Dustings 93: Douchebag Edition

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On Twitter this week, noted dipshit, Uri Geller, tried to present props from an old X-Files episode as evidence of alien life…

By the way, here’s my take on Uri Geller. I think anyone who pretends to be real is a complete loser. His big innovation in performing was to be so fucking boring that people assumed maybe he was legit. “Certainly no one doing this for entertainment would be such a dullard, right?” His most memorable tv appearance was one where he totally flopped. He’s spent his entire life feeling like he’s not “enough”—something probably instilled in him when he was a child. Any attention or admiration he’s received has been from pretending to be something he’s not—a psychic, an insider to the alien cover-up, etc.—and it likely tears him up inside, if he has the capacity for any self-reflection.

His life is a grim deal. Imagine being an opportunist star-fucker who has devoted your life to chasing fame, and you have 1/20th the Instagram followers as some Z-list chick from the umpteenth season of a cheesy reality show who is most notable for selling her farts.

Almost as pathetic as Uri himself is the weird simping that has happened for him in the magic community in the past few years. “Actually… Uri was pretty good!” No, he wasn’t and isn’t. As a person, he’s a creep. As a performer, he’s a total snooze.

Paul McKee Has Been Kicked Out of the GLOMM

Whenever I read an article about a magician fucking children (which is something that happens enough for me to start this sentence with “whenever” rather than “once” or “both times”) I always search my email box for the name and pray this person isn’t going to be a Jerx reader or GLOMM elite member.

Fortunately, this has never been the case. Unlike the IBM or SAM, I keep sex criminals out of my ranks. And this newest depraved monster posing as a magician is someone completely unfamiliar to me.

The Echo, a Liverpool newspaper and alliteration fan-site, reports:

“Kids' entertainer 'Professor Paulos' unmasked as 'predatory paedophile'“

With typical headline-writer dignity, you can tell they were a breath away from writing something like: Professor Paulos picked a peck of prepubescent prey for perverted pleasures.

Professor Paulos is the stage name which Paul McKee used when performing for children.

McKee was convicted of 13 sex offenses and abusing seven girls, including toddlers, over a 24-year period.

According to the article, One woman left the courtroom in floods of tears saying "I'm going to pay someone to kill him, I want the fucking bastard dead" as the judge passed sentence.

Well, good news, it looks like the check cleared—at least partially— as a couple of weeks later someone kicked the shit out of him in prison, breaking his jaw, ribs, and vertebrae.

Eat shit, Mckee. You’re out of the GLOMM.

Big Game Fishing

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It’s annoying to see poorly executed verbal technique in magic. It’s one thing to see someone fumble with a sleight, that’s understandable. To master a sleight, you need to get good at doing it under the pressure of a live performance. And sometimes you’ll screw that up. That’s fine.

But when people have shitty verbal technique (like equivoque or fishing), it’s because they’re underestimating their audience, and they’ve just chosen to overlook a weakness in their method and perform the trick anyway.

My least favorite fishing technique in magic is when you have a couple of options—say a red card and a black card—and the magician says, “It’s not a red card, is it?” There are magicians who insist that this will be seen as a “hit” either way.

Sure, so long as you ignore your spectator’s reaction and how language works, that will be a hit.

Here’s a video example of how this technique actually goes over, taken from an old post…

Here is Devin Knight, trying to use this tactic in his recent Penguin Live lecture. You'll notice the spectator doesn't react as if Devin has provided information, she reacts as if she's giving him information, because she is. And what does the audience do? They laugh, because it such a shitty, obvious gambit that they assume he must have meant it as a joke.

Big Game Fishing is a technique for your fishing toolbox (well, tackle box, I guess) that doesn’t use some wishy-washy statement to get—at best—a soft hit. Instead, it uses some definitive statements to fish between two objects without there being—apparently—any misses.

Here’s how it works.

Imagine you’re performing for someone with the Snaps deck. You’ve used some techniques that allow them to mix the deck and perform the cross-cut force on themselves. As a final moment of apparent freedom, you tell them that while you turn away from them, they can look at the card on the bottom of the top packet or the top of the bottom packet (“either of the two cards at which you cut”).

