Magic Simp

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.

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.