Posts

Posted on

Linus’ Blanketfort
or Every Day Clutter

A few days ago I mentioned how much I hate the term Organic as it pertains to magic. To re-iterate I get the need for gimmicked props that look natural, like a John Cornelius perfect pen, but somehow nicely engineered objects like that very rarely get categorised as organic. Rather, organic magic tricks are usually pitched at the younger end of the magic market who apparently don’t seem to own anything which costs more than £2.99, so they have to carry gimmicked bottle caps, gum packets and novelty keyrings.

Although the term gets passed around now and again, Organic has been supplanted by the new buzz phrase which if anything I hate even more – though not as much as its three letter acronym

Every Day Carry
Continue reading “Linus’ Blanketfort
or Every Day Clutter”

Posted on

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”

Posted on

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”

Posted on

The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac

A rarity for you all today. not only am I clearing a backlog of old topics by posting 3 times in one day, this post has TWO embedded videos featuring yours truly.

At the start of May I used a new routine I’d been working on to enter my local magic club‘s closeup competition. Within this post you will find a recording of my act AND a separate video giving details of my creative process in coming up with it.

Later today I will post some sour grapes about coming second masquerading as a treatise on creativity.
Continue reading “The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac”

Posted on

The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Over time, I have accumulated a lot of DVDs containing magic instructional videos. So many that I have now reached the point where I only have shelf space for half of them, and most of that shelf space is out of reach. A while ago I started to keep my DVDs instead in plastic sleeves inside a large ring binder, with the case inserts kept in regular A4 sleeves alongside them. I used to have a mere 40 or so DVDs in this type of storage but after a recent concerted effort I have now got two 65mm ring binders, each with 20 pages of double sided 2 pocket dvd sleeves. For those unwilling to do the maths, that’s 160 DVDs, and it is still not my entire collection.

But this time around I did something else alongside the action of putting DVDs into binder sleeves and collecting a huge box of empty black keep cases. I also digitised the video onto a big hard drive.

And I wish I’d done it earlier
Continue reading “The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”

Posted on

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”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “The Phantom, The Witch and The Crushing Weight of the Modern Media Oligopoly
or Simon Says”

Posted on

The Universal Theory of Mind, Perception and Ketchup
or Magic Mustard

I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who may well be the only other human being who reads or is even aware of this blog, when the topic turned to what makes a good magic trick. I’d been rolling around an idea for a while that we should start a podcast, but wasn’t sure what theme to use. My latest idea was “Magic Fixers” where we would take old rubbish tricks we don’t like and see if we could spice them up to make them work in a modern world.
Sort of like a weekly instalment of This post on the Linking Rings

I have some killer ideas for the Hotrod trick.

But the problem was that in discussing the kinds of things we could fix I made a startling revelation about magic, magicians, perception, reality and barbecue sauce.

Or mustard.

Or spaghetti sauce.

But not ketchup.

Continue reading “The Universal Theory of Mind, Perception and Ketchup
or Magic Mustard”