A Magician's Guide to Exploiting Failure Pt. 1

While the subject of failure in mentalism may be up for debate, in traditional magic, it’s not the sort of thing anyone really advocates for. It would seem there is little to be gained from failure in magic. If your double lift splits or your coin shell falls off your half-dollar into your spectator’s lap, it’s hard to paint that as being a good thing in any respect.

That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but there are ways to artfully use failure to add another layer to your performances.

Over the next couple of posts I’m going to talk about two of those ways. Today’s post is about…

The Magical Failure

“I’m going to make your card vanish,” you say. You place it on the table and rub it with your hand. You lift your hand and it’s still there. “Shit.”

“Is it smaller,” your friend asks?

“Is it?” you say, and pick it up and hold it next to another card. “Yeah, a little, I guess,” you say, unimpressed. “It’s supposed to completely vanish.”

This trick—which just requires a force, a top change, and a bridge-sized deck of Bicycle cards—is an example of a “Magical Failure.” You’ve failed, but something impossible has still happened.

Another example. In the past I’ve used the technique described in this post to perform this…

I force a four on someone, “With just a flick of my finger I will split the 4 into four aces,” I say. I hit the 4 and it splits into an Ace and a 3. “What the hell,” I say, and pick up the three and sort of scratch at the edge like I’m trying to figure out why it didn’t split into its component aces. “These things are $8 a piece. Stupid Ellusionist garbage. This is the third one that hasn’t worked right.”

Depending on the person you’re performing for, your reaction to the “failure,” and the nature of the trick itself, these Magical Failures may or may not come across as genuine failures. Your audience may be 98% sure that it was just a trick and you planned for that to happen. That’s okay. A 2% doubt is good enough to toy with their minds a little.

The more you use this technique on someone, the more likely they are to see as something you’ve planned. That’s fine. It’s still a fun presentational conceit. And if you’re like me, and you’re stubborn, and you never cop to it, they can never be completely sure.

In my experience, the keys to making a Magical Failure ring true are these:

1. Perform for someone who hasn’t see you do too much magic.

2. Prepare them for a something big, and then do something subtle. Ex: “I’m going to make this dollar bill levitate with my mind.” You strain for a while and eventually the bill shifts a little bit on the table.

3. Keep your reactions contained. Don’t go too big. Express minor frustration/disappointment/confusion. “Damn. Why is this so hard?” And then move on. They may say something like, “Hey, but the bill still moved. That was pretty crazy.” You completely dismiss this. “No… you see, it’s supposed to float up like three feet. The guy who taught me made it look so easy. But he also meditates like six hours a day.”

In the next post I’ll explore another type of failure that I use in my interactions. While Magical Failures give people some magic in the hopes of messing with their minds a little bit, what I’ll discuss on Monday gives people NO magic, but can screw with their head even more intensely.

Testing Failure

In mentalism there is the notion that getting something wrong can strengthen the overall impact of an effect. For example, if you’ve written down the name Jane and I “read your mind” and I’m getting “Jen… or Jan, maybe?” That, perhaps, gives some credence to the notion that I didn’t just read directly what you wrote down on that sheet of paper. If I had, then why would I be struggling? This is, I think, pretty sound reasoning.

Earlier this year we did some testing of this idea by performing a mentalism routine for people and having the performer nail the the thought of word directly or have him be slightly off. Later the effect was rated by the spectators based on impossibility and enjoyment and we got my least favorite sort of result when it comes to testing: there was essentially no difference in the ratings. Now, there are many people who would say that spending money to test magic is already the equivalent of setting cash on fire, but when you don’t get a definitive answer out of it, then it certainly feels like a giant waste of time and effort. (I guess technically we did get an answer, but the answer was “no difference,” so it felt like it wasn’t much of an answer.)

But we also did a smaller test that I do think produced some somewhat interesting results. What we wanted to test was get people’s responses to different types of failure.

