My Conversation with Dai Vernon: Part 1

Some people don’t like it when I deign to question the wisdom of our magical elders. So let me start this post by saying that is not what I’m doing here. In fact, this is a message that came directly from Dai Vernon himself. I bought a Ouija board and had a conversation with him and I’ve transcribed it below. So take your, “How dare you question the great Dai Vernon” emails and shove them up your asshole. I’m not questioning him at all. I”m doing him a favor. The spirit of Dai Vernon has specifically asked me to update you on a change in his thinking. If you disagree with anything here, take it up with the ghost of Vernon.

Below is our discussion:

Me: Oh, great Ouija board. Bring forth a spirit for me to communicate with. I pray to thee, lord of the Ouija.

Ouija; H-E-L-L-O

Me: Oh shit. Who dis?

Ouija: D-A-I-V-E-R-N-O-N

Me: Da’ Iver Non? Damn, you sound hot, baby. What are you wearing?

Ouija: D-A-I……V-E-R-N-O-N. T-H-E-M-A-G-I-C-I-A-N.

Me: Oh, rats. Okay. Well, still… what are you wearing?

[Some unimportant back and forth.]

Me: By the way, this is a coincidence. I run a magic blog. Is there anything you’d like to get out to the magic community?

Dai: No shit? Yeah, actually there’s something I’m famous for saying that is no longer accurate.

Me: What is it… “A large action covers a small action?” Is it the opposite? Does a small action cover a large action now? I knew it! Ok, I’ll spread the word.

Dai: What? No, you fucking idiot. How would that work?

Me: Oh. I don’t know. Just like… maybe… like, to cover a pass you should wiggle your pinky toe? Actually, you’re right. That doesn’t seem like it would work. Never mind. So what was it you wanted to say?

Dai: Remember how I said, “A good magic effect should easily be described in one sentence.”

Me: Sure.

Dai: Not anymore.

Me. Explain, Dai. Actually, before you do…Is your name pronounced DAY or DIE? I’ve heard both.

Dai: It’s actually, Duh.

[Then he Ouiji’d me this gif]

Duh went on to explain what he meant. In this day and age, an effect that can be “easily described in one sentence” is synonymous with a “an effect that is easily google-able.”

“It’s not that I was wrong then,” Dai said, letter-by-letter. “It’s just that now that isn’t good advice anymore. When secrets were very hard to come by, then it made sense to focus on the simplicity of the effect. But that’s no longer the case, so magic needs to change.

“Think of the version of Ring-flite that Ellusionist just released. Now, back in my day, when I made someone’s ring appear on my keychain, there was no way for them to figure out how that was done without burning a ton of time and calories. The secret was nowhere to be found in your home or even at the library. You would have to make inroads in the world of magic just to even know where to look for such a secret. It was a glorious time.

“These days, it’s a different world. Ring-flite may still get a great reaction in a demo video, but what do you think happened two seconds after the camera turned off. I’ll tell you what happened.

“This is what happens.”

Me: Oh wow, I didn’t know you could hyperlink in a Ouija message.

Dai: Oh gee. You didn’t know? You? Oh wow, the room is spinning. YOU were unaware of something? What a shocker.

Me: I just meant-

Dai: Zip it, bitch.

Dai continued on, “A ring vanishes and appears on a keychain. That’s a one sentence description of an effect. And while that would be good if you were following my advice back in the day, if you follow that same advice now, that means you just got fucked by the ghost of Dai Vernon. The moment you leave the room, anyone who was truly fooled will be on their phone looking for an answer, and will have enough to satisfy them in a matter of moments. If they don’t look it up, that’s even worse. They probably weren’t even fooled or didn’t care about what you did at all.

“Magicians like to imagine there is a huge contingent of people who would be super fooled by a trick AND then would just choose to live with that deep, abiding mystery without doing LITERALLY 10 seconds of research. Those people don’t exist. Or, at the very least, they’re rare enough that we shouldn’t consider them when deciding how to approach our magic.”

Me: What about the magicians who say that if a spectator googles your trick after you show it to them, it means you’re a bad magician?

Dai: Those people are fucking morons who got into magic because they’re socially awkward and they still have no clue how a normal human thinks or reacts to things. People google tricks because that’s the natural step people take these days when trying to figure something out.

Me: Okay… well… then what’s the point? I mean, why am I bothering showing magic to people if their natural reaction is to take steps to figure it out? Why try to fool them if they don’t want to be fooled?

