Magic Simp

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.

Last week I discussed the probabilities of three effects: ACAAN, Triumph, and sympathetic Rubik’s cube. The Out of this World effect slipped my mind last week so I’ll mention it today.

We’ll use magicpedia for the definition of the effect.

A spectator separates a deck of cards into reds and blacks without looking at the faces of the cards.

Unlike facing, card color is not independent. There are only 52 cards in a deck so if you know the color of the first 51, you can determine the color of the last card with total accuracy.

The ACAAN effect has a \(\frac{1}{52}\) chance of happening by coincidence. Some magicians try to hype up the effect by emphasizing the fact that there are \(52\) possible cards and \(52\) possible positions and imply the probability is \(\frac{1}{52} \cdot \frac{1}{52} = \frac{1}{2704}\) but this isn’t correct.

To see why, let’s start by considering randomly chosen card \(C\) and randomly chosen position \(i\). Assuming a full, standard deck and valid card and index choices, the chance of card \(C\) being somewhere in the deck is exactly \(1\). The card must be at one of the 52 locations. That is

Art build on history, society and technology. The Surrealism art movement started about a century ago. People were inspired by Freud’s study of the mind and the desire for freedom in the post WWI society to explore and let loose their subconscious.

Whereas the dreamlike nature of surrealist art is a product of the artist’s attempts to tap into the unconscious mind, it is a necessity in magic. Magical is an inherently surreal art form. A bunch of procedure that may not quite make sense or have any apparent purpose happens and then a surprising conclusion presents itself. Endut. Hoch hech.

FISM is introducing a new category for online magic. (There’s also one for street magic which is more traditional and less contentious.) Online magic is getting more and more popular and has significantly diverged from other types of magic I think it makes sense for it to be a category. There are some specific implementation details which I think will need to be worked out.

I feel like there should be a distinctinction between “social media magic” and “virtual magic”. I consider the fundamental difference in the two to be the lack of a live audience for social media magic. As such, you have more flexibility to create a magical effect. For example, you don’t have to worry about cleaning up because you can just cut the video. On the other hand, it won’t have the same personal connection of a virtual or in-person show. I’m guessing that the category is meant for “social media magic”.

Real magic doesn’t exist. Therefore, every magical effect has a flaw. A common argument people make when they want to denigrate an effect is to focus soley on the flaw.

Discussing the method to a trick isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it is necessary to understand how practical the trick is and whether it fits in the environment you’re working in.

The issue is when people use the existence of the flaw as a thought terminating cliche. An example argument tends to go like “This trick uses a gimmicked device. The gimmick is obvious. Therefore this is a bad trick.”

Conjuring Archive is a great website that lists different variations of magic tricks and what books you can find them in. It’s really useful for finding ideas on how to modify magic to fit your style. I especially love the “effects that are simply too hard to explain” category because of how Denis Behr’s comments describe the some effects. One of the best things about reading old magic books is finding moments when the author injects some personality inside an otherwise purely technical description of a trick.