Magic Simp

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.

3/28 UPDATE: Lloyd Barnes and David have both removed their videos. See this article for details.

Yesterday, Lloyd Barnes released an hour long video on youtube “reviewing” Unbiased ACAAN, an ACAAN effect sold by David from the youtube channel Unbiased Magic Reviews. Theres a long section that describes the math that UMR uses to make the effect happen.

This drama is a continuation of the discourse surrounding the Atomic Deck. Sean Devine, another youtuber, released a scathing review of the Atomic Deck. Sean’s video more or less revealed the basic mechanic behind the product and Craig Petty, the creator of the effect has publicly called him out for doing so.

Magic creators please start all your trailers with a 10 second description of the effect followed immediately by live performance.

The worst thing about shopping for new magic is trying to figure out what an effect actually is.

Die Hard (1988) is a classic action movie. Go watch it if you haven’t already seen it. Otherwise this post won’t make sense. There’s a surprisingly long section on wikipedia discussing the motifs in the movie. It touches on issues of masculinity, corporations, and xenophobia, all of which are too complex to discuss on this blog.

This post will focus on the scene where the protagonist John McClane approaches the main villain Hans Gruber who has taken Holly, McClane’s ex-wife as a hostage. There’s been plenty of action movies which end with the villain taking a person hostage such as True Lies (1994) and Air Force One (1997) but what makes Die Hard worthy of discussion on this blog is how this scene relates to principles of magic.

Craig Petty’s Atomic Deck released recently and there’s lots of hype and complaints. The product is an ACAAN effect. A big negative that people identified with the release is that it requires a phone. The flagship routine requires the spectator to go to a specific website to enter their choice of card and number. The website will then spit out a “percentage” which the magician needs complete the effect.

If you’re willing to require a phone, there’s a much easier way to achieve an ACAAN. Instead of having the website be some strange page that gives statistics about the likelihood of card-number combos, just have it be a random generator site. You can use the excuse that human’s are bad at generating true randomness. The spectator will be invited to go to the site and press a button that randomly chooses a card. The spectator is free to press this button as much as they like. Then once satisfied, the spectator presses a different button to generate a number. The spectator can even generate multiple numbers. The secret of course being that the numbers will exactly match the index in one of the stacks you’ve prepared.