It was at this point that Dai told me something that was a complete paradigm shift for me and the reason behind why someone might decide to search out an explanation for a trick.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you exactly what his response to my question was.

Re-Tweak: Sort of Psychic Part Two

More thoughts on John Bannon’s, Sort of Psychic.

I enjoyed your thoughts about Sort of Psychic -- especially because I completely skipped over the trick when I first watched the DVD. John is very clever (I loved his early books) but tbh, he's a rather dull performer. I'm curious to know what jumped out at you when you saw the trick, and more generally about your thought process when you read/watch new material. —DK

What stood out to me originally when I saw the trick was the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the effect. In essence you test the spectator’s ability to find which pile holds their card a few times. Then they’re able to cut to their card from a shuffled deck. It’s such a pure concept.

Compare that to a trick where…say… the spectator cuts off a small packet of cards. They count the cards secretly in their packet. Now you deal out 12 cards in the shape of a clock face. The spectator thinks of the card at the hour of the number of cards in their hand. Now the cards are assembled and dealt into three columns. The spectator answers three questions—they can lie or tell the truth—and their responses are spelled. At the end, the card they’re on is the card they thought of.

In the broadest of strokes, that trick is like Sort of Psychic; the card is somewhere in the deck and the spectator finds it. But the two processes are polar opposites. One is convoluted. One is pure.

When I read/watch new material, I’m generally not looking for a trick that I’m going to be able to take and pop right into my repertoire as is. There’s not many magicians creating the types of presentations that I enjoy performing.

What I get most excited about is a strong bland effect. Strong, because I want the trick to be fooling, of course. And bland because that means I can dress it up in numerous ways. I call these Blank Slate effects. I talked about them when I wrote this post on the Vanishing Inc blog.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion about “Sort of psychic” and love the idea of using acupuncture as the “cause” of the magic, that I might explore to use on other effects.

Personally, I’ve found, “Sort of psychic” plays well to a certain sort of crowd, but if you have a mathematician present they tend to pick up on part of the winnowing technique. Nothing wrong with that, but you might need to give the maths types a knowing smile. The sort that says "I know you know how this is done". They will get a kick out of feeling they know how its done.

I really have no desire to give people the kick of knowing how things are done (unless they’re playing a wingman role in the presentation).

I will agree that there are some tricks you don’t want to do around mathematically minded people. But this is actually not one of them. You can very much take math out of the equation with a couple more tweaks.

Here’s how.

The spectator is thinking of one of sixteen cards. Either you start this way as Bannon does, or you get to this point as I do in the original Tweak post from Sept. 4th.

You shuffle the cards and deal them into two piles (back and forth). They attempt to intuit where their card is.

After this round you assemble the cards and give them a real shuffle. Well, real enough. You give them a red/black shuffle (aka Ireland shuffle). Now you deal out two piles again.

They intuit. Again the packets are assembled and you give them another real shuffle. Pretty much real, at least. You actually run the top four cards singly and then shuffle off on top.

Deal two piles of 8 for a final round of intuition. Now all the cards are assembled and the full deck is shuffled for real (minus the control of two cards). And you finish as in Bannon’s original.

Notice how unmathematical the process is now. You’re shuffling the cards for real and dealing them in a standard manner throughout the effect. There’s clearly real mixing going on. There’s no questionable anti-faro. You’re just mixing the cards and dealing them into two piles in a way that is similar to what they’ve done themselves in numerous card games.

All the genuine mixing throughout the effect will take it out of the realm of a mathematical solution. Unless they are not only familiar with the underlying mathematics, but also the concept of a red/black shuffle, card controls, cross-cut forces, etc. There’s too much to untangle there. And keep in mind you’re never mentioning the number of cards. It’s just 1/3rd of the deck. Hell, you can use 15 cards if you want to throw them off a little. But it’s not necessary.

Add into that whatever presentational impetus/motivation you’re using for the effect, and you should have a pretty impenetrable effect, and not something that looks like a mathematical effect, regardless of the spectators familiarity with mathematics.

