Dustings #101

Happy New Year Andy!

I assume this has already reached your radar - but in case it has not. 

Ellusionist has put out a new trick with Kevin Li and Hanson Chien: 

Now, these are some great creators and the trick seems decent enough - a morphing/changing [pen cap impression].

But I can't help but think one of the stamp options is unnecessary... seen around 0:58, 0:59, and 1:05. 

Here's a spoiler:

Anyway, probably hilarious when performing for some drunk college kids, but IDK, seems unnecessary. —SV

Hmm…

My thinking is this… I sometimes do magic tricks that are dumb and sophomoric, and those can be fun and get a good reaction (for what they are).

The thing is, I would never waste a good trick for this kind of reaction. Because the “I’m profoundly amazed by this” reaction, isn’t really compatible with the, “this is so stupid and funny” reaction. They’re different parts of the brain, or something.

So including this reveal in the package makes me think that they think it’s not a very strong trick. Otherwise, why would you use it for this corny reveal?

Of course, the other thing to keep in mind is that this is coming from Ellusionist. Ellusionist releases a lot of good material, but they also have a history of pandering to the world’s dumbest magicians. So it might be the case where they think, “Yes, this is a great trick. But let’s add the dick reveal to it, too, in order to appeal to our clientele of fucking imbeciles.”

So yeah, I wouldn’t judge the trick necessarily based on this one hokey reveal. (But it’s also hard to judge it based on the trailer, as it doesn’t really show what the trick looks like, which is never a great sign.)

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If you haven’t built out your repertoire of tricks yet, the beginning of the year is a great time to start. Work towards finding and learning one trick per week for your repertoire and you will have a full 52 trick repertoire by the end of the year. That’s massive when compared to most magicians I know who only really keep a handful of tricks in their brain ready to be unleashed.

It might help to have some categories in your mind so that the tricks flesh out your repertoire in a way that you want them to. (Maybe limit your self to half card tricks, and you have to have at least half non-card tricks. Or make sure at least 50% of the ones you learn this year are impromptu. Or whatever your goals are.)

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Watch this video as homework for next Wednesday’s post.

Your Kiss Is On My List

Today was supposed to be a post showing an example of what I feel is a perfect “routine” (as I mentioned in Tuesday’s post).

But instead, I have a timely trick I’d like to share with you that I wanted to get out quickly. (The other post will go up next Tuesday.)

This is best if you’re with a group.

The way it works is this…

You turn to one of the people and say:

“I want to try something with you. I can’t do it with anyone else here but you. First, I want you to put your mind into the headspace of ultimate pleasure. I want you to imagine the best time of your life. Okay? Perfect. Now I want you to name a random 2-digit number. A number that feels genuinely like it has no association with anything you’re thinking of.”

Your friend says 55.

You open your notes app and show your friend a list of 100 names. At 55 is their name!

As your friend or, ideally, other members of the party show some interest in what just happened, they will hopefully ask about this list of people. Who are they? What is this list?

“Oh, it’s nothing really. That’s not important.”

As you casually scroll back up to show the name of this record of people in your note: Jeffrey Epstein Client List.

Method

You know the method.

This is a fleshed out write-up of an idea that came from the R&D Team at The Journal of Psience who simply emailed me:

DFB + Epstein List

Yes, yes, you don’t need to lecture me. I know this is dark subject-matter. I know it’s referencing something traumatic. I get all of that. The impact of a joke (and this is more joke than trick) is often predicated on the awfulness of what it touches on. If it’s too inappropriate for you or the people you surround yourself with, then don’t even consider doing it, of course.

I’ve never seen any correlation between the actual decency of a person and the stuff they’re willing to joke about (if anything, I’ve seen an inverse correlation) so I’m not worried about it.

The true reason not to do this trick is that it somewhat “burns” DFB for your audience as a method. And you’d be burning it for something that’s not the strongest trick. But it may be worth it to you in order to do something so timely and something that paints one of your friends as a total creep.

[The easiest way to make the list is to ask ChatGPT to give you a list of 100 male full names in random (not alphabetical) order. Then populate the beginning of the list with some recognizable names of actual clients.]

Influence: The PsychCrypt Imp

It’s very rare for me to stumble over a premise out in the real world that requires absolutely no manipulation to make it work with a magic trick, but a couple of weeks ago, I found just that.

