Magic Simp

The only correct way to perform the chop cup is to take it out of your show and not perform it at all.

Seriously just don’t do it.

Paul Daniels has the only good chop cup routine. (Don Alan fans in shambles.) The moment right at 3 minutes in this video is peak entertainment.

I never want to hear the “actually this is the bottom of the cup ahuehuehue” joke ever again. And especially don’t make the spectator guess if the ball is under the cup or not more than once. Everyone understands ur a 1337 m4g1c0r who can make the ball appear and disappear at will. No one cares.

If the risen card from your rising card can’t be removed from the box and handed out, get a better rising card.

The methods for “any named card rises” often require gimmicking the cards in some way. I don’t think the trade off of letting spectators name any card is worth the downside of not being able to have the card be taken from the deck fully. Its possible to just use an index and taking the duplicate card out of the box I suppose but I think the image of the card leaving its container on its own is too good.

A huge winter storm is impacting the midwest and eastern United States. Over ten thousand flights were cancelled. That’s a crazy number to think about. I know of multiple people who had trouble leaving Columbus post Magifest.

Never underestimate the snow. I’ve postponed and cancelled gigs because I wasn’t able to safely attend. People will understand. (There’s also the risk that the event organizer will cancel and we all know that people aren’t always good at communication.)

Magifest is happening this week and I won’t be there and I feel bad. (But not bad enough to buy the $75 livestream.) Two of my favorite magicians growing up, Bill Malone and Jason Latimer will be attending. I have a couple east coast friends who will be attending and if I hear any super spicy drama I’ll post on this blog.

The January date is a bit unpleasant for people who are not professional magicians because offices tend to take time off near the end of December to New Year and be busy at the start of the year. On the other hand, professional magicians are very busy throughout all of December because of all the holiday parties and tend to have a lighter January.

Quinta By Phill Smith is a way of forcing a single item from five. The method allows a spectator to select any number (literally any number) but the problem is that if then number is too big, the procedure takes a long time and gets really, really boring. I had an idea to increase the apparent fairness while breaking up the tedium by repeating the procedure multiple times but each repetition would be limited to 6 via dice roll. I remembered the concept of a “poisoned card” from the 10 card poker deal and conviniently, five perfectly divides ten so combining the two felt logical. The spectator would take the force card first and then alternate with the magician taking other cards until all ten cards were gone.

I don’t understand how people can justify spending so much money on single trick decks. Some cost as much as a full brick of bicycles. I don’t know what conditions people are performing in, but for me, I expect a deck of cards to last exactly 1 performance if the audience touches it in any way. I know I’m exaggerating a bit, but there’s simply too much that can damage cards.

I unfortunately had to get a boring office job last year that has been so exhausting and time consuming that I didn’t really have any time to focus on magic.

I’m resurrecting this blog because I want to write and do magic again.

Good luck to me.

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.