Tag: magic

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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 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”

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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”

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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”

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Competition Time
or I’ll Be The Judge Of That

As I write this there is a local magic competition tonight, which I would have participated in were it not for my recent hospital stay. It’s a magic competition I have had an interesting history with, as a participant, organiser and rule setter. My disappointment with its fairness in the early days also nearly got me ejected from the club.

The thing about magic competitions is that as a performing art, appreciation of any given entry is entirely subjective. Generally a small number of judges are appointed and the rules set out criteria to them judge the competitors on. These judges will have different ideas of what counts as suitable attire for a performer, what is entertaining, what is mystifying etc.

Skill should be an objective measure, as is seen in gymnastics competitions, except when Simone Biles does a backward double-twisting double tucked salto dismount (thanks Wikipedia), everyone sees it. If a magician does a multiple diagonal palm shift and everyone sees it it wasn’t very good. One year the organisers had to tell the judges that a particular routine was entirely self working, because having seen no sleights at all the judges were under the impression that they were in the presence of an absolute master of prestidigitation. This disclosure got back to the competitor and caused no end of problems as it was seen as the organisers introducing bias to the judges.

Is there a way to fix all this?

Continue reading “Competition Time
or I’ll Be The Judge Of That”

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Oddfellows
or Cumulative Conceits

The thing about diary tricks is that they are predicated on a rather strange idea; that the performer has a pocket diary for the year, in which they have written a playing card for each day. The natural instinct is to give a reason for this. These reasons are often convoluted out of necessity, as there is no normal reason for a person to do such a thing. The only reason to put things in a diary is to act as a reminder, and the only reason you’d have to remember a playing card for each day is for a magic trick.

But… How many other tricks have these conceits?
Continue reading “Oddfellows
or Cumulative Conceits”

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Problems That Solve Each Other
or In and Of Itself

Sometimes I set myself challenges. Occasionally personal, occasionally universal.

Personal ones include:

  • How to perform a borrowed ring routine without a borrowed ring?
  • How to perform a matrix on stage?
  • How to perform a show using nothing but paper?

The universal ones are things like:

  • How to end a show with a suitable climax?
  • How to deal with the awkwardness of audience volunteers?
  • how to give a show more meaning?

    • Often, usually in fact, I dont solve them. I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that no one else has ever encountered the same problems as me, particularly the universal ones, and thus my inability to fix them doesnt trouble me too much. After all, some magicians spend their whole lives trying to solve just one such universal problem in a new way, let alone two or three…

    This post contains enormous spoilers for Derek DelGaudio’s show In And Of Itself.

    I never got a chance to see it live but it has now been made available to stream on Disney+ so no one with an interest in magic has any excuse. One month of Disney+ costs way less than a ticket to the show, plus you can invite all your friends around and watch Thor Ragnarok after.

    So do that, then come back to read me talking about how clever it was.

    Continue reading “Problems That Solve Each Other
    or In and Of Itself”