Mailbag #176

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I don’t think you’ve written anything about Instant Paper to Money 

It’s really smart and hyper visual but even in a pro setting it’s a pretty strange prop.  Let me show you what I can do with my several pieces of perfectly rectangular cut sheets of glossy magazine clippings that are all identical in size and are in my speciality weird wallet.

I bought it without thinking because it is stunning and while the hype has died it was and is still being proclaimed as the new best method and Extreme Burn killer.  However, once I got it I just sat on it because these damn slips of paper are so unusual it’s annoying.  After weeks I finally gave it a go and tried to just get out of my own way and clear my head trash only to have my audience immediately question and ask about the slips of paper that are conveniently perfectly cut and sized to a $20 bill.  Even in a professional gig this feels like an impossible hurdle whether the audience verbalizes it or not.  Maybe I’ll intentionally tear the edges and make them look ragged and less perfect.  In fact maybe that’s what the creator should do, send them slightly oversized so the buyer can tear them up a bit to fit but still be truly torn.

Regardless I’m again left feeling like most people don’t really perform and the marketing engines are stronger than one may assume.

As a fellow Extreme Burn user, where you at on this one?—SK

For a casual performance, Extreme Burn is a much better option. Changing 1s to 100s is more organic and it’s examinable. And you can keep it in your wallet or pocket like a normal human.

That said, this is a pretty trick.

I don’t think ripped edges really solves the problem you’re facing. Now you’re a person carrying around ripped pieces of paper rather than cleanly cut pieces of paper. That doesn’t make you any less weird.

I think the best approach is to address it presentationally. If you’re demonstrating a counterfeiting technique, or a way to hypnotize people to see cut up paper as money, then it makes sense you would have these items with you to demonstrate such a thing. That’s more than enough reasoning in professional performing stiuations. In social situations it could still be seeen as somewhat unusual, but there’s no way around that really.

This video for "Headache" shows up in my feed a lot from Penguin. It's so obviously AI due to the way the camera pans and the creator shows up in different places that it's almost excusable. But the effect and reactions are also included in these seamless extended scenes so it's questionable what is real if anything and what's not. —RD

Yeah, I’m certainly not going to wave the flag that there should be no AI used in magic advertising at all. I can see they were trying to do something interesting with it there. But I can also understand why it would make any ad that uses it feel suspect.

More importantly, if I was marketing magic, I’d want to avoid AI because it has a certain charmless-ness to it. I know very few people who say, “Oh, look at this great AI ad!” But I know tons of people who are actively turned-off by it or find it weirdly unsettling.

What’s interesting is the ubiquity of AI has led to advertising that is technically more professional and polished, but people now associate that AI look with cheapness not professionalism. Like every shitty restaurant I know has advertising that looks like this now.

And while that might have looked fine 10 years ago, now it just looks like they put the least possible effort into it. And it raises the question, “If the food here is good, wouldn’t you want to show us pictures of the actual food?”

I tend to feel the same way about magic advertising. It seems like the biggest selling point should be the demonstration of the routine. When this is chopped up, abbreviated, modified with AI, or not shown altogether, it doesn’t instill great confidence in the routine.

Regarding Headache, I don’t find the AI use egregious. It just doesn’t add anything to the marketing for me personally.

Protection Spell is a good starting point to anyone new to the site. In making my notes for the site, I finally read about this and have shown it to a couple of people.  The cards and pencil are in my wallet and I think this is a pretty good litmus test to see if handling this kind of material is something the performer is comfortable with. Originally, I had tried to think of a basic beginner trick to apply your ideas to and chose 8 card brainwave. This has its own problems if it’s something you carry with you everyday (space, examination, magician-centricity) and Protection Spell just keeps the same essence. Getting to this conclusion was a lesson in how effect has priority over method choice. —CJR

Protection Spell is good for both people new to the site, and audiences new to the style of presentation I write about here.

It’s a small effect (50/50) so you’re not asking them to play along with something too fantastical. And you can gauge their interest as you delve into the presentation, and if they don’t seem engaged, you can jump to the climax fairly quickly. This lets you know that in the future they’re probably not someone who is going to be locked into a long-form, more immersive trick.

There’s a shockingly dull trend that hit the DFB facebook page today and unsurprisingly is very popular there. What do you think? — JC

This feels like one of the less impressive ways to hide a word in an image. And given that’s it’s something AI clearly shits out in 2 seconds, it’s not even that interesting.

If anything, I’d probably go the other way with it: show the written name as a failed prediction and then zoom out to reveal the image. In that case it might be better if the image is made up of a bunch of different names so you can scan over to the next name. “Is it Rihanna? Cardi B? Megan Thee Stallion?” And as you zoom out it’s just a cluster of more and more names, as if you were covering all your bases, until finally the image reveals itself.

