Tag: Showbiz

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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.

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or The Singularity Approaches”

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I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner

SIn my previous post I talked about The Magic Circle’s rules regarding exposure and teaching magic on public platforms, and I did it on the basis of controlling access to information to only people directly seeking it. And I ended with “Maybe you could even start a Discord”.

Today I want to drill down into that a little more, in terms of one of the things I think is lacking when you teach magic on a public stage like a youtube channel or even a website:

Community

Now you can get your hammer and sickle out.

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or Nobody puts baby in the corner”

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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.

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or Throwing the baby out with the bath water”

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Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, there are two kinds of computer hackers.

White hat hackers are tourists, explorers, defenders of digital space. Yes they will use their knowledge of technology to gain access to places they shouldn’t be but they won’t take anything or damage anything and often will tell the organisations after the fact what vulnerabilities they exploited to gain access, so that the systems administrators can improve their security.

Black hat hackers are using similar skills and access to steal confidential data, sabotage the systems they infiltrate and exploit unknown vulnerabilities entire for personal gain.

You know, goodies and baddies.

And I decided a while ago that since magic is just theatre… Why aren’t there more magic baddies?

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or How to lose friends and alienate people”

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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.

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or I can teach you, but I’d have to charge”

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Shut up and dance
or You are feeling very sleepy

It’s difficult writing about magic tricks when you don’t know the method.

You can talk about the theatrics or the presentation or wow factor but the value of a trick issue outside of the performer and their script and style, you really don’t know much about the mechanics. At best, you can try to infer elements about it from the performances to figure out it’s limitations and features.

So I’m going to say right now: I do not know exactly how or why hypnosis works.

But after seeing a number of hypnotists I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, and what’s going on is not a million miles away from the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance”

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or You are feeling very sleepy”

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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.

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or Simon Says”