Here’s what I mean by “type” of failure…

1. If you’re thinking of Jane and I say Jen, that’s one type of failure.

2. If you’re thinking of Jane and I say Patricia, that’s a very different type of failure.

3. If you’re thinking of Jane and I say, “Sorry, nothing is coming through,” that’s a third type of failure.

Let’s call these The Near Miss, The Total Miss, and The Missed Connection.

Here is what we did. We gathered people (25 in total) in groups of 2-4 to watch a short presentation from three performers. They were informed that they were seeing things in the early stages so there were still some rough edges, but we were just looking for their general feedback.

Each group saw some magic, some mentalism, and a a sleight-of-hand-gambling demonstration—each from a different performer.

The magician always did two coin tricks that worked.

The sleight-of-hand “expert” always did one demonstration that almost worked (he stacked four out of five cards in a royal flush, missing on one).

The mentalist’s performance was the only one that was different from group to group. This was the breakdown:

7 people saw a mind-reading card trick and a successful word reveal

6 people saw a mind-reading card trick, followed by a word reveal that was slightly wrong. (Near Miss)

6 people saw a mind-reading card trick, followed by a word reveal that was way off. (Total Miss)

6 people saw a mind-reading card trick, followed by an attempted word reveal where the mentalist never made a guess because he wasn’t picking up anything. (Missed Connection)

After each “show” there was a 10 minute conversation with the audience, the performers, and one of the people coordinating the testing. The conversation was very general, “What did you like, what didn’t you like. What did you find interesting. Etc.”. We didn’t have a real way to quantify what we were looking for at this point. I just wanted to get a feel for the response.

One thing that was very clear to me was that being wrong—like totally wrong, like saying, “You thought of a hammer,” when they thought of a sandwich—was not a positive in any regard. People were much less inclined to engage with that performer, or talk/ask questions about his performance when there was a total miss.

You might say, “Well, no one ever suggests getting things completely wrong in mentalism.” But that’s not quite true. I’ve seen people encourage performers to take risky guesses in hopes of getting something right. Or they’ll say it doesn’t matter if your psychological force doesn’t hit because being wrong can strengthen the effect. But in both those cases, you can end up being very wrong.

After the testing we did that day, my friend Mark, who was one of the performers, did come up with some data that was measurable from the post-performance conversations we had. He calculated the amount of time that was spent with each group interacting with the mentalist (as opposed to with the gambling expert or the magician) in the conversation after each performance.

The people who saw two successful tricks from the mentalist spent half of the discussion time (50%) talking/interacting with the mentalist.

The people who saw the successful trick and the Total Miss spent 19% of the time discussion time talking to the mentalist.

The people who saw the successful trick and the Near Miss spent 58% of the discussion time talking to the mentalist.

The people who saw the successful trick and the Missed Connection spent 56% of the discussion time talking to the mentalist.

If we extrapolate those numbers out (and I realize that requires a bit of a leap of faith when dealing with just a handful of people in each group) we can perhaps come to this conclusion:

A near miss (or even a failure to connect at all) in mentalism may not make a trick significantly more impressive or entertaining, but it has the potential to make a mentalism effect a little more intriguing. It perhaps gives the audience a little more to think about. There was slightly more conversation with the mentalist when their presentation included this kind of miss.

However a Total Miss tended to shut-down engagement significantly.

Here is my theory as to why…

When we present mind reading, it’s done as a type of communication between two people (generally). How does communication work?

• I send a message and you receive it.

  or

• I send a message but it’s not 100% clear.

  or

• I send a message but it doesn’t come through.

Everyone understands those situations. But what doesn’t happen in communication is: I send a message and you receive something completely different. So, in the example of a psychological force that doesn’t work, where I say you’re thinking of the 7 of Hearts, but you’re actually thinking of the 2 of Clubs, this doesn’t feel like failed communication—because that’s not how communication fails—it just feels like a failed trick or a wrong guess and there’s nothing in those two circumstances that will be perceived as interesting to anyone.