Because of the way you set it up, you know they’re now thinking either a Ferris wheel or a tennis ball.

You write something down quickly and then start to tell them your impressions of what they’re thinking of.

Here are the two ways it might play out.

They’re thinking of the tennis ball

“Here’s what I’m picking up. This is something that you can hold in your hand, correct?”

Yes

“It’s not just something you could hold in your hand. You often hold it in your hand when using it. I’m picking up a definite form to it… but it’s not really hard like a wrench or something.”

Pause. Thinking for a moment.

“Yes, I think my first impression was correct. You’re thinking of a tennis ball.”

They’re thinking of the Ferris wheel

“Here’s what I’m picking up. This is something that you can hold in your hand, correct?”

No.

“Hmm… I’m pretty sure I’m right on this. You can hold it in your hand. It’s… like squishy. And maybe sticky too. Yes?”

Not at all.

“Yes… yes… I’m never wrong, and this is coming through so clearly. If I’m wrong about this [I tap the paper on the table] I’ll buy you dinner. What image were you thinking of?”

A Ferris wheel.

I turn over the paper on the table and it says Ferris wheel.

“That’s exactly what I was picking up from you. A sticky, soft, hand-held Ferris wheel.”

Big Game Fishing

That’s the technique, basically. You make a physical commitment to one option, but then you start verbally describing the other option.

If your verbal description is accurate, then you just ignore your physical commitment and put it away at some point without commenting on it. You put the slip of paper in your pocket or the card back in the deck. Writing something down or pulling out a card was just part of your process of honing in on the thought. It doesn’t need to be referenced or shown because you’ve already told them what they’re thinking of, so it would be redundant to say, “And look, that’s what I wrote down too.” Of course, it is.

But if your verbal description is inaccurate, then you further commit to it and make it even more wrong, so it seems like you’re wildly off track. Then, when it comes time to show what you wrote, it seems like your inaccurate statements were just to create tension, or to misdirect from the climax. You were just making a “big game” out of the reveal by pretending to be wrong. Of course, it doesn’t matter what you said, because you had made this clear, physical commitment to one word (or card or picture or whatever).

Magicians already use this sort of misdirect frequently in their tricks. They’ll make it seem like they’re off base before showing that they were actually correct. Here we’re just taking that theatrical gambit and using it as a methodological one.

This won’t fit into every sort of fishing procedure, but I use it quite frequently.

What I use this most with is probably the Hoy book test. I don’t usually say, “And look at the first word on the page.” Instead, I tell them to read the first line and think of an unusual or interesting word. I can usually narrow that down to two options, and then use this technique to apparently nail the one genuinely free choice of word from a “random” page in a book they freely chose that I’ve never seen before.

As always, point out any prior credits to me. I originally came up with it because I didn’t like the fishing that was used in John Bannon’s AK-47. But it took me a while to realize that it could be used more generally whenever you’re down to two options.

The Beta Test Performance Style

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I have no real goal behind writing this site. I’m not trying to convince anyone that I have the answers regarding how magic should be presented. I’m just documenting my journey in magic and the things that have worked for me. In fact, I would prefer the standard style of performing magic remain the standard. The meaningless effects, the dull routines, the scripted jokes… if that’s the standard, then the standard is something I can easily exceed when I perform. (And if you don’t think that’s the standard, then you’re oblivious.)

If I did have a goal of some sort, it would be to encourage the people who do resonate with this style of magic to actually perform more. I think there’s fucking far too much talking about magic online—that’s almost what the hobby of magic has become: yakking with other magicians online rather than taking the risk of trying to enchant someone in real life.

The Beta Test Performing Style is a training-wheels performing style that can get you off Facebook, off the magic café, and off YouTube and out showing people stuff.

It’s similar to the Peek Backstage style, but it’s even one more layer removed, so you have one more layer of self-preservation for those of you who are scared of performing.

In the Peek Backstage style, the idea is that you want to get their feedback for “something you’re working on.”

