• Last Minute Thoughts on Blackpool

    Category:

    I wish I were going. Maybe next year. No, I’ll manifest it. Definitely next year. The Secret works!

    Timon Krause’s book sounds great. I’m very hyped up for it. I don’t know much about it (cold reading?), but everything Timon releases is golden. Hopefully, there are a few less footnotes in this one though. Or, hell, if Harrison Greenbaum loves them, so can I, I guess. I can learn to love footnotes. I can become a footnote fetishist.

    New force options for Random Card Generator by Plainsight Magic! Fuck yeah! The only problem with Random Card Generator is that it’s one of the forces I most want to repeat later on and use it for other tricks.

    Not a new release, but Babu’s Nest of Wallets is amazing. Snap buttons? And you pull the wallets out face up? Brilliant.

    The Atomic Deck is, of course, going to be very exciting. I can’t wait for us to review it and finally not shit on Craig Petty.

    (more…)
  • How To Spend Your Time At A Magic Convention

    Category:

    Franklin was supposed to write this post. Unfortunately, Franklin died from Covid after attending a recent convention. (Editor’s note: This is not true.) He did get his notes to me before perishing, though, and I’m going to see what I can do with them.

    1. Come a day early and make sure you’re caught up on sleep.

    It’s really nice to not have to worry about checking into two things the day that you get there, and catching up on sleep will pay off handsomely over the course of the convention. But if you can’t do this, at least do this next one…

    2. Stay as close to the venue as you can, if possible the same hotel.

    Many of these should speak for themselves, and this is one. Even if the hotels are next to each other, it’s impossible to overstate how convenient it is to be able to stop by your room in under 2 minutes. Which isn’t possible if you aren’t in the same hotel as the convention.

    (more…)
  • Odds and Ends #8: The Burgle Ass Effect

    Category:

    We’re big fans of David Berglas and Mark Elsdon here. So when Murphy’s Magic and Craig Petty released promo for a seemingly perfect version of ACAAN, with a glowing endorsement from Mr. Elsdon, we were very excited! There’s just one tiny problem…

    That’s not just once, either. The entire page was loaded with this typo. Great quality control as always, Murphy’s. (Hey, at least we’re beating up on Murphy’s and not Petty this time, right?) I really love how you put the word ass in the name of one of the greatest magicians to ever do it.


    Alright, I know how this looks. We abandoned the schedule and almost as quickly abandoned the site, right? Why else would we have no posts for you for almost a month?

    (more…)
  • Notes on the Number Forcing Stack

    Category: ,

    Editor’s note: Now that we don’t have a schedule, I can do important things like schedule posts for the 7th day of the month.

    There’s a long history in magic of using a deck of cards to force a number by adding up the values of cards. A significant portion of this history is devoted to the 14/15 stack. I think it was the most popular primarily because it was the first.

    Today, I’m taking a stand for the 13/14 stack.1 And I’m adding plenty of footnotes just for you footnote fetishists.2

    To be clear, a 13/14 stack is one in which every pair of adjacent cards sums to 13 or 14. I think a 13/14 stack originates with P. Howard Lyons’ “Northern Force”. He explains how to set it up from new deck order with a Klondike shuffle. Sure, great, but who has the time for a Klondike shuffle? And besides which, that only works in a “new deck order” where all the suits are arranged Ace to King, and decks aren’t usually arranged that way today. That’s actually good news, since the modern new deck order permits setting up a 13/14 stack with a single perfect faro.

    Fast stack from NDO

    (more…)
  • New Year, New E-Mail

    Category:

    You can now email us individually again. Sorry about that before. Please email one of us about an article of theirs that you liked, or a question you might have. Especially because after my boneheaded decision to put everything together into one excessively long email address, we got exactly one reader email in the following months. Besides, every time we get an email the team jumps for joy. One big synchronized leap. It’s beautiful, you should see it.

    That’s drew@themagicoval.com, franklin@themagicoval.com, anne@themagicoval.com, and jerry@themagicoval.com.

    I can still be reached at themagicoval@themagicoval.com.


    We’re going to get even weirder in 2025. For example…

    (more…)
  • Prelude: This post was never published, and for good reason. And it’s a Sunday, not a Wednesday. Anyway, Mark Elsdon saw fit to honor us and especially me by linking to my review of Crazy Sam’s Mind in his yearly wrap-up. As a result, I’m bringing shame upon this website by publishing this piece of crap merely a few hours later while we’re supposed to be on a break. Isn’t it fun to not have a schedule anymore? I’m loving it, guys. Guys? Just me here? Well, here’s the post anyway.


    So I didn’t point out that James Hydrick is a pedophile in my review of Crazy Sam’s Mind, and I didn’t point out that I don’t actually explicitly base my presentation around the story of James Hydrick. Look, it was meant to be a review post, not a presentation post. However, given that I called it the James Hydrick Presentation, an admittedly clumsy move, I may as well dedicate another Wednesday post to breaking down this presentation, especially now that I’ve done it a few more times.