So what do I take from all of this? I would say that my interpretation of this is that in mentalism the occasional failure isn’t necessarily bad, and perhaps is even beneficial, so long as it feels like a genuine failure of communication. So if I’m ever going to script a failure, it would be of the “near miss” kind.

I will try to avoid “total miss” failure altogether. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from it. The nice thing about mentalism is if you see yourself staring down the barrel of a “total miss,” you almost always have an out. You can say, “There’s something wrong. There’s a problem with the signal. Can we try again?” This “missed connection” type of failure doesn’t harm the story you’re telling and may, in fact, be beneficial. (Also, in amateur magic, you have the luxury of suggesting “trying again” an hour or a day or a week later. And creating this narrative that rolls on beyond a two-minute trick is always a positive in my book.)

In an upcoming post (maybe the next one) I want to discuss the use of failure in more traditional types of magic. I think it’s an under-explored idea and more powerful than you might initially imagine.

Mailbag #16

In yesterday’s post you mentioned tricks that don’t have scripted jokes, but are still funny. What are some examples that you could give of that? Or do you have any general tips for being funny in “social magic”? —CC

Sure. But let me clarify what I was saying first. When you see a comedy magician, he is likely doing a standard trick with a bunch of jokes in it. There is nothing funny about cutting and restoring a rope, but it can be a funny routine if you add jokes to it. To do that professionally is one thing, but to do it in a casual situation is kind of awkward (in my opinion).

When I lived in NYC, I would occasionally find myself out at a bar with some local magicians and they’d use canned lines on people. “Do you believe in coincidence? Me too. What a coincidence!” “Clear your mind. That was quick!” “Show the card to your friends. What… I’m not your friend?” I’m probably overly-sensitive to corniness, but from my perspective these lines added nothing to the interaction and just made the performer look lame.

If you want to do a “funny” trick socially, then I think you’re better off doing a trick that has a premise which is funny in some way.

Take a trick like Cryptophasia. The premise is that your spectator is your long-lost twin. There are no jokes in the effect but there is a lot of humor that naturally comes from engaging with the presentation.

I’ll Be My Mirror is another funny premise that doesn’t really have any jokes in it.

I can’t say how well such tricks would play in a professional situation, where people are expecting scripted patter and jokes. But when you’re just hanging out with someone, premise-based humor will feel much more natural. You’re not “cracking jokes.” You don’t have to take on a new personality. You can just insert your normal personality into the weird situation. If you’re naturally funny, that can boost the inherent humor in a funny premise. But even if you’re not, it can be funny how seriously you take it. Think of the Time Traveler’s Toilet. If your attitude is, “Isn’t this funny?” It’s not funny at all. But if you’re very serious about it, and your attitude is, “Isn’t this fascinating?” or, “Isn’t this concerning? A toilet should not do this, right?” Then it can be very funny.

You’re not going to get spikes of concentrated laughter like you would if you were performing in a comedy club. But that’s okay because you’re not performing in a comedy club.

When presenting magic casually, I don’t think you should ever attempt to be funnier or more clever than you are in real life. You want people to feel like they’re having this experience with the you they know. In social magic, I think the goal should be to make everything seem normal, except this one weird thing (the trick). If you start spouting out pre-planned quips then it’s going to feel like a performance, not an interaction.

If you’re naturally funny, then it makes sense to include that aspect of yourself in your material, but you don’t need to script the humor (because you’re naturally funny).

If you don’t think of yourself as funny, then strive for being fun. It’s just as good.

---

The next three emails all reference my review/presentation/handling for Paul Harris’ Deep Clear which appeared in the Fall X-Communication newsletter.

I absolutely LOVE your handling and presentation for deep clear. Gave it the wife test and it fried her hard. The time delay the explanation gives you makes it virtually impossible to back track. Thanks for sharing! —MH

Just some unsolicited feedback. I am greatly enjoying these refinements on commercial tricks. You have a knack for improving/fixing presentations, which is something magicians are usually bad at. I'm voting for more of this in the next year. —GT

Your presentation for Deep Clear took that trick from the back of my “unused” drawer and made it possibly my favorite trick of the year. Please keep these updated handlings and presentations for other’s effects coming. I’m surprised none of the magic companies have hired you to do this. —DW

Aw, you sweeties. Look, no magic company has to hire me to do it because you have already hired me to. (“You” meaning the supporters of this site.)