With the Beta Test style, you say something like, “Could I get your help with something? I’ve been asked to test out a new trick on a few people. Can I try it with you?”

Now, this assumes you’re saying it to someone who already knows you have an interest in magic. If you were just approaching someone at a bar or café or something, then you’d need to do a little more groundwork first.

This performance style is so low stakes that even the most pathetic of you can use it without feeling like you’re making yourself vulnerable in any way.

The subtext is: “This isn’t my idea, someone else asked me to do it. This isn’t my trick, it’s another guy’s trick that I’m testing for him.”

Your ego is not on the line at all. If they say the trick sucks, then you can be like, “Yeah, it does! I can’t wait to tell that other guy who is not me that his trick sucks!”

I hope you see how low pressure this is and that this can get some of you on the road to performing more. Don’t cloak yourself in this style all the time. As I said, use it as training wheels. Once you realize people are happy to watch something interesting and happy to engage with you via magic, then you can transition on to other styles.

Even if you’re someone who finds it easy to perform, there are a couple benefits of this style that you can take advantage of.

First, it broadens the world of magic for the person you’re performing for. It’s not just you learning tricks out of books or on YouTube. You’re testing out a trick for someone else. Who is this person? How did you two link up? From there, you can further broaden the scope of the magic world to talk about things like conventions and mentors and secret organizations and stuff like that.

Second, it frees up the spectator to be a little more generous with their criticism. If you say, “This is something I’m working on,” the majority of people will still be hesitant to tell you how they really feel—especially if you’re performing for friends or family. But if you tell them you’re testing out something for someone else, they usually feel a little more free to tell you what they really think, which can be helfpul when you’re testing something new.

There you go, hopefully you’ll find this of some use and the Beta Test Performing Style will get you out performing and transform you from a magic beta virgin to a magic Chad like myself.

Storyworthy

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As magicians, we are so immersed in the world of magic that it can be easy to forget how a non-magician might perceive an effect we show them. We are so familiar with tricks that our perspective is skewed.

So here’s a simple way to get yourself back into the non-magician’s mindset and give yourself a better understanding of how a trick might go over for a normal person. This simple heuristic will give you a good idea if a trick is worth performing for people or not.

Here’s how it works…

Don’t imagine yourself performing the trick for someone.

Instead, imagine yourself telling someone about the trick as if it was performed for you.

“So I picked a card and signed it, and then we put it in the middle of the deck, but it kept coming back to the top. The guy wasn’t doing anything at all. He’d just slide the card in the middle and the next thing you know, it was on top.”

You can probably see yourself telling that story.

But what about…

“So I shuffled the deck and cut off a packet of cards and secretly counted the number of cards I had and put them in my pocket. Then I dealt the deck into two piles, stopping whenever I wanted. Then I decided which pile would be the suit and which pile would be the value. So I turned the top card of each pile over and the value card was a four and the suit card was a diamond. So my target card was the 4 of Diamonds. Then we gathered the cards together, and we counted down to my number, that only I knew, and there at my secret number was my freely created card, the 4 of Diamonds.”

Would you tell that story? Probably not. So why would you perform a trick like that?

Isn’t the hope that when you perform a trick, it becomes a story they tell others (or at least themselves) in the future? If you wouldn’t tell that story, why would you expect them to?

Of course, there are ways to present such a trick in a more palatable way, but to get to that point, you have to be able to identify when a trick needs to be overhauled presentationally. Imagining yourself telling the story of a trick—and recognizing if it would feel awkward or dull to tell such a story—is an easy way to get yourself out of your magician’s mind and back into a human one.

Mailbag #97

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You recently mentioned that long tutorials aren’t necessarily a good thing. I just saw a phenomenal example of that. 

Craig Petty’s new release “Cube 52” is boasting a 9-hour video download. This is a good thing? I am overwhelmed just thinking about having to wade through 9 hours of video to find a decent trick. That’s a whole work day. Ridiculous. —MH

One time, I was in a long-ish distance relationship with a girl who lived in the Poconos, a couple of hours from where I was living in New York City. We were driving together through her small town and there was a sign on the side of the road. Not quite as big as a billboard, but still a very large sign that was clear from the road. It said:

See
Candles
Being
Made

I turned to my girlfriend and said, “That sounds like a punishment.”