Now, early last year I did a whole series of posts on the Influence premise. My issue with it for social magic is that my friends and family know I’m not a master of influence. And if I was, I’d be using that skill to get my landlord to give me a discount on my rent, or cops to let me out of speeding tickets. I wouldn’t be using it to make you choose a particular poker chip.

It’s also as premise that feels very “thirsty” to me. “I’m so clever I can make you do things against your will!” That’s something I maybe wanted to convince people of when I was 13. I’m a grown ass man now.

I’d rather go with a clearly unbelievable premise than something people might be tempted to believe, or (worst of all) something people might think that I want them to believe. What would be more pathetic than a guy using a trick in hopes that you’d think he was smart and persuasive?

This variation on the influence premise is pretty wild, but it’s not something someone could completely dismiss.

It’s predicated on this fun fact (?) I read recently:

The premise sort of works itself out from there.

You have someone over for drinks or dinner. At some point you show them a short video clip or have them listen to a snippet of audio.

Later on, they’re able to perceive something which normally they wouldn’t.

Let’s take a look at it with just a standard card force. (For illustration only, this is no way to actually do it.)

Boring Magician Version

“Look, I wrote down ‘You will touch the 10 of Diamonds.’ It wasn’t really a free choice after all. I actually influenced you to touch the 10 of Diamonds.

PsychCrypt Version

“What card did you get? The 10 of Diamonds?? Haha… jesus… well… I guess I’m a real magician because I wrote down, ‘You will touch the 10 of Diamonds.’ I can’t believe that really works.”

Your friend will be a little confused by your reaction.

“Okay, I admit. It wasn’t a magic trick. Have you ever heard of P$ychade1ic Crypt0graphy?” [Altered spelling so this site doesn’t show up in a google search for that term. It’s not super widely known.]

You then explain that you laced their broccoli cheddar soup with a certain chemical compound that allowed them to perceive a certain embedded message in the video you made them watch earlier. (I wouldn’t claim it was LSD.)

You then queue the video up to a different spot and try another experiment.

✿✿✿

Believable? Not exactly. But you still wouldn’t want to perform it for someone who doesn’t know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t actually slip something into their food or drink. But as a fictional story to immerse someone in, it’s so much more interesting than, “I influenced you to touch that card!”

You can read more about this concept here.

And here’s a generic PsychCrypt video you can use as part of your Imp (you would want to hide the title from them initially). I used white nosie, so you can claim the commands are embedded in the video or the audio. Don’t make anyone watch the whole thing, of course. Just, like, a 30 second snippet.

How to Routine Tricks Together

I saw an interesting coin routine the other day that I liked quite a bit and wanted to bring to your attention. I’ll mention the individual effects first and try to figure out why these tricks make such a good routine.

• First, the magician performed a Chink-A-Chink effect

• From there he went into a Coins Across trick with the coins.

• Then he let one of the spectators “choose” a coin and he did a coin bite with it.

• And he closed by pushing the remaining Coins Through the Table one-by-one.

Why is this such a good routine? Can you figure it out? Why do these tricks go so well together?

I’ll tell you the secret. The reason these tricks go so well together is because they are the first four tricks listed in Wikipedia under the subject of Coin Magic.

“Huh?”

I’ll explain…

When putting together a string of magical moments or effects, we tend to think in terms of a “routine.”

“Here’s my ambitious card routine. The card goes into the middle and comes to the top. Then it goes into the middle again and goes to the top. Then it goes into the middle again… and goes to my wallet! As a kicker, the deck disappears!!”

But is there any difference in magic between the way we use the word “routine” and the way we would describe the output of a machine that randomly spits out various magic tricks/moments? The card goes to the top of the deck twice, then it goes to the wallet, then the deck disappears—this is a routine only because those moments were strung together. There’s nothing else that qualifies this as a routine.

And if the only thing that qualifies this as a routine is because the effects were placed side-by-side, then the term “routine” is essentially meaningless.

“This is my routine” just means “These are the tricks I’m performing back-to-back.”

The title of this post is “How To Routine Tricks Together”

The answer is: Don’t.

Don’t “routine” tricks together.

This is true especially when performing in social situations.

Think in terms of story rather than “routine.”

You have a story you want to tell, and these tricks when put together are going to tell that story.

That’s it. That’s how you put tricks together. If your tricks don’t tell a cohesive story, then there’s no reason to do them together.