It’s safe to say you will probably see more of that style of review in the future. When I first started writing reviews for the newsletter, I felt compelled to do timely looks at new releases, and that sort of butted against my desire to only review things I had actually tried out. What I’ve realized in the ensuing years is that nobody really needs me to say things like, “The roughing spray was unevenly applied,” or, “The stitching on the wallet is very nice.” There are dozens of youtube reviewers who can give you that type of basic information. In fact, because they’re all rushing to get their videos out, that’s about all the information they can give. You can tell a lot of them have never actually performed the trick they’re talking about.

So, rather than compete to be first, I will continue to save the reviews until I feel I have something worthwhile to say about an effect that’s borne out of performing it.

There will be shorter/quicker reviews when I don’t have much to say about an effect I like, or when an effect is unworkable for whatever reason, but I won’t force myself to be timely if I think there is some insight I might find a couple months down the line. In fact, the new version of the newsletter starting next year may include some reviews for stuff that is years old.

---

Loved the coins across idea... and I was thinking it could be "fun" when it goes "wrong" and the coins fuse together... like Sean Fields "One". —DY

I think that would make a good phase to the routine as well.

You could also screw up in a much more subtle way: You try to transfer two borrowed coins and you end up with a double-headed coin and a double-tailed coin.

From the feedback I got, a lot of people were taken with the idea for that premise and had other ideas about where to take the trick. I think that’s one of the benefits of putting a trick in a Context. If a trick is just about coins going back and forth then more phases usually just means more coins going back and forth. But when you come up with the Context for why the coins are going between the hands, then it becomes much easier to find other effects that fit that context that aren’t just the same thing happening over and over.

Dustings of Woofle #18

Does anyone know if Houdini came back during the seance last night to prove the existence of life after death? I checked the news but didn’t see anything about it.

---

I have a folder on my computer called TATITS (not to be confused with the folder on my computer called FAT TITS).

TATITS = There’s A Trick In There Somewhere

I have 1000s of pictures, articles, concepts, and quotes sitting around in the folder. I will start posting them from time to time. Below is a recent image I saved.

The sad thing about magic is we have 1000 tricks that tell the story of some boring encounter between a magician and a gambler, and not a single one that tells this story:

---

SansMinds is releasing Will Tsai’s Visual Matrix aka The Rose Act which he performed on America’s Got Talent.

It’s $300. And if you could buy it and actually perform the effect live in front of real people, that price would be a steal.

But something about the ad copy for this effect suggests maybe we should temper our expectations. Specifically this part:

Who is this for?

• If you are serious about the art of magic.

• If you are serious about owning a piece of history.

• If you are serious about learning all the thinking that goes into the Rose Act.

• If you are serious about using this act to learn and inspire yourself to create a masterpiece for yourself.

Notice it doesn’t say, “Who is this for? Someone who wants to perform the effect.” It’s just for someone who wants to own a piece of history or “think” or be “inspired” by the act.

What if I’m someone who wants to perform the trick? Shouldn’t I be included in the the group the trick is for? I’m guessing the answer is “fuuuuuccckkk no,” because there’s no way the trick holds up in person. There’s a reason they crammed Tyra Banks 100 feet away in the wings of the theater rather than sitting table-side to witness the magic.

SansMinds has some stuff that looks great, but with rare exceptions, almost everything they’ve put out was made to be performed on magic demos, not in real life. It’s very strange. I’m not 100% sure why they exist as a magic company selling to magicians.

It would be as if one of those companies who stages food for commercial shoots—and uses motor oil for pancake syrup and Elmer’s glue for milk because it looks better on camera—said, “You know what? We should open a restaurant!”

