging on my phone and typing html on a touch screen keyboard is an absolute nightmare, and when I finished off my post about hypnotism, faced with the task of adding all these links I decided not to bother. Not because it was too much effort, but because I had read House of Leaves.

Spoilers ahead for House of Leaves I guess, as if most people didn’t know about it entirely from internet videos explaining the entire plot.

Continue reading “House of Cards
or This Blog is now Ergodic Literature”

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The World’s Greatest*** Card Trick
or I can teach you, but I’d have to charge

Normally I don’t try to keep up with current affairs because I like to sit on a topic and let it stew in my brain until it ferments and froths over, generating a stink I can’t contain and have to smear on the internet for everyone to see.

But this… this just… I can’t even.

Right now you can buy the World’s Greatest Card Trick for £435.

Before you go any further, I want you to think: Sky’s the limit, what would be the world’s greatest card trick? The greatest. The absolute best.

Continue reading “The World’s Greatest*** Card Trick
or I can teach you, but I’d have to charge”

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Shut up and dance
or You are feeling very sleepy

It’s difficult writing about magic tricks when you don’t know the method.

You can talk about the theatrics or the presentation or wow factor but the value of a trick issue outside of the performer and their script and style, you really don’t know much about the mechanics. At best, you can try to infer elements about it from the performances to figure out it’s limitations and features.

So I’m going to say right now: I do not know exactly how or why hypnosis works.

But after seeing a number of hypnotists I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, and what’s going on is not a million miles away from the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance”

Continue reading “Shut up and dance
or You are feeling very sleepy”

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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.

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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”

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Get Knotted
or How To Carry A Professor’s Nightmare

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.
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or How To Carry A Professor’s Nightmare”

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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.