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Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it

Fay Presto is a scuba diver.

This may come as a surprise to many readers (should they exist) as it’s common knowledge that Fay Presto is a magician, but whereas most magicians work some shitty 9 to 5 to earn the money to buy magic tricks which they perform on the weekends, Fay Presto performs magic around the world to earn money for her scuba diving trips.

She told me once about the odd economics of scuba gear, that almost every piece of scuba equipment from tanks to masks to wetsuits is far cheaper on the internet, but no experienced scuba diver would ever buy things that way. Not because the online products are lower quality or difficult to judge sizes and compatibility or anything like that, but because the one thing you can’t do online is fill up your air tanks.

On a suba diving holiday everyone’s airtanks get re-filled a few times a day, and the only place to do that is at a physical scuba gear suppliers.

However, here’s the rub: there is no money in filling air tanks. If people don’t buy their scuba gear from the physical scuba store where thry dive, the scuba store goes bust, no one can fill up their air tanks, and scuba just kinda… Ends.

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or Use it or Lose it”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”