---

Honestly, I had never seen that trick from AGT before. Other than the odd episode of the Carbonaro Effect, I don’t think I’ve seen any magic on TV in the past couple of years. Not due to a lack of interest, necessarily. It’s just because I spend so many hours a week writing/performing/thinking about magic, that it’s not the thing I want to relax with at the end of the day.

I’m fairly out of the loop on any magic that doesn’t happen on my couch or over lunch.

For instance, I had never heard of this magician named Reza, who is famous enough to have his own theater show in Branson, Missouri.

If you’re not familiar with Reza, he looks like if Criss Angel was cast as the lead in the stage version of Dallas Buyer’s Club.

I stumbled across him a couple weeks ago and was watching some of his videos on youtube and he did one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in this video.

He made a black guy not react to a magic trick.

This is incredible. If I showed you this and asked you what he was watching…

You’d say, “I don’t know… a leaf falling into a puddle?” That can’t possibly be a black guy—magic’s greatest spectator—seeing a magic trick. But it is.

I need to inform Aziz.

---

View this post on Instagram

The Cat's Meow 💋🐈🎃 Video by @playboy @officialplayboyplus Directed by @lizstewartproductions Happy Halloween!

A post shared by Alice Antoinette (@alice_antoinette_official) on Oct 31, 2019 at 4:51am PDT

That’s our friend Alice—who got her start posing for the JAMM—in her latest Playboy feature.

I like to acknowledge her from time to time on the site because I feel bad for her. It must totally eat her up inside that she peaked so early. It’s sad. Can you imagine the constant pressure she feels trying to get back to the point where she had achieved the portrayal of ultimate eroticism: Dan Harlan on the cover of Magic with Rubberbands, Volume 1?

Presentation vs Context: The Invisible Palm Aces

This is the final post I have planned on Presentation vs. Context. Although I’m sure the subject will come up in the future. Today I want to look at the exact same trick, presented with an identical premise, but in one case that premise is a Presentation and in the other it’s a Context.

Here is Paul Harris’ opening patter for the Invisible Palm trick:

“I’m going to show you how a professional gambler cheats at cards. Basically, it’s an advanced technique called PLAMING. That’s spelled P-L-A-M-I-N-G. It was invented by a famous gambler by the name of Bermuda Shwartz. This was the very same man who nicknamed his wife Houdini, because she had trouble escaping from his trunks, but that’s another story.

“Anyway, I”m going to demonstrate this wonderful technique he had for ‘plaming,’ and I’ll show you the very same way he showed me, by using these four Aces

“The first card starts in the standard V position, symbolic of the first letter of the word Venezuela…”

And on it goes. Most of Paul’s early work had these sort of silly, nonsensical, jokey, hokey presentations. It’s somewhat surprising, given that he would go on to be one of the people behind David Blaine and his virtually patter-less/Presentation-less performances. And the Bro Gilbert led performances on the True Astonishments box-set didn’t have any of this kind of weirdness. So I can only imagine there was some point where Paul was in the midst of this sort of performance where he stopped himself and said, “What the fuck am I talking about?”

If you watch his performance of this trick on The Magic Palace, you can see how this presentation goes over. You might say, “Well, he got a few laughs in there.” Okay, I guess, but what about the trick itself? This is a multi-phase effect that gets zero reaction from the audience until the polite applause at the end.

Now, let’s contrast that with Wayne Houchin’s performance of the same effect. It’s the same trick, same handling, and same premise that the cards are being absorbed into the performer’s hand. But where Paul delivers this as a loose Presentation in which to tell jokes, Wayne performs it as if he’s demonstrating a genuine technique.

Notice how each phase of the routine gets a strong reaction. It’s the same trick, but because he doesn’t need to steamroll on to the next joke, he can focus on each moment and let it breathe.

Presentations have jokes. Contexts do not. That doesn’t mean that both can’t be funny. But Contexts should not have scripted jokes (they should not feel like they have scripted anything).

With a context the humor should come from the premise, or from the natural interaction that comes from that premise.

