Magic Simp

It is becoming more and more socially acceptable for men to wear nail polish. Let’s use this for magic.

Test your creativity by coming up with some routines that involve nail polish, then score your self with the following rubric.

You recieve:

• 0 points for forcing a card and revealing it on your nails.
• 1 point for color changing nails.
• 2 points for anything else.

I’ll be honest the only non-basic idea that I have is some sort of extension to Zapped.

Magic revealers, what’s with the masks? Just stop.

Just have a anonymous magic blog like regular people.

There are a lot of amateur magicians posting their magic on youtube. I’m totally fine with this, even the terrible ones that flash their moves.

What I really hate is the people that post comments like “Great trick almost didn’t catch the double lift there.” Seriously no one’s impressed if you catch someone else’s moves. There’s no need to signal you know how to do magic too.

Also unsolicited feedback needs to stop. It’s bad manners to give unsolicited feedback in the art community and magicians need to adopt this policy too.

All bicycle packs come in the same order. From the top, you get your two advertising cards, Ace to King of Hearts, Ace to King of Clubs, King to Ace of Diamonds, King to Ace of Spades, and finally the small joker followed by the big joker. Magicians (and no one else) call this new deck order.

Not all decks, however, are arranged in this order. The first trick printed in Card Mastery by Michael Macdougall, first published in 1944, requires all the values in each suits to be lined up in sequence. He also noted that some decks could be in a different order and the magician may be required to count off the cards to create the proper set up.

Last week I posted about a great magical scene in the latest Daredevil tv series. I recently watched the finale and it was pretty bad. Not so bad that it discredits the previous article but pretty bad.

The plot point about the Red Hook area being a “free state” and not technically a part of America is sooooo silly. Like seriously. There’s no way that America would be ok with a city of criminals at the edge of NYC. It’s also completely out of character that Matt wouldn’t immediately go through all of Foggy’s files after the murder.

The latest season of Daredevil is pretty good and has a great magic moment. I’m not sure if this season counts as the fourth season of the Daredevil series or if it is its own thing that just happens to be continuing the previous story. The scene I’ll be discussing takes place in the third episode. Matt’s team needs to bring a witness to the courthouse. The opposing team is trying to prevent this at all costs.

Zener cards were designed to be used in scientific experiments to attempt to prove the existence of ESP. In the initial experiments, subjects were able to correctly identify the hidden card at rates greater than expected by chance, but further analysis have revealed many possible ways that information could have been exposed such as body language or simply imperfections on the backs of the cards.

I’m much more interested in the ways that people can surreptitiously pass information. This is the main presentation I use for an ESP matching routine. I frame the effect as trying to pass information to and from the volunteer without letting the rest of audience know. It’s fun for everyone watching the volunteer make funny faces rather than the standard routine where the volunteer tries to avoid getting their mind read.

I’ve been practicing my tabled faro recently. I don’t have any routines in any of my shows that require it so this is just for fun. I realized I’ve been doing it “wrong” by basically treating it as a regular faro but sideways on the table instead of keeping the top cards separate.

This post is a follow up to this previous article.

Both David from Unbiased Magic Reviews and Lloyd Barnes have deleted their videos around this drama. Looks like David and Craig Petty have also found some common ground and are on ok terms? A bunch of parasocializers are probably going to be upset they have to find some other hobbies. Hopefully this peace will last.

I definitely still think exposure based reviews will continue to pop up in the future if magic contiues to grow in popularity. I’m not sure how much people can do to prevent it. David attempted to restrict the sale of his product and Lloyd still managed to acquire a copy of it. Even if you don’t sell your magic other people can still get ahold of it. Kellar paid a small fortune for a copy of Buatier’s vanishing birdcage (though he did it to perform, not expose) because to him the financial gain was worth it to him.

When buying a safe, you might notice that manufacturers never make any guarantees that the safes are unbreakable. There is an understanding that given enough time and sufficent tools, all safes can be defeated. Instead companies offer estimates on how long it will take to be cracked.

“Examinable” and “unexaminable” are implied to be disjoint categories but there is in fact a continuum of examinability. The term “fully examinable” was invented to imply that the gimmicks are so good that no spectator would ever be able to figure out the secret. I’ve never really liked the phrase “fully examinable” because I think a sufficently motivated attacker with the right tools will be able to uncover the gimmicks, but I might just be being pedantic.