Tag: Showbiz

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Cargo Cultists
or Dream Big, Buy Bigger

I recently had an argument in a pub with another magician who had a trick to show me. I won’t go into the trick, what you need to know is that it used a deck of cards with beautifully complex illustrations on them.

Oh wait did I say illustrations? I meant AI generated images. But this post isn’t about that. This post is about one of the things he said in the ensuing argument.

He said that without the AI he never would have been able to create 52 illustrated cards, that the art would have cost too much from a real artist¹, and so this wasn’t hindering any artists careers, since there was no version of this where he hired an artist. He either used AI or the trick never got made.

I said maybe if you can’t do something without the AI, you probably shouldn’t do it at all.

He didn’t like that.

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or Dream Big, Buy Bigger”

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Flattening
or Beginners’ Pluck

When I first started learning magic I joined an online forum for magicians (no, not that one ). This was back in the days before Facebook swallowed the entire conversational volume of the internet simply by its membership ubiquity. As I understand it still exists so I could go back in theory but I no longer really want to because back then I gathered a reputation of arrogance. I knew nothing. Nothing. I was an idiot who probably only really understood one trick to any serious degree¹, but I spoke with great authority in many matters of opinion, and used my one year of study to argue with professionals who had many decades of experience.

And now not only do I understand why I did this, but I have earned the fate of having to encounter it from the other side.

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or Beginners’ Pluck”

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Telly-portation
or 5000 miles in 50 feet

I always love it when my interests overlap so imagine my joy at seeing Corridor Crew do a VFX examination of a Copperfield Illusion, to show how it was done.

Technically I should be opposed to this kind of exposure but when its a trick from 25 years ago, that was on a TV special, requiring a 2000 era las vegas budget, and will probably never be done again… it’s kind of a methodological cul-de-sac. On top of all that it is also a camera trick, so fuck him.

I don’t want to talk about the method though. I wan’t to talk about the effect.

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or 5000 miles in 50 feet”

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Ourobot
or The snake that eats its tail will starve to death

I didn’t want to be talking about this again but a couple of recent events have really driven home to me some truths about the state of things in magic.

I know roughly when AI was first used to promote a magic trick, essentially as soon as the available models were good enough to get away with it.

I know how deeply ingrained it has become, now on every magic shop storefront, in countless products, and in magicians promotional materials, often to an insane degree.

What I didn’t know was when this would start to be a problem.

Continue reading “Ourobot
or The snake that eats its tail will starve to death”

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Kayfabe Collapse
or Repent for the end is nigh

Did you hear the rapture is happening? Or already happened, I’m not sure, I haven’t been keeping up. Feels like proclamations of the end times are being spread every other weekThis one had a bit more traction because of TikTok and the faithful arrogant have been giving away their worldly possessions in the USA, all in the belief that they are going to be beamed up to heaven in the rapture any day now.

Funny stuff because every time one of these things comes around it’s related to loose interpretations of the book of revelations, casting barcodes or chip and pin as the mark of the beast, but there’s never any of the wrath of God stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria¹.

You think you’ll never see any proper signs of the end times…

… and then one day your Dad tells you Penn and Teller just became members of The Magic Circle.

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or Repent for the end is nigh”

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Antibrand
or Leader of the Opposition

In my last post I mostly provided a lot of background information for the real topic I wanted to get into. In the end explaining the situation was a whole post in and of itself, so the real meat will be here. How to break out of the expectations of cultural hegemony.

For those who still don’t agree that this is something worth doing, there’s a blog post which explains the full reasoning far more succinctly than I ever could by girl on the net. It’s called The Facile Debate About Separating Art From Artist and its an SFW post on a very NSFW website. If you don’t want to read some filthy smut, just read that post and then leave the page. If you do want some filthy smut then you’re welcome I guess.

Anyway this isn’t about whether or not you want to burn down the Hogwarts in your mind. This is about how to actually do it.

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or Leader of the Opposition”

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Culture War
or Magicians stop referencing Harry Potter challenge 2025

I need to start compiling a list of magicians doing good things for the art, culture, and diversity of magic. Through the years I’ve mentioned magicians doing amazing stuff in the field and a list of legendary magic heroes would be a great resource.

Today I’m going to plant my flag a little. As you might know, I live in the UK and I’m as queer as a bottle of crisps¹, which is why the recent news coming out of the equalities and human rights commission is so troubling.

Sure, America has a despot in the oval office using a stacked supreme court to dodge legal accountability while he makes unconstitutional attacks on minorities, but at least over there it’s recognised as an authoritarian coup using strongarm tactics to impose a christofacist regime. Here the official voice of equal rights is imposing transphobic laws, the independent press report constant fearmongering about trans interlopers, and the most left wing government we have available are that the press and right wing pressure groups have valid points and thanks the EHRC for providing “clarity” in their rulings.

On top of all this, the richest woman in Britain has vowed to fund push back for any legal case where a trans person has attempted to assert their rights, specifically for the purpose of setting case law to deny those rights more robustly. And she’s our most beloved cultural export, who people hold up as a champion for progressive politics.

📌 But put a pin in that, I’ll get back to her later.

This post is about legendary magician hero, Justin Wilman.

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or Magicians stop referencing Harry Potter challenge 2025″

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The Work is not The Work
or The Curse of Technology has Doomed us All

I went to a lecture recently which simultaneously blew my mind and made me very sad.

The lecture was by Magical Katrina, who you may know as the sexy magician from the Chappel Roan Red Wine Supernova music video.

But the lecture wasn’t about music videos or lesbianism analogies. It was about… search engine optimisation and automated ephemera generation.

But before I explain what those are I need to back up a little to tell you about my local magic club.

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or The Curse of Technology has Doomed us All”

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Crowd Control
or The act that writes itself every night

Years ago I went on a course run by Wayne Goodman on how to work a restaurant residency, and the latter half of this was actually working a restaurant, and trying to put us in the kind of situations that may arise. For example he would tell us to work a table which, unbeknownst to us, he had visited a few minutes prior and told them to refuse a performance.

I never had to face this particular fate as the table he told to reject me was so keen to see me perform that they ignored him and eagerly asked me to continue.

One challenge he set however was to approach a table and not perform a single trick until he gave us a signal. In short, we had to use the time to build rapport. We all just used the opportunity to make small talk, explain that we are magicians, just sweat it out until we could finally do the one thing which we thought gave us value as human beings.

But it needn’t have been that way.

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or The act that writes itself every night”

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Shabbycadabra
or Let’s See Jon Allen’s Card

A couple of days ago I saw a lecture by Jon Allen. It was pretty good, lots of solid thinking, strong methods, entertaining effects, and everything he said made perfect sense… But when he explained his reasons for doing things the way he did, I continually found myself disagreeing with him.

Normally when I disagree with someone I can put my reasons into words but it wasn’t until much later that I realised what was going on in my head, and when I had this epiphany it suddenly made a lot of other things slot into place in my head, such as why I have so many props I never use.

Jon Allen is too professional.

Continue reading “Shabbycadabra
or Let’s See Jon Allen’s Card”