With a Presentation you can add in jokes, like Paul does, but I don’t think it serves the magic particularly well. Since the humor isn’t inherent in the trick, you split the audience’s focus. “Who is this Bermuda Schwarz? What do you mean ‘V for Venezuela’? What is ‘plaming’ is that supposed to be funny somehow? Or is it important… is this something I need to remember?” You can watch the video of Paul Performing and see that there are some lines which no one has any clue how to react to. This can’t help but take focus off the power of the effect. And honestly, it feels kind of apologetic to me. Like you’re shucking and jiving to keep them entertained because you’re worried the trick itself isn’t interesting enough.

However, you may want to be the guy who tells jokey, whimsical stories with accompanying card tricks. Here’s a guy doing just that. He’s presenting that trick with Paul’s original patter. I’m not posting it to make fun of the guy. I just want to give you an outsider’s perspective of what this sort of thing looks like. Maybe you watch that and think, “I bet my friends would like that!” Well… god bless you. You’re a lucky man. I wish I had those sorts of friends. The minute I start saying, “This ace represents mud, blood, beer, and crud,” my friends would be like…

(I have friends all over the political spectrum.)

I’m not anti-humor, obviously. And I’m not anti-humor in magic. But if it’s not inherent in the premise, I think it pulls people out of the effect. Or, at the very least, it comes off as scripted. And scripted equals Presentation. And if you’re striving for an immersive Context, then Presentation is your enemy.

Introducing the Virtual Focus Group

Back when I was doing my old site, I would get my friends together and show them videos of magicians performing and then I’d write up their comments in a series of Zagat review style posts. These days I do a much more intense version of that sort of thing with the focus group testing I’ve been involved with in New York City.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something in between. As I mentioned in this post, this site is going to change going into the next season. The posts are going to be more casual, dumber, and shorter. The total amount of content will remain similar, but the stuff I feel has particular value will come in a monthly newsletter that will expand on the X-Comm newsletters that I’ve done for the past few years.

One of the features I’m planning on having in the new incarnation of the newsletter is a Virtual Focus Group (until I come up with a better name for it). Here’s how it will work. I’ll have a group of 20 laymen that we identify from short-term gig job sites. We’ll screen out anyone with knowledge/interest in magic. Once a month, we’ll send them a few short videos to watch and give their comments on. After three months they will be cycled out of the program (unless they prove to have some sort of incredible insight, then maybe I’ll keep them on in a different role). They’ll get $20/month for about a half an hour’s easy work. I think it’s a win-win for everyone.

“You’re going to pay $400 a month to have laypeople comment on magic videos?” Well, yes, I’m the one writing the check, but that money comes from the people who support the site (hence the reason it will be supporter-only content). I’m happy to reinvest that money and I think it’s the sort of thing supporters of this site are interested in too.

I love the unbiased, unvarnished responses we get in testing. What I think I’m better at than most magicians is maintaining a layperson’s sensibilities about things. But it’s impossible to be as good as an actual layperson. It’s one thing to listen to your audience, but they might be friends, or they might have paid good money to see you, that’s going to color their reaction. You can’t really trust reactions you see in demo videos. And listening to the feedback of other magicians is next to useless.

I’m still trying to figure out the details on how the Virtual Focus Group will work: what questions I will ask, how they’ll view the material, if I’ll do follow-ups, etc. But I ran a little test a couple days ago with five people I picked up off Craigslist. (No, not whores. They don’t even have that section on Craigslist anymore, sadly. Uhm.. I mean… good. It’s good they don’t have that section anymore.)

I sent them five demo videos of recently released effects. I had edited the videos so they just showed the trick, not any of the other promotional information. So even if they wanted to, it would be difficult for them to do further research on an effect.

I asked for three pieces of information about each effect:

• Describe the trick.

• Rate how impossible the trick seemed to you.

• What is your best explanation for how the trick was done?

For a few of the tricks, the response was about what I expected. But a couple received an interesting reaction.