But either way, this sort of thing never comes off as much more than a gag to people. There’s no real sense that you “screwed up” and then made things right. There’s nothing particularly magical about it.

It’s the phone version of a corny packet trick.

Dustings #147

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Austin Lineback has been kicked out of the GLOMM.

If only we’d had some clue this guy was an unhinged piece of shit. Oh wait…

This looks like it’s a great book for Marcs.

Yoo-hoo, Jay. Over here!

I think Sankey needs to update his eyeglass prescription. Pretty sure he’s talking to a lamppost here.

Obsession

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Once a month, at least, I'll get a long email from someone asking me what I think of their new presentation.

They'll describe the trick to me and it will have what sounds like a lot of interesting elements—the spectator's aura, numerology, some psychological experiment, and a drawing the magician did as a child. I don't mean it will have one of those elements. It'll have all of them. (Not those specific ones. That's just an example.)

And I'll say something like, "It sounds interesting. But I'm not quite following. What is the trick, exactly?"

And then they'll reiterate what they told me the first time.

And I say, "No, I mean from the spectator's perspective. What did they just see happen?"

And that's where the conversation fizzles out. Because they can't answer it.

Their motivation is good. They had a standard meaningless magic trick and they attempted to give it some more compelling presentational elements. But they ended up with a presentation that wasn't meaningful, so much as it was "complex."

Complex can be fine in a novel or a TV series. But it's not great for a magic trick, which by its nature is already going to have something the spectator can't wrap their head around.

Dai Vernon said a good magic effect should easily be described in one sentence. He was talking about what happens in the trick itself. But I think what's more important is that the premise can be explained in one sentence.

You can have a complicated trick where half a dozen things are happening, but if you have a simple premise—

"The magician stepped into a closet that he said took him 12 minutes into the future. When he stepped back out, he was able to predict everything I would do for the next 12 minutes."

then you're all set.

They may not remember every beat of the trick. But they'll remember the premise.

If you can boil the premise down to a sentence, that's your best hope of having a story that sticks with them.

Storytelling Example: Obsession

During one of my daily updates last month, I recommended seeing the movie Obsession.

Since that recommendation, the movie has gone on to become the highest-grossing original live-action films of the decade. Now, is that because I recommended it? Possibly. We'll never know. But I'm guessing at least a couple hundred million of that was the "Jerx-bump."

One thing that makes the movie so good and watchable is the simplicity of the premise: a guy makes a wish that his longtime crush will fall madly in love with him, only for her devotion to spiral into a possessive nightmare.

That's the extent of the backstory. He wishes on a novelty item (a "One Wish Willow") and it actually works.

I watch a lot of horror movies, and so many are bad because they would over-explain how she came to be obsessed with him.

"Turns out the novelty item was a cursed Egyptian relic. The girl is the reincarnation of the guy's long-lost lover from 3,000 years ago. The wish doesn't just make her love him—it awakens her past-life memories and a parasitic demon that feeds on unrequited love, so now she's obsessed, violently jealous of anyone who ever talked to him, and slowly turning into a monster unless they complete a ritual involving his childhood teddy bear."

This is what I often see magicians doing when they try to come up with a "better" premise—they cram in a bunch of different concepts because they think more equals more interesting. It doesn't.

Hook, Line and Winky

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This is an idea for a trick that would be the strongest, most memorable, most talked about trick you ever perform in your life.

The problem is that almost none of you—possibly no one—will be able to do it.

First, you get Hook by Eric Ross.

Then, you get a prince albert piercing.

Replace the piercing with the hook.

Walk into the room with 5 strings sticking out of your waistline.

An intriguing way to start with an unibelievable ending that will have people contemplating what would have happened if the trick went wrong for the rest of theeir lives.

Okay, since I wrote the draft of this post, I actually got someone to try it out—an old friend I reached out to and asked, “Do you still have that hole in your dick?”

“Which hole?” he replied.

Fortunately it turns out he had both.

I sent him the gimmick and he reworked it to be a single hook and performed it this past weekend. I wasn’t there for it, but t sounds like it went off as spectacularly as I imagined.

Am I going to tell you to pierce your junk just to do this?

Yes. That’s what I’m tellling you.

The Creature in the Corner

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I was staying at a friend's house a couple of weeks ago and I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak. Not wanting to wake her, I tried to navigate the hallway without turning on any lights. As I walked past the open door of a room on my way to the bathroom, I saw some sort of creature in the corner, sitting in the dark.

It was about four feet tall, it looked like it was maybe covered in long hair or something, and it had two glowing eyes staring right at me.

I couldn't make out any other details because the room was illuminated solely by the moonlight coming in through the window, and this creature was off in a corner, away from the main shaft of light.

I paused. I stepped back from the doorway so I couldn't see it (or, rather, so it couldn't see me).

I peered in. It was still looking at me.

I took a step towards it into the darkened room, but it stayed where it was.