    Here’s how I actually perform Crazy Sam’s Mind.

    (more…)
  • Bricking Around with Drew Perry’s “Bricked”

    Category:

    Editor’s disclaimer: The main point isn’t the review, it’s the clever ideas Franklin had. Of note even if you aren’t interested in the product: How to make an object appear to fall out of a card, a bit of card-to-location theory, and an example of applying the Chinese Knockoff presentation.


    First, a quick review: Drew Perry’s freshman release with Alakazam is really a piece of work. If you’ve seen the trailer, you have an idea of exactly what you’re getting, but I promise you it’s a lot more well-thought-out than you might be imagining. So I’ll just spell it out for you in case you were considering it:

    You get the (generic) Lego gimmick that you’ll use the same way as an Omni Deck or a Solid Deception gimmick. It’s made out of plates and can be disassembled as you like. You get a full custom Lego-themed deck which is worth the price by itself if you’re a collector. (They promise to sell refill decks if you want the deck only.) It contains 63 cards, and looking through it when I first opened it was the most excited I’ve been opening a deck since Piff The Magic Dragon’s deck. (I think Piff’s deck may be more exciting on the whole, what with getting to turn the box into a Tacular, but it feels like as much or more creativity has gone into the Bricked deck.) The back design looks exactly like the gimmick, including being a one-way design, a feature useful in a handful of ways.

    On top of that, you get 3 hours of tutorials for routines to do with the deck from Drew (Editor’s note: Not our Drew.) and Craig Petty. There’s some great ideas in here for most of the gaffs and there’s a lot of classic routines in addition to ones constructed with these cards in mind, especially from Craig. There are plenty of things you can pick on the guy for, but when it comes to putting together worthwhile paid material, he will give you your money’s worth.

    (more…)
  • Holiday Hiatus and Schedule Scuttling

    Category:

    The holidays! So joyous. If you’ve been a reader for a while, you’ll know that we usually do a little something for any holiday that a post day falls on. Unfortunately, we won’t have the opportunity to do that this year. Even though Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year, this won’t be because we stopped doing posts on Wednesdays. Instead, this will be because we won’t be doing any posts for the latter half of December at all.

    Why the late notice? Well, a weekly schedule is a tricky thing. We finalized this decision almost two weeks ago, but it was too late to add it to the errata post and we weren’t going to subject you to two non-magical posts in a row.

    As a result, we’re doing away with the schedule as well. For real this time.

    Okay, trouble making announcements is far from the only reason, or even the biggest reason, but I wanted to get all the important news out of the way before the part where you have to click to see the rest of the post. Speaking of which…

    (more…)
  • Conducting Trains and Bones

    Category: ,

    This is an idea for those of you who use bone conduction devices.

    I always thought it was great that you could play your own audio file (on most if not all of the devices currently available). The stock audio preloaded onto the device was always some creepy robotic sounding voice. The script would usually be something uninspiring like “You are thinking of the Two of Hearts.” Whose voice is that supposed to be, yours? Or a voice from a random person?

    When I was fooling around with the device I was using (Inception by ProMystic), I opted to use my own voice. But it still felt like a recording, like a fake moment.

    I watched many performances that included bone conductors online, and it was easy enough to infer from the reactions that the performers were just using the default voices that came with their devices (shame on them). The reactions made by the audience members who had the device used on them would be vague things like saying: “I heard a voice,” or “I heard a man’s voice.” There was nothing in the reactions to indicate anything noteworthy about the voice.

    I wanted to find a voice that would make sense within the context of the trick. I wanted it to truly feel like a mind trip. Rather than the people being confused hearing the voice, I wanted the voice to be an affirmation of sorts.

    Here’s what I came up with.

    (more…)
  • Excessive Errata, Non-Jerry Edition

    Category:

    Synthesis & Secrets, which we reviewed upon initial release, is now available again in extremely limited quantities. If you’re interested, you should snatch a copy up immediately. It won’t be reprinted for a long time if ever, and never again as hardcover.


    Anyway, it’s time to cover some mistakes that we’ve made. Unlike other errata we’ve issued in the past, each erratum here will be for someone other than Jerry, if you can believe it.

    Also, there will be useful tips and some news, so click through if you don’t want to miss out.

    (more…)

Subscribe

Sign up with your email address to receive an email when there’s a new post.
We respect your privacy and would sooner die than give your email away. See our full privacy policy on the Et cetera page.

Search


Categories


annemann app magic bad tricks card index card magic coin magic convention craig petty dai vernon daniel madison darwin ortiz david berglas david copperfield drew equivoque green latrine holiday impromptu james randi jason ladanye jay sankey jazz jerry jerx john bannon juan tamariz justin miller karl fulves lloyd barnes marc kerstein mark elsdon mentalism meta nonfluff obituary paul harris presentation psy force stack story tarbell timon krause trick vanishing inc youtube


Archive