Calen Morelli - 365 Days of Magic

In the history of magic on the internet, there have been three transcendent artistic achievements. The first was the Magic Circle Jerk blog, the third is this blog, and in between was Calen Morelli's 365 Days of Magic. This was a project where Calen would create a new magic trick every day for a year and put it up on youtube. And I mean create, as in new tricks and new methods. Other people have tried similar thing, but were just performing a different trick each day. Which is fine and all, but not quite as interesting to me. The magician in me would rather see half-assed new stuff, rather than a perfected old routine. 

Calen only made it half the year into his project before he had to give it up. That may seem like a failure, but why did he have to give it up? Well, because he had to move to Vegas because he was hired to work for David Copperfield. So it's kind of hard to see that as a failure. That would be like if you had pledged to post a video of you ejaculating onto a picture of Anne Hathaway every day for a year. And then six months in you're like, "Sorry guys... I have to stop posting. I won't have time anymore because I'm getting married to Anne Hathaway."

For a couple years now it seemed like the videos Calen created for this project weren't on his youtube channel, but now I see they're back and I encourage you to go check them out if you haven't. You want to look about 5 years back. Starting with the video "Bending the Rules" and ending with "Lose the Sugar." [UPDATE: They're gone again.]

I was inspired a ton by Calen and I ended up adding a number of the effects that got their start during this project to my repertoire. Below are a few of my favorites. These have the added bonus that, if you're interested, you can learn them from Calen's Penguin Live lecture.