I took another step. It didn't flinch.

Another step. Its eyes were frozen.

One final step. And it started feeling considerably less animate than it did on first glance.

I reached out and my hand cast a shadow across one of the glowing eyes.

I touched the cursed monster and realized it was an exercise bike with a jacket hanging off the display screen. The "eyes" were the silver plugs on the ends of the handlebars that curved forward and inward around the jacket.

I let out a deep breath. I was significantly less concerned this thing was going to kill me or steal my soul. (On the negative side, it wasn't going to grant me wishes either.)

Did I ever really think it was some kind of hairy goblin? Probably not. But it was the middle of the night, I was half asleep, in a new place. So while I wasn’t sure it was a creature. I wasn’t sure it wasn’t either. It was just this mysterious thing until every step I took stripped it of its mystery a little. The closer I got, the less dangerous it became, the less alive, the less capable of becoming anything.

A lot of magic gets diminished the same way. Not by being explained, exactly, but by being over-defined.

If, at breakfast, you put a strawberry under a coffee mug, mumble some kind of incantation, lift up the mug, and the strawberry is gone, your friend watching might wonder what they just saw. Especially if you seem to not fully comprehend it yourself. Was it a trick? Was it a glitch in the matrix? Did she really see a strawberry in the first place? What was that incantation about?

Now exchange the coffee mug for a spun copper cup. And the strawberry for a crocheted ball. Add two more cups and more crocheted balls. Exchange the placemat for a close-up mat. Don't simply vanish one thing. Make the balls vanish and appear over and over. Have them penetrate the bottom of a cup. Have them all gather under one cup.

Every additional beat of magic or bit of polish you add to a trick ends up clarifying the category of the experience for people. It tells them, "This is a magic performance. This has been engineered. This has been practiced." In some contexts, that's exactly what you want.

But I think the most affecting amateur magic occurs when they're not sure exactly what they just saw. It must have been a trick, of course… but it had all the rough edges of…something else.

Consider that before adding another phase, a second climax, or using special props that look only like something you'd get at a magic shop.

Are you sure you want to take that step forward if it ends up making things safer, smaller, and more easily understood?

Sometimes the best thing you can do is keep them in the doorway a little longer, let the eyes keep glowing, and let the creature remain a creature.

Mailbag #175

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Do you have any tips for spotting AI? I thought you were reaching with Wednesday's post about AI in that magic demo but when Penguin came out and admitted it I realized I'm maybe falling for a lot of it. Anything in particular I should look out for? —NA

I don't really know what to tell you. To me it was obvious the moment I saw it—the way the facial features moved, the voice, etc.

You know, sometimes someone will say, "This diet soda tastes just like regular soda." And I taste it and it tastes chemically, fizzy, sweet piss. I just think some people's senses are attuned differently.

I pick up on AI content really easily, especially in magic or writing—but that's because I perform daily for people and I write professionally. So that's right in my wheelhouse. On the other hand, if you showed me an AI cricket match I'd probably buy it because I've never really seen a real one.

So it was just an immediate recognition. And then on rewatch, specific things stood out to me as strange.

"There's no way you're going to get this." That seems like an odd thing to say. The card is sitting face-up in front of her. He's turned away. He hasn't indicated he's going to try to "get" anything (that's not even the point of the trick). At this point in the routine he's only had her take a card and sign it.

Notice her eyes and facial expressions. They don't line up with looking at someone's back. That's a face that's making eye contact with someone.

Her reaction here is too intense for the trick.

The trick is a card turning over in the deck. At best this should be a fun surprise moment.

This expression is what's known as the "inner brow raiser." It's indicative of shock, but not "fun magic trick" shock. More of, "I forgot the baby in the hot car" shock. There's concern and fear there.

You can get this reaction with magic, but it typically has to be a very intense or personal effect.

AI often gets the magnitude of things wrong. Here it's like, "Oh you want her shocked? Sure thing." And it gives you a woman who looks like she found her husband in bed with her grandfather.

You wanted this 😮 and you got this 😱.

You see this magnitude issue in AI writing as well. People will ask AI to write an ad for their variation on Twisting the Aces, and it's like:

This isn't just a card trick. It's a weapon. This is a rupture in the fabric of what your spectators believe is possible.

One ace turns. Their pupils dilate. Their breath catches. Time itself seems to fold in on the moment.

It's not magic. It's inevitability.

And magic creators are like, "Hmmm… yeah that sounds about right. Let's go with that."

Everything is maximal, nothing is specific, and the actual mechanics or performance conditions of the trick are nowhere to be found—because the "writer" doesn't know what a real reaction looks like, just what "reaction-adjacent language" sounds like.

The truth is, online magic reactions have always been mostly worthless as far as judging a trick goes. Pull out a camera and start filming people's reactions and you're going to get performative reactions. It's actually less embarrassing to go, "Wow! That's incredible!" than to give a real reaction that's underwhelming.