The first comes from Penguin. It’s called Forgotten Princess. It’s a presentational variation on the Princess Card Trick where you—according to the ad copy—”Erase a memory, then bring it back.” So instead of the card just “vanishing” as in the original version, the conceit is that the spectator is forgetting the card. I didn’t really give it too much thought.

But then when I heard back from the respondents, in the area where I asked them to “describe the trick,” no one came back with anything related to “forgetting” or “memory.” A couple people said they weren’t clear on what the effect was. The remaining respondents said things like, “The magician knew the card she was thinking of.” And, “He made her card vanish and then come back.”

Now, I’m willing to concede that they might not have understood the trick because there is not a continuous performance of the trick in the demo. But I think there may be a bigger issue than that. As I watched the demo again I thought, “Well, I don’t think I really understand the trick either.”

From the primary spectator’s perspective what is supposed to be happening? Put yourself in their position. I show you five cards. You think of the King of Hearts. I pull one out and set it on the table. “I’m going to make you forget the card you chose.” I show you the remaining four cards, the King of Hearts isn’t in there. So you assume that’s the card I have removed. But then I put that card back in the fan and show you the cards and there still is no King of Hearts. Then I snap my fingers, re-spread the cards, and the King of Hearts is back. At what point along the way did you apparently “forget” anything?

You didn’t forget it when I showed you the four cards.

You didn’t forget it when I showed you the five cards. (If you had forgotten it, you wouldn’t be able to say if the card was there or not.)

You didn’t forget it when the card came back. The whole time you’re looking for the King of Hearts and that’s the card that came back. From your perspective the card is not there, then it is, but you knew what card you were looking for the whole time. So the idea that I “plucked the memory of that card from your head,” doesn’t really track.

Perhaps, this is intended as a dual reality trick. To the other observers it may seem like the person forgets the card? I’m not sure. It’s a close-up trick though, which is a fairly weak area for dual reality. And the laypeople I had watch the video didn’t “get” the memory thing regardless.

Conclusion: I’m not sure the Princess Card Trick works as a demonstration of a psychological illusion (any more than any vanish would—David Copperfield: “I made you forget the Statue of Liberty!”)

If you want to present the trick in a more psychological manner, I don’t know if “memory” is the right path to take. If I were doing it, I’d probably talk about “psychological scotomas” (blindspots). “Have you ever been searching all over for your keys, and you’re going crazy because you have somewhere you need to be, but you can’t find them anywhere? Then you look at the coffee table for the fifth time and there they are. They were right in front of your face but you couldn’t see them before. Your mind blocked them out. Well, there’s a way to induce this sort of sensation. Are you okay with that? I promise it’s temporary.”

So they think of a card. You do something (don’t just snap your fingers like a lazy all-powerful piece of shit). And when you spread the cards their thought-of card is gone. They see a blank face where the card should be (Or maybe you could have a card with a super blurry image on it.) Then you snap them out of it and their card is back. The idea being you’ve somehow generated a blindspot for them, making it so they can’t see the card they were thinking of.

I’m not sure if that’s any good. But I think there is a stronger logic to it than in the “memory” version.

The next trick that got an interesting response was Card Flex by Mario Tarasini and Ellusionist.

Watch it and ask yourself this question, “What is supposed to be going on here?” It’s something none of the five respondents could clearly answer.

I guess the answer is supposed to be, “The magician pushes a card through a bill. And while it’s through the bill, the card separates in two pieces and then is restored.”

That’s some straight gobbledygook right there. There’s a somewhat glaring issue with this trick. When you do a penetration effect (like card through bill) you want to make sure the audience believes these are two solid objects. You know what really takes away from that impression? When you then go and split one of the objects in two.

Of course, if you could hand out the card at the end, then maybe you could forgive the clusterfucky nature of the two tricks jammed together. But you can’t. So your best case is for someone to say, “That was sort of neat looking. I’m curious how the card is tricked up to allow you to do it.” That’s the best case scenario. (All five respondents said “trick card” or something along those lines for their guess as to the method.)

