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Read more: Making Your Anagrams Commute
Editor’s note: After introducing frontloaded progressive anagrams, which give your typical progressive anagram a couple of the perks of a perfect progressive anagram, Franklin announces the definition of a new category of branching anagram based off of perfect transgressive anagrams. This post assumes you are familiar with the concept of transgressive anagrams (TAs), perfect TAs,…
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Read more: Toward Better Progressive Anagrams
Editor’s note: This commences Anagram August with a superior type of progressive anagram. For an introduction and anagram trainer tool, see the previous post. For some reason, at some point, someone looked at the idea of fishing for a mentally selected word by asking whether it contained certain letters and said, “that’s an anagram!” despite…
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Read more: In Defense of Lecture Patter
Hello from the land of surf and Spam musubi, where you tip the beach boys by day and Shoot Ogawa by night. That’s right, as I write this I’m absorbing the mana of Hawai’i. I’m not sipping a Mai Tai on the beach, unfortunately. I’m in an airport lounge punching keys on my laptop and…
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Read more: Phantom at the Magic Festival
The blog was in full force at Mystify Magic Festival. If we did our job right, nobody realized we were super cool magic bloggers, but we were taking notes. We are immensely thankful to all involved for putting on the event. There were a lot of really important discussions going on, and seeing the turnout…
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Halal Magic
Category: essayRead more: Halal MagicTell all the truth but tell it slant —Success in Circuit lies Emily Dickinson This post is inspired by a Muslim magician I once met, who taught me a valuable lesson about halal magic. If you’re not familiar with Islam, just pretend I met George Washington instead. The point is what kind of magic someone…
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Read more: Notes on the Number Forcing Stack
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…
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Read more: Zen and the Art of EmotiPsychic Maintenance
The Notes A note from the Editor: This post is unrelated to The Zen of Magic: Avoiding Method Overloading. A note from Drew regarding when and how this post was written: I first had this idea during my final year at university. I was taking a mysticism and occult class (religious studies) and we were…
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Cut Your Nails
Category: essayRead more: Cut Your NailsOkay, so I attended Cardistry-Con. After reading the title and the first sentence you’re probably assuming this will just be about hygiene at Cardistry-Con. It isn’t. Stick with me, it’ll be worth it. But to bury the lede for a moment, the event itself was stimulating, and it was inspiring to see so many talented…
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Read more: The Zen of Magic: Avoiding Method Overloading
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. Alan Perlis In Self-Working Coin Magic, Karl Fulves poses the following puzzle: Can you arrange six pennies on the table so that each coin is touching four others? It’s not a particularly difficult puzzle. A mathematician might note “Ah, you’re describing an…
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Memorability: A Misguided Proxy Metric
Category: essayRead more: Memorability: A Misguided Proxy MetricWelcome to the final post in our series on memorability. In the last post, Jerry referenced the “Magic By The Numbers” survey, and in particular, the open-ended question that was used to explore what magical audiences expect to get from a live show. While the raw responses are not available, the summary does not mention…
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