[Update: Some of the changes here (the addition of dealing and shuffling) are similar to ideas that John added to a rewrite of this trick that was published in MAGIC Magazine in August, 2016. Now, I could come here and say it was my own independent invention of these ideas—that they were semi-obvious improvements to be made to the original. But that’s not true. In fact, I totally fucking stole the ideas. I wanted the glory to be gained from mentioning some small tweaks to an old effect. And I wanted that glory to be all MINE, MINE, MINE! My apologies to John Bannon. Am I really sorry? No! I’m just sorry I got caught, you sons of bitches!]

Monday Mailbag #29

Does Daniel Garcia's "Pressure" actually fool anyone?  I feel like the answer is no. 

This direct question leads me to a broader one: when is a trick deceptive enough that it passes your internal test and is allowed into your repertoire? As far as I know (and I don't know a lot), you're the foremost expert on "does it actually fool them" matters. I base this statement on your focus group testing and you're fearless "I'll go test it out" approach. Obviously, what I want is a trick that fools everyone 100% of the time. There are a zillion factors that lead to the success of the trick (like it's execution, convincers, and the knowledge/problem solving abilities of the spectator) but at some point we're all deciding whether we think a trick will or won't work, and that leads to whether we do it or not.  I'm sure even "Pressure" can be saved by removing the easy answers, but sometimes a trick is beyond saving or it's unreasonable to go the extra 10 miles to pump up the fooled 'em quotient. —CC

I can’t speak to Pressure too much. I do understand where your question is coming from because that’s the type of trick where a certain number of people are just going to be able to understand exactly what happened, regardless of how well you perform it.

In general, I try to avoid tricks that can be figured out with just one flash of insight. If a trick fools people 90% of the time, it’s not good enough for me. I perform in the types of situations where—if 1 in 10 people in a group figure it out—then eventually all 10 will know how it’s done. Or if I’m performing one-on-one, I don’t want a 10% chance of the trick failing completely.

Of course, you can’t really speak in exact percentages this way unless you were testing every trick you performed on 100 people or whatever.

So you just have to establish your standard for what it means to fool an audience. My definition of fooling an audience is that they have no answer that satisfies them. They may have things they find questionable or suspicious, that’s fine, it’s almost impossible to get rid of that altogether. But if they’re able to brush off a trick by saying, “Well, it must have been ______” then that’s no good. My tricks need to be un-brush-off-able.

So the first few times I perform a new trick, I will almost always talk about it with people afterwards to get their best guess at how it might be done. If they speak with confidence about any solution, right or wrong, then I re-work the trick (to eliminate that as being a potential solution). And if that doesn’t work I ditch the trick altogether.

---

Your idea for the sock routine is brilliant.

I always liked the mis-matched socks finale.

And this is a great use for it. Until now - I wasn't interested in this marketed effect - it felt too much like a dumb card trick. —JM

You hear that, Vanishing Inc.? I want my cut of this sale.

I heard from a number of people who liked the variation I presented last week, but I did get one person who wasn’t a fan.

I found your presentation for Socks to be amusing, but I disagree with the way you structured the effect. The prediction phase only involves two selected socks. The matching phase uses all of the cards. The ability to seemingly control and match up all of the cards is a more impossible effect than just being able to predict the two they selected. —DN

An audience’s enjoyment is not just based on the statistical impossibility of what happened. In fact that is often the least consequential factor in their reaction to an effect. The problem with the structure of the original effect is that the first phase was bigger than the second. Not more impossible, but the sphere in which the magic took place was bigger. It happened on the cards and on the magician’s feet. By having the second phase happen just on the cards, it feels like a step backwards. It feels like just a card trick.

By reversing the phases you have this thing that the spectator will assume is just a type of card trick, and then in the second phase you find that it has broader ramifications. I think that’s the way to play it.

---

A quick comment on [last week’s] mailbag.  I love the idea of using acupuncture, but I never would without training (and even then, probably not).  That said, I have been thinking about the practice of moxibustion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxibustion) which is close and much safer, provided you don't let the little burning piles actually burn down.  (The Wiki site also has an old painting of the practice, and because it uses the "principles" of acupuncture, you get to consult those cool acupuncture charts). —DG

Thanks. Moxibustion looks like just the sort of nonsense I like to occasionally include in my tricks.

Even more “Sort of Psychic” talk in tomorrow’s post, since my post on that has generated more feedback. I will give you another tweak you can use on it that eliminates any mathematical explanation. So you can pin the effect purely on moxibustion or whatever the hell you’re using the trick to demonstrate.