I feel the same way when I hear, “Nine-hour instructional video.”

Look, the three volume Paul Harris Stars of Magic videos managed to perform and teach 37 wildly different tricks in less than 3 and a half hours.

I understand the impulse is to provide as much value as possible, but what about for the people that value their time?

These are cards with a Rubik’s cube back design and different colored faces.

There are apparently a lot of different things that can be done with these cards. But I would love an edited version of the instructions. Yes, I realize I could probably watch the first 45 minutes and get the basic ideas. But I don’t want the basic ideas, I want the best ideas. I want Craig to tell me from his experience what are the most powerful tricks. Which are the few that he is regularly performing the most?

I realize everyone’s hearts are in the right places with these long downloads. “Let’s give them all the ideas we have, and the history of the effect, and some unedited chit-chat about the trick, and multiple live performances of the same effect.” How can you complain about getting more? Especially when the hobby of magic is evolving to be less and less about performing for people and more about talking to other magicians about magic—on podcasts, and YouTube videos, and Facebook groups, and Discords. For most people, these long downloads are probably giving them what they want.

And if I were to fall in love with the trick, then sure, give me 9 hours to really savor all the ideas. But usually I’m in the mode that I just want to get out there and perform. Give me the Pareto Principle version of these downloads. Give me the essentials. I don’t need the deep cuts.

Re: Neo-Techniques

I understand very much where you want to get, and the double lift approach is good, but in the shuffling case not so much. The reason being is that they ARE capable of turning the top card of a deck, so its a matter of mimicking how a normal person does it. But they are NOT capable of shuffling a deck (and they know it), so in this case if we want to convey a shuffled deck, we cant mimic them. —BM

I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t fully agree. When people say they can’t shuffle, they mean just that, that they can’t shuffle. Because to them, “shuffling” often means the riffle shuffle with the waterfall, or something like that.

But if you said, “Can you mix these cards up?” They wouldn’t say, “Oh no, I’m incapable of that.” Because they can mix the cards. And that’s what we want them to believe. That the cards are “mixed” into an unknown state.

So, I believe it makes sense to make your mixing look like something your spectator would do or could do.

If people can relate to what you’re doing, they will be more amazed when the outcome surpasses anything that they could have made happen themselves. If you’re doing a one-handed shuffle with a waterfall (to take it to the extreme) then you are already doing something they can’t relate to, so the impossibility of the ending is lessened.

When you see a 6’10” athletic guy do an incredible dunk, it might be impressive, but it’s not unbelievable. But if some 5’6” chubby slob who looked like you took off from the foul-line and slammed it through the hoop, you would be shocked and amazed.

Whenever I can, I want to keep my handling of the props as familiar as possible to people so that the climax really feels wholly unexpected.

Re: The discussion of secret writing in Mailbag #94

I think the best way to disguise secret writing is to add another method to the trick that gets you the information you need to write _before_ the spectator thinks you have it, then pretend you have written it, but secretly write it _after_.

Simple example: someone picks any card; you thumbwrite the value on a business card; then reveal it

Disguised: Someone pushes any card out of a face down, marked deck. You read the value: Ace of Hearts. Pick up your business card and say “Before you did that, I predicted Ace of Hearts. Let’s see what you got." While they are turning over the card, you secretly write AH on the card and drop it on the table.

Among other things, this takes all the heat off the writing, because once you say the name of the predicted card, all attention turns to the card on the table. —PM

Yup, absolutely. If you can combine different techniques in your secret writing, you can remove the idea of secret writing altogether.

I have a friend who does this with WikiTest. He puts a folded business card on the table at the start of the effect and covers it with a glass. The person searches their word, and my friend writes it on a second (pre-folded and unfolded) business card in his lap. Then he can talk about a premonition he had the night before, and he wrote a word down a word on that business card. “For some reason, last night I was getting a clear vision of a groundhog. Is that what you were thinking of?”