So my point in calling this out was never to be like, "How dare you tarnish our beloved demo reactions with AI!" It was just to make the point that if there’s going to be any value to online demos we at least have to all understand exactly what we’re dealing with.

Just a quick heads up for a potential topic for your blog: As so many people are raving about Reid Ferry’s ‘Trident’, I’m wondering what you think of it. The prop-less version in particular is pretty obvious, isn’t it? I think it’s generous of Reid to post the uncut version on YouTube, but not only me even after showing this to a laymen, they immediately knew what was going on... However, if there would be a way to improve it, it would probably fit to the carefree approach.—SG

I think you should offer a service where you offer a “stamp of approval” for tricks before they come out. I’m tempted to by the new Trident trick but it’s SUCH an investment. And the endorsements just sound like the standard mutual cocksucking of all magic endorsements. I feel like you’re in a good position to confirm if a trick has merit because you’re known in the community but you aren’t ever marketing yourself or wanting people to like you, so you don’t have the “let’s scratch each others backs” thing going on. Think about it. —DA

What the fuck? I want people to like me! Do I come off that misanthropic? Well, to be fair, I don’t particularly care if other magicians like me. So I see your point.

I’ve actually offered a similar service in the past to people who are releasing effects. I don’t think anyone ever took me up on it.

As far a Trident goes, I found the propless version (shown here—five minutes in) pretty obvious. And that’s despite the fact that the demo is edited to hide the process somewhat. But what did you expect? Any truly propless “any word” revelation has to be obvious almost by definition.

I think the version with a business card is stronger (shown here) But if the method I’ve been told for this is accurate, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people when they get this.

That said, there may be so much more to this than I understand and it may actually be great. But from what I’ve seen and heard, I’m skeptical.

I wanted to share one of my favorite hooks. I usually use it when I know I'll be spending my time with some of my friends that I see often (especially if I know that we will spend some time scrolling away and showing each other funny videos and whatnot). It's basically having a bunch of normal interesting posts saved on Instagram that make for an interesting magic hook... 

Also, by having the videos on the saved page on Instagram, you can showcase the video as if you had just stumbled across it while scrolling with a few taps on the video (going down with a few upward swipes after clicking on the saved video, then swiping downward as u look at the reels yourself with the audio on). I find that feeling of spontaneity adds to the fun of the experience for smaller effects compared to "look at this interesting video I saw last week" even though I still love that line if the presentation makes sense for me to use it. —KA

Yeah, this is a goood idea. That style of interaction: “Let’s hang out and look at stuff on our phone and show each other anything interesting we find” is so common and natural these days that using that as an “in” to an effect makes a lot of sense.

I’ll try to remember to mention any good posts that I come across for this purpose. Perhaps it’s time to turn this blog into a similar Instagram.

Until then, you’ll have to find your own useful posts. Which sadly means branching out from the bear-focused balloon fetish content you usually peruse on Instagram.



Penguin Responds

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In regards to Wednesday’s post about my suspicions of the use of AI in the spectator’s reaction to the effect, What the Flip? Acar Altinsel, the owner of Penguin Magic writes:

Thanks for your thoughtful blog post. It was actually more helpful than you may realize.

I hate to admit, I didn't realize the trailer had AI in it. So when you posted about it, we had a meeting and immediately took down that video and ripped the AI stuff out, and put up a new cut.

I'll write a newsletter about this topic at some point, but I feel very strongly that we definitely *do not* want AI to help reactions OR effects.    There was a trailer that was submitted to us a year ago that used an AI reaction and it triggered me to say very clearly to our team that people won't trust us if they think we do this. Since then, until "What the Flip", as far as I know we haven't done this.

And *because* I've been very clear to our team about that, I kind of assumed our videos didn't have it, so it was really disappointing to find out some had made it into our new video.  Thank you for pointing it out in a respectful way.

We work with a lot of editors, which makes it difficult to police especially as AI gets better, but we added a new requirement that editors we work with give a complete list of *any* AI that was used to help work get done no matter how, to hopefully prevent this kind of thing again.

Anyway, just to be clear, I hate the idea of AI being used to enhance effects or reactions, and frankly find it creepy in general, and I'll always appreciate another set of eyes helping us catch it. You helped us quite a bit today. —AA

Now, you may be saying, "That sounds good, but he's only saying it because they got caught."

That's not the impression that I get. I take him at his word. More importantly, I take him at his actions. They re-cut the trailer, pulling out the AI content. And he okayed me posting this email that publicly states they're not going to use AI to enhance effects or reactions in future demos.

That's good enough for me.

Speaking of me and my incredible AI-dar and ability to spot digital manipulation, I don't want this site to become just me calling people out, but I have to be honest… I don't think this is Craig's real physique.