How I Made $1000/Week Working 5 Minutes A Day: Part One

Two decades ago, I moved to New York City with a couple hundred dollars, no job, no place to live, and knowing no one in the area. I had one bag of clothing, a Discman and an 80 CD wallet. I had no computer, and obviously no smart phone. This was a challenging situation, but my attitude towards those types of situations has always been: “Eh… I’m sure I’ll figure something out.” The beauty of approaching life this way early on is that you realize you will just figure something out regardless of the situation. And that knowledge is hugely beneficial going forward in life.

I got off a Greyhound bus to the city in late November. Since it’s really really hard to get online with a Discman, I found an internet cafe, and looked for the cheapest housing I could find. That’s where I discovered the now defunct Hotel Riverview. Right on the edge of Manhattan in the West Village area, up against the Hudson River.

At a time when the average price for a hotel room in NYC was about $275, the Hotel Riverview was a cool $24 a night. Bingo.

There was quite a bit of history to the hotel. It had once been used to house surviving crewmen from the Titanic. Built in 1908, it was originally the American Seamen's Friend Society Institute; intended to be a “temporary home for seamen in distress.”

Distressed and covered in semen was still an accurate description of the Hotel Riverview at the time I stayed there. A $24/night hotel in Manhattan is not a place where cost-conscious travelers stay. It’s a place where desperate people stay. Junkies, prostitutes, the criminally insane, and me.

My room was—and I’m not exaggerating here—4 feet by 6 feet. It held a bed and a little sliver of space next to the bed. There was a single, naked lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. For a few more dollars a week you could get a small TV on a rolling stand in your room. There was no cable. Just an antenna which would bring in nearly three whole channels.

Each floor had a communal bathroom. This wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Sure it was disgusting, but when you’re not eating much (as I wasn’t) you don’t have to go to the bathroom too often. And I usually had the facilities to myself. It turns out the other occupants of the building weren’t big on taking showers.

Although I stayed there through the winter, I never shut my window the whole time. The room was heated by a 4-inch diameter metal pipe at the foot of my bed, through which boiling water would run constantly. It wasn’t down near the floor. It was literally where my bare feet were at the end of the bed. So it was a fun game to try and not be scalded by it when laying in a bed in a room that isn’t as long as I am tall.

The blazing pipe created a balmy atmosphere in the room. So keeping the window open was a must. When it’s a moist 95 degrees in the room, and a crisp 10 degrees outside, and your window is open, you get a nice meteorological phenomenon where the two meet. Your own little personal weather-system. A tiny storm of charged air that is both hot and cold and—from what I can tell—really fucks up the reception on your antenna TV.

So things were not ideal. And it was made worse by the fact that there was a rule in place that you had to check out for one night every two weeks. So every thirteen days, in the dead of winter, I’d have to pack up my stuff and just wander the streets for a night until I could check back in the next day.

I figured to get an apartment it was going to run me somewhere between $2000 and $3000, in order to pay for first and last month’s rent and any sort of deposit or fees that might be involved.

I was doing some work through a temp agency. If I was lucky, I’d make about $55 a day, or $275/week. My room and food was around $35/day, or $245/week. So, if I was really tight with my money, I could just about save $30 a week. Which meant in a scant year and a half I’d be set up to get a place somewhere. Obviously that wasn’t a viable plan.

I probably could have asked my parents for a loan or harassed one of the people I’d met in the city to let me stay with them for a while, but that’s not really my nature.

One time my high school guidance counselor told me that my problem was that I liked getting backed into a corner. That I would allow myself to get into difficult situations so that I could try and get out of them. And there is probably some truth to that. But I don’t really see that as a problem. I honestly see that as one of the keys to a happy life. When you tell yourself, “I like challenges, struggle, and adversity,” those things are all off the table as a source of pain in your life. Not only that, but you will handle those situations much better than the person who laments, “Why me!?” all the time.

So there I was. No money, no job, no prospects, and no real marketable skills. Looking down the barrel of another couple years living a life of austerity in a room that was just bigger than a coffin, but no less depressing.

Faced with that reality, I knew I needed to come up with a money-making plan to get me out of this situation sooner. Just over a month later, I had $4000 in my pocket and was on my way to my own place in the city. The story of that plan will come next Sunday.

