Tag: Consumerism

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Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works

Sometimes I read something and wonder if I’m having a brain heammorrage.

It’s like the words in their particular order make so little sense that either I have forgotten how to read or the author of the words is insane, and I am surprisingly not egotistical enough to assume the latter every single time.

Thats the sense I had today when I was told that Dan and Dave, one of many famous sibling groupings known colloquially as the Buck Brothers, were putting all their work in the public domain, a statement backed by a post on their Instagram.

Continue reading “Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works”

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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.

Continue reading “Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it”

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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.

Continue reading “[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches”

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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.

Continue reading “Ban Hammer
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.

Continue reading “Trickbait
or Sell the Sizzle not the Sausage”

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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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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”

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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”

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The Existentially Terrifying Scale of the Global Supply Chain
or Mamma’s Got a Brand New Bag

I think about plastic a lot.

As you may know from my last post, I have a 3D printer. This troubles me sometimes in an ecological sense, because even though the PLA¹ filament I use is bioplastic, realistically it is neither recyclable or biodegradable, so the wastage and sprews and support material is going to landfill, where the best case scenario is that it will remain there for a hundred thousand years, and the worst case is that it somehow ends up in the food chain.

Did you know there are now tiny particles of plastic amongst the sands of the furthest uninhabited reaches of the Sahara desert, as well as flowing through the bloodstream of every living human being.

The thought that I was adding to that worried me… And then I needed a bag.

Continue reading “The Existentially Terrifying Scale of the Global Supply Chain
or Mamma’s Got a Brand New Bag”