This, of course, is a much higher bar than just “routining” tricks together. The reason I could pick the first four tricks alphabetically from the Coin Magic entry and you didn’t immediately call it out as bullshit as far as being a “routine,” is because deep down we know the word doesn’t have any weight. Whereas, if I said, “I have a great recipe.” And said it consisted of the first four ingredients I found alphabetically in my kitchen:

• Almonds

• Albacore tuna

• Anchovies

• Apricot sorbet

You’d probably know I was fucking with you. Because we expect something from a “recipe.”

Calling something a “routine” is just a lazy way of justifying performing a bunch of tricks rather than one.

If you need a more concrete example, on Thursday, I’ll describe one of the strongest three-trick stories you can do.

Mailbag #105 - Christmas Party Wrap-Up

Happy New Year, Everyone!!!

Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

No! I submit that it should not.

I got a lot of feedback regarding last month’s Christmas Spectacular. I thought I’d take this week’s mailbag to address some of the general responses I got.

“Thank you!”

You’re welcome! But really, don’t thank me. Thank the people who contributed. And I mean that literally. If there was someone who contributed something that you found to be of value, please reach out to them in some way if you haven’t already. It’s one thing to hear it from me, but I’m sure it will mean much more coming from the people who consumed the material.

“So, is this going to be an annual Christmas tradition?”

No!

Here’s the thing, part of the reason I can put a call out to 36 magicians and get 33 contributions in return is because I never do this. This was the first time in eight and a half years that I asked other magicians to submit something to the site. If I started doing it regularly, even if it was only annually, there would be diminishing returns.

So no, don’t expect this to return next Christmas.

That being said, any magicians who want to share something on the site are always free to. (I mean… if it’s good.) This site is one of the few places where you can share ideas with a large world-wide audience who all have a genuine interest in magic. People aren’t just casually perusing this site because they have a fleeting interest in magic. The site is just too dense for that.

So yeah, while the Christmas party was likely a one-off thing (or I’ll do it again in another 8 and half years (Summer 2032 Christmas party, y’all!!)). I’m always open to sharing stuff from other magicians on the site.

“How much was written ahead of time?”

For each entry, I had four things:

1. The guests’ contribution.

2. What time I was going to put their post up.

3. A couple words about what I might write about leading up to their contribution.

4. Anything they were working on that they wanted me to mention.

I wrote that on index cards. And all night I just went from one card to the next. So, for example, with Andi Gladwin I had a card that looked like this.

I’m an incredibly slow writer, generally. Not a slow typer, but a slow writer. As in, slow to organize my thoughts and put them forward in an intelligible way.

The only exception to this is the type of goofball bullshit that introduced many of the posts. That shit flows out of me. But still, trying to write and edit and format a couple of posts every hour was pretty rough.

“What the hell happened in the middle of the night?”

Okay… first, let me start with what my thinking was in regard to how to present the material originally. I decided to make it one long post even though I knew that would be harder for me and harder for the reader. My thinking was, at least on that night, I wanted people to experience the post as if they were travelling through a party. When you go to a party, you come in and wind your way through from room to room and interact with different people as you go. So even if there’s one person in particular you want to see, you still have to work your way to that person. That was the idea of the long post. You had to scroll all the way through to get to who you most wanted to see.

About nine hours in, this became unmanageable. The post that I was repeatedly editing became too long and unwieldy, and every change I was making in the background was super slow to load, which just made it unusable when I was trying to edit and change things quickly. So I broke it off and started a second post around 1:30 am.

So I start in on a second post at that point, and all was going fine until 3am or so when I realized the first post was gone. It wasn’t on the site. And it wasn’t on my dashboard in Squarespace. Just poof 💨

I’ve had posts disappear before, but not posts I spent 9 hours straight writing.

Duplicating effort is my least favorite thing in the world. I’d rather have to walk an additional 5 miles than walk backwards half a mile to get something I forgot. So seeing that post disappear was a gut punch. And it was made worse by my choice to write it live and make it all one post. If I hadn’t done one or the other of those, it would have been the mildest of inconveniences. But the confluence of all those things made it a disaster.

As I was contemplating how to deal with this (while still trying to get the other posts written) I put a message in the announcement at the top of the page that if anyone happened to have the site open in another tab or on another device and they hadn’t refreshed the page recenly, I wanted them to email me so they could copy and paste everything over to me. It was a long-shot, but in the end, with the help of Seth R. and Dan C., I was able to get everything back up by, I think, like 9 or 9:30 in the morning. It meant reformatting and publishing 150 or so graphic elements, text blocks, and all that stuff. But it was better than the alternative in my mind of either writing it all up again a week later, or just saying fuck it and setting the blog on fire.