I realize this sounds like I’m setting up a story that begins with, “So I got me a chisel and went to work on constructing a glory hole.” But the plan I came up with was one that was completely legal, safe, and didn’t involve me doing anything sketchy at all. There was no sex or drugs involved. I didn’t get into any dangerous situations. No one got scammed. It required no special skills on my part. And there was no luck involved. And while the time element may be slightly exaggerated for the sake of the post title (there was some time spent planning and prepping throughout the day) the time I spent “working,” on the days I worked, was literally right around 5 minutes.

I will spill the details in a week.

The Juxe: AV Undercover Favorites

The Onion’s AV Club has had a youtube series for years now where artists come in and cover well-known songs. For some reason they deleted a lot of the older entries in this series from their official youtube channel. But here are some of my favorites that remain, or that I could track down on random youtube channels.

The Regrettes cover Fox On The Run (The Sweet)

Punch Brothers cover Reptilia (The Strokes)

They Might Be Giants cover Bills, Bills, Bills (Destiny’s Child)

The Big Moon covers Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler) —(and a little bit of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind)

Lake Street Dive covers Take On Me (A-ha)

Snap Judgments: Banderaction

With 40% of the vote, the winner of yesterday’s poll was Banderaction by Cyril Thomas. Pardon me, he worked hard for his title, Dr. Cyril Thomas.

My Feelings on Rubber Band Magic

Rubber band magic is the weakest of all the common branches of magic associated with a particular prop. I’m not saying rubber band tricks get bad reactions, I’m saying they have to be much stronger than other tricks to get the same reaction. For example, the trick I performed earlier tonight from Banderaction involved a rubber band jumping from my hand, onto the spectator’s hand, then back onto my hand, in a very visual, camera-trick esque type manner. It got a nice reaction. But if that had been a coin that rested on my hand and in a blink was on the spectator’s palm and then just as quickly was back on my hand, that would have garnered much stronger reactions.

Rubber band magic has these issues:

1. There’s often something to see. Even if the spectator can’t see precisely what happened, they can likely get a sense—on some level— that there was some motion that occurred that they didn’t quite catch.

2. There’s often something to hear. If you could erase the THWAP! of a rubber band whipping around into a new position, rubber band magic would be much stronger.

3. People are quite familiar with the elastic properties of rubber bands. They’ve stretched them. They’ve let them snap back into place. This isn’t some hidden feature of rubber bands that magicians stumbled over.

4. Money has meaning. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Playing cards are timeless. Doing magic with these items feels a little more natural than pulling out some rubber bands you just “happen to have with you.”

5. It’s very hard (at least I’ve found it very hard) to build up a rubber band trick into anything other than a “Hey, check this out” type of moment.

In the past on this site I’ve talked about a spectator’s reaction progressing through three stages: Surprise, Astonishment, and then Mystery.

Rubber band magic tends to get a nice “Surprise” moment, but then the reactions fade quickly after that. I don’t find there to be a ton of resonance with rubber band magic in general. It looks like trick photography, but it doesn’t feel magical.

It may sound like I don’t like rubber band magic. That’s not the case. I like it. It’s just difficult to create really hard-hitting magic with an object that feels so arbitrary and where the method is based on properties of the object that spectators know about.

The Download

But let’s talk specifically about Banderaction.

Dr. Cyril Thomas is truly a genius when it comes to rubber band magic. Is that what his doctorate is in? Rubber band topology? Because his ability to figure out the geometry of the method behind these tricks is something I find astounding. It’s so far from the way my mind works. If you are into magic for the cleverness of the methods, then this is a download you should absolutely get.

I found his teaching to be very good. He goes through the steps of the set-up clearly and repeats them a couple of times. Unfortunately, there was one decision made in the production of this video that I found to be monumentally retarded and wildly frustrating. It may take 10 minutes for him to describe a particular effect. This is done over his shoulder with him breaking the move down into steps. That’s perfectly fine. But once you understand the steps, you want to see them done all in one action. And you want this to be easily found so you’re not scanning through 10 minutes of download to find that spot. Wisely, they decided to show the set-up for each effect briefly at the end of each explanation. Insanely, they decided to show this from the spectator’s point of view. Which is essentially a useless viewpoint for teaching magic—especially rubber band magic. So now instead of having one location in the video that I can go to in order to see the set-up in brief, I have to try and scan through, and find the pieces of the set-up and put them together while my fingers are trying to hold a rubber band in place that’s been doubled over a dozen times.