Conclusion: If you want to melt a card through a bill, use Matthew Johnson’s Melt 2.0. It looks great and everything is examinable.

If you want to do a close-up Zig-Zag, consider Blade by Nicholas Lawrence. I like the business card variation. Again, it’s examinable at the end.

If you want to melt a card through a bill and in the middle of that do a zig-zag trick, ask yourself what would possibly compel you to want to do that.

Dustings of Woofle #17

I found this screenshot on my desktop and it made me laugh so goddamn hard. I need to explain it first though.

A couple weeks ago I was writing about the Digital Force Bag app, and how corny it is to walk around with a list of random celebrities in your notes app. And as I was writing the post I thought, Well, what would be a good rationale for having a list of celebrities in my notes app? Then I thought it might be funny to have a list called “Celebrities I Fucked.” No hot young starlets, but just like:

• Billy Mays

• Ed Lover

• The Travelocity Roaming Gnome

• Zachery Ty Bryan

• Joy Behar

And so on.

And you’d wax nostalgic about your former lovers, but mention that one held a very special place in your heart because you had a child together.

You’d lay a photo on the table face-down. They’d name a number, you’d show the celebrity, and the picture would be one of those “what would your child look like” face morphs between you and the celebrity.

I could get some mileage out of something like that.

So I was going to explain this idea in the post and then I was going to show an example of such a photo. I wanted to choose a couple of people readers of this site would recognize, so I chose Joshua Jay and Elvis Presley.

So I went to this site and inserted pictures of Elvis and Josh, and… oh my god. The picture they gave me in return was so hilariously stupid that I decided to excise that part of the post because it would have derailed the whole thing. But I took a screenshot and just stumbled on it again and it made me laugh even harder.

So here it is….

The love child of Elvis Presley and Joshua Jay…

I’m going to put some space here to generate some tension as you scroll down…

here it comes…

hold on, let me quote from the site first…

“Have you tried something like this in the past, but have not been convinced by the results? BabyMaker is not just another face morphing program that stops transformation in the middle and calls it a baby.

Instead, BabyMaker is based on the newest facial recognition technologies. The program carefully analyzes the two faces, detects their facial features, and applies sophisticated mathematical transformations to these facial features to show a totally new face.”

okay, here it comes. A “sophisticated mathematical transformation” “based on the newest facial recognition technologies” showing what the child of Joshua Jay and Elvis Presley would look like…

Here is the lovely young lad…

---

S.G. wrote in with some interesting additions to the Transporter presentation in the previous post…

The idea with The Transporter is great, especially with Halloween parties coming up, where I and a friend will go as Rick and Morty. An energy transporting wristband just sounds like an invention coming directly from Rick.

Here are some ideas I came up with:

• I will buy «electrode cream» (used to increase electrical connection between the Body and EEG machines) and apply it below the wristband. The idea being that there has to be an electrical connection between both hands. It would make the context more interesting and it’s a buy-in for the spectator.

• In the coin-phase of the trick I will tell them that I will not make one, but two coins at the same time travel from one hand to the other. Then I will close my fists, wait some seconds and suddenly smoke will come out of my fist. I will frantically ask the spectator to break the connection between my hands. When I open my hands, there is only one coin in my hand left (using a shell) and in the other hand there is a black mark (some ash I applied with my thumb). The idea being, that two coins was too much for the Transporter and one coin got pulverized. Then I will say that the Technology is still not ready but that we can try smaller amounts of energy and go into the second phase of the trick.

• Another idea I am considering is building a crazy sci-fi looking device where both wristbands are plugged into. Then I would screw in a small «light bulb» and it will start glowing when both wristbands are connected, increasing in brightness, culminating in a flash and then dying down. Each phase of the trick I would screw in a new light bulb, the idea being that it is used up during the Transportation.

---

In case there was any doubt about what Jibrizy’s cell phone wallpaper is—it is, in fact, a picture of Jibrizy.