“How long did you crash for afterward?”

Three hours. I had Christmas plans all the following day with friends.

The timing wasn’t well-thought-out.

Staying up all night isn’t that foreign to me, so it wasn’t that bad. What was bad is that after staring at my laptop screen for 17 hours straight, I couldn’t see anything. Everything was super fuzzy. I prayed, “Please don’t let me lose my eyesight because I tried to write a magic blog for 17 hours.” I didn’t want to have to explain that to others.

Fortunately, god answered my prayers and my vision went back to normal after a day or so.

All-in-all, it was a fun experience. The feedback has been great. But it will likely never happen again.

Oh!

One thing I forgot to mention as I was dealing with sleep-deprivation and losing all the work from earlier in the night was what Caleb Wiles asked me to share on his post. So I’m going to highlight it here.

Caleb is the president of a non-profit called Magic For a Cause. Their mission is in three parts, per their website.

1. We organize magic shows to raise funds for charitable causes. All proceeds go straight to the charity... we never take a cut.

2. We provide magic instruction to empower young people to develop social skills and confidence.

3. We engage in community outreach to perform magic for underserved groups (such as children’s hospitals, foster care group homes, etc.)

If you are interested in donating, please check out the site at the link above.

Caleb also says… “I'm also looking for people who are interested in helping with the project overall (graphic design, website design, custom print services, submitting easy-to-do tricks, etc.) If anyone is willing to contribute, they can reach out to me directly at caleb@MagicForACause.org “ Do it!

Jerx Christmas - So Long - 7:34 AM

Okay, everyone. The sun is up. We’re cooking breakfast here at the Jerx party house. About half of us made it all through the night, the other half are waking up as I type this.

I hope you had a good time. I’m exhausted. Sometime after Christmas, I’ll break the holiday post up into its component parts so it’s not such a bitch to navigate.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all!

Jerx Christmas - Justin Flom - 7:25 AM

Guy’s I’m super excited. All night I’ve been trying to wrangle this trick out of Justin Flom.

He was hesitant to give it up at first. But I think the combination of sleep deprivation along with gallons of mulled wine, dozens of christmas cookies, and a nearly lethal dose of holiday cheer have warmed his heart to the point that he has decided to share it with us.

As Justin presents it, it’s already a strong trick. But if you personalize it, I think it has the power to be a strong and emotionally resonant trick.

Before we get to that, let’s let Justin explain.

After Justin recorded that, we went and looked up how difficult it is to create those one line drawings yourself. So you could do this trick with anyone’s image. Your girfriend’s beloved grandfather. The president of your company. The four-year old who got dragged off by that falcon at whose memorial service you’ve been inexplicably asked to perform magic.

Honestly, it doesn’t look that difficult. It looks pretty easy, actually. Although I’m sure it’s not really that easy. But it seems like the sort of thing a capable artist would be willing to do for you custom for pretty cheap. Or you could muddle through it yourself.

But imagine taking it a step further…

You come out with a completely blank deck of cards. Blank on both sides. Cards are distributed out to people and they’re also given a marker to do a random scribble in the manner you tell them. The line should start on one side of the card and go off another side or the same side. They can make a little loop or other simple shape, or just keep it a curve or straight line. Something simple. And you gather all the cards together and mix them, and now their own random doodlings combine to make the bride’s face, or whatever.

You’d have your 16 card set-up that’s blank on one side, and 25 (or however many) more fully blank cards. Start by giving them a few truly blank cards and showing them how to do the random scribbles on one side. Then take them back. You’re handing out a few at a time, so they’re not really sure how many there are altogether. Once all the cards have scribbles on one side, you pass everything out again to have them scribble on the other sides as well.

With cards going in and out, being scribbled on by multiple people, it would not be difficult to hide the fact that 16 of them started out with scribbles on one side. What would be difficult is making sure you distribute them and re-collect them in a way that keeps your stack in order.

It may just make more sense to swap in your stack at some point when you’re collecting up the cards. Either way, I love the idea of the collective unconsciously creating this image of someone special.

Even if your one line portrait wasn’t super smooth and crisp, that doesn’t matter. If it even hints at the portrait of someone important, that’s a miracle.