While they react, he can casually remove the glass and unfold the business card, switching it in for the one he wrote in his lap.

By combining three deceptions: the WikiTest app, secret writing, and a billet switch, he has something truly impenetrable. (ABCM, as I said long ago.) Not only that, but all these methods take the weight off each other. Secret writing, when they believe the writing is already isolated somewhere, is easy to get away with. A billet switch that happens after the climax of a trick (after the word has been revealed) does not need to even be very good to get away with it. And the only “answer” to WikiTest (“somehow he must have seen what I searched”) is eliminated when you apparently wrote it the night before.

Dustings #92

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Regarding book tests that require you to know the page number the person is on [See Wednesday’s post], a friend of mine uses this technique and has had some great success with it. I’m changing some of the details because he doesn’t want to give away his actual routine at this point. But if you have someone think of something from a long list in the Xeno app, and then go to the page number at their list position in the book, then you’ll know the thing they’re thinking of, the page number, and your book-test reveal, all without them saying or doing anything.

So, for example, they think of any character from a list of 100 Marvel comic’s characters. You tell them to go to the page in your book of Aesop’s fables that matches up with the number on the list of the character they’re thinking of. You then have them insert the character they’re thinking of into the fable they’re reading, so they have this screwy hybrid thought in their mind which you can then reveal.

“I’m getting… The Thing… and he’s… chopping down a cherry tree? Is that what you’re thinking of?”

You could do this entirely remotely, assuming you left the spectator with the book (which you could do with Aesop’s Favorite Book Test, for example).

This is undoubtedly a convoluted way to get someone to a page in a book, but I think you could sell it that you’re trying to expand your mind-reading capabilities. And to do so, you have to springboard from a subject you know very well (in this case, Marvel Comics) to one you don’t know well (in this case, Aesop’s Fables). I think that sounds pretty reasonable.

AI Giveth

Speaking of Xeno (or Digital Force Bag), ChatGPT is excellent at coming up with long lists of things. Just ask it to provide you a list of a certain length of a certain subject, and you should get what you need with a little tweaking.

AI Taketh Away

I asked Dall-E-2 to create an image of Marvel Comic’s The Thing chopping down a cherry tree to illustrate the first section of this post and this is what it gave me.

AI sucks.

In yesterday’s post I asked for you to email me with any examples of “neo techniques” that mimic the way a beginner might handle cards. One clarification: the “slop shuffle” is not the way a beginner would mix cards, it’s the way a fucking imbecile would. Maybe there can be another set of techniques that mimic the way a spazzy dipshit would handle cards, but that’s not what I’m looking for here.

Neo Techniques

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I have a new project I’m starting for myself. And, like most of the projects I start for myself, I’ll share the details with you in the future if they’re worth sharing.

It started with a realization I had recently…

The less and less that people play cards in the real world, the more that when I hand a deck to people and ask them to shuffle, they do something that looks somewhat like a Charlier shuffle.

gif from TCMagick on youtube

This is great news because it means we have an easy false shuffle that mimics something people naturally do.

Similar to the philosophy behind the Neolift, I’m trying to collect techniques that mimic a non-card-handlers skills with cards.

I think when people watch an obviously skilled card magician, there is a limit to the sense of wonder they can feel. The magician’s feats can seem impressive to them, but I still get this sense that on some level they’re thinking…

“If what’s happening is magical… then when does he have to be so skilled?”

Of course, we know the audience isn’t going to really think they saw true “magic” when you show them a card trick, but why let them off the hook so easily by demonstrating skill with your card handling abilities?

I mean, unless the role you’re playing is one of a cardsharp, then you don’t gain anything by them thinking you’re good with a deck.

So I’m looking to collect some of these “neo techniques” (neo as in neophyte—as a beginner would handle things). You can help because a lot of you are more well-read than I and likely know of some techniques I haven’t heard of. So email me if there’s any specific sleights or techniques you think fit the bill. If there are enough of these techniques to make an interesting post in the future, I will do so.