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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.

Continue reading “Go hang a salami, Tenet
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”

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Troublewit’s end
or Feel the Hate

There’s a term used by magicians to refer to other types of performance which blend well with magic. Things like juggling, ventriloquism, quick change, balloon modelling and shadowgraphy. That term is Allied Arts

Often the allied arts will be included in a gala show at larger magic conventions and they are usually the most popular part. This may be because they are a novel diversion in a sea of magic that all starts to look the same after a while. It may also be because the things defined as allied arts are usually, but not always, overt displays of skill.

A colleague of mine once said that the difference between juggling and magic is that you can see the juggler’s hands. To put it a little more directly: jugglers can make something difficult look easy, magicians can make something easy look impossible¹.

But there’s one magic trick that has its method as clearly visible as juggling or balloon modelling, and yet refuses to be demoted to an allied art, because there’s no overt skill, very little actual skill, and only magicians seem to like it.

But not me.

I cannot fucking stand Troublewit.

Continue reading “Troublewit’s end
or Feel the Hate”

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Purse Strings
or Magic on a Shoestring Budget

At the second this goes live I will just have finished giving a sort of impromptu lecture on the Alakazam discord theatre. I did this as a favour to the store, which is nice, and my friend Wayne who does a lot of promo work for them.

I couldn’t possibly have done it to raise my own profile to ahead of my upcoming book release later this year (hopefully).

If rather than coming here from that lecture you’re one of my regular readers (whom frankly I didn’t realise I had) consider this a little free lesson in how I perform off the clock.

The subject of the lecture is my Purse Strings routine and in the off chance that someone enjoyed it but needed to jog their memory about some part of it, I present this article as a companion piece.

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or Magic on a Shoestring Budget”

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Nervous Energy
or Casting Basic Fireballs

I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine recently over messenger and my inability to stay on topic basically fucked it up for her. Probably sounded like nonsense. I say recently… When I wrote this paragraph and some of what’s below it was still 2019 and it felt like the world would soon be my oyster, forgetting that oysters are one of the main vectors for hepatitis and sure enough we would descend into a plague.

So anyway I’m going to have a crack at explaining it now.

This is how to turn problematic nervous energy into useful performing energy, and cast a few fireballs while you’re at it. It’s worth noting that while this works for me, it won’t necessarily work for anyone else. There is always the possibility that I’m just fucked up and accidentally found a glitch in my own emotional hardware.

But hey, maybe you can break your brain too!

Continue reading “Nervous Energy
or Casting Basic Fireballs”