All magic teaching should be done from the performer’s view except for the parts where you want to show me what it looks like from the spectator’s perspective. Why we haven’t cracked this simple concept in 40 years of magic video instruction is beyond me.

Okay, moving on. The trick I decided to learn from this download is Quantum Paradox. A rubber band is wrapped around the palm of your hand. The spectator’s hand is placed next to yours. The band jumps onto their palm. Then it jumps back onto yours. You can see this at 1:55 in the trailer (and earlier in the trailer where it’s performed with a cell phone instead of someone’s hand).

My Experience

I ordered the download Thursday afternoon. I learned the basics of the trick in about 30 minutes and I was pretty comfortable with it with about another 45 minutes of practice.

The set-up for the effect is a little daunting. While you can do the set-up in front of people, it’s not going to look like just a casual stretching of the band, or something like that. You’re clearly doing something (if the person is looking).

I was able to perform this five times tonight. I would generally do the set-up as I was in conversation with someone. So—best case scenario—in their mind I was just absentmindedly stretching and twisting a rubber band I happened to have on my wrist. (And you do have to have multiple rubber bands on your wrist for all the effects on this download. (I think all of them.)) I would then bring attention to the band around my palm, take their hand and place it next to mine, and then have the band jump to their hand and then back mine.

Three out of the five times, it worked perfectly. A couple times the other person pulled their hand away when the rubber band appeared around their palm. And that sort of ends the trick there. This was my fault. I didn’t emphasize that they needed to hold completely still. And I didn’t emphasize that because I didn’t want to. The method requires their hand to remain still but I wanted to see if I could get away without actually saying that or holding their hand in place—just so they’d feel less controlled. But no, you can’t really get away with that.

The trick got the reaction I expected, which was a quick “Whoa!” when the rubber band went to their hand and another “Whoa!” when it went back to mine.

The reactions were good, but brief. I think it came across as a quick fun trick, but not too much more than that. This trick really didn’t have enough resonance for me. But as I said, that’s been my experience more or less with most rubber band magic.

A significant downside to the Quantum Paradox effect—and likely other effects on the download—is that, like many rubber band tricks, the moment of magic is over so quickly that people naturally want to see it again. But the set-up is so extensive that it can’t be executed invisibly if they’re paying attention. So the spectator will often feel caught off-guard by the magic moment and when they ask to see it again you have to refuse. This, of course, leaves them feeling like you were only able to fool them because you caught them off guard. Which isn’t really a satisfying feeling to leave them with.

Why is Crazy Man’s Handcuffs still such a classic of rubber band magic when we have more intricate methods and more visual effects like the ones on this download? It’s because CMH can be done slowly, it can be repeated with no set-up, and it doesn’t look like rubber bands simply snapping into new locations. I wish creators were keeping these benefits of CMH in mind when coming up with new effects, because as clever as the methods may be, they don’t always make for useful and usable rubber band tricks.

My Verdict

Does Banderaction get a bad reaction? No.

Does Banderaction get a bland reaction? No.

Does Banderaction cause dissatisfaction? No.

A sad erection? No!

This review has been as much about my feelings on rubber band magic as it has been on this particular product. The truth is, if you like rubber band magic, then you’ll like this. If you like clever methodology, then you’ll like this. If you’re happy with the response that you get from rubber band magic generally, then you will likely be happy with this as well.

I like the download and I think the thinking involved is worth the price, but I doubt anything from this download will crack my regular repertoire.

A number of effects on the download require a kind of “cozy” handling. There is so much going on with the band behind the hand, that angles can get a little sensitive. And occasionally there is so much tension in the band (when from the spectator’s perspective there shouldn’t be) that it looks a little unnatural. Due to those types of issues, this may be better suited for instagram than real life performances.

If you’re a big rubber band magic fan, I think there is some incredible thinking on here and you’ll enjoy this product despite the performance issues you might encounter.

If you’re just casually into band magic, I don’t think your “new favorite rubber band trick” is on here. But if you have the money to burn and you’re interested in checking out the intricacies of the methods, you’ll likely still find it worth your time.

Today's Post Will Be Late

If you’re one of those people who read this site on a schedule and come here soon after the 3AM posting time, you’re going to have to wait a bit for today’s post. I’m still writing it. My notion of buying, learning, performing, and then writing a review for a product over the course of 12 hours (with a party thrown in for good measure) may have been a little ambitious.

I’m still working on the post now and it should be up in a couple of hours.