Monthly Archives: August 2020

I don’t really want to spend this month showing you tutorials and stuff for Magic. It’s a discipline with a lot of different ways to learn, including numerous extremely technical books and documents and one-on-one demonstrations. What’s grown in popularity these days is jargon-light videos, where you’ll see someone show you how to do things, with simple terms used to describe them as opposed to the deliberately obscure and difficult form of our discipline. Between being a literal criminal subculture and the scholarship being spread across numerous countries, there’s a host of things magicians do that are described in a user-hostile language of unhelpful bullshit.

Youtube, however, has been pretty good at establishing new language for this stuff. Particularly, there are a few channels that mostly are just archives of tricks, demonstrated and given clear, specific explanations. There are, in essence, only about seven fundamental structures to a magic trick, but it’s not a discipline where knowing that unpacks anything for you; you may know that there’s been a ditch or a load at some point, but that doesn’t mean you have any idea which of the two it is. If you know your principles, though, Sankey does a great job of showing you a lot of different tricks that use the same small number of skills. What’s more, Sankey does something I see a lot of magicians avoid, which is that he’s inclined to use gimmicks, and he teaches you how to make them.

This makes sense: Sankey is trying to make money, and the ways he does this is with long-form instructionals and things like printable and digitally distributed gimmicks. This is not strange at all. It’s still a pleasant thing to see, because it’s often surprising how many magicians simply do not approach gimmicks these days – deck prep, sure, but things like ironing labels or creating fake gum wrappers, that’s its own discipline and it merits respect.

(Though uh, one of his recent tricks involves blowing air into a bag of food, which, you know, maybe don’t do that right now.)

Now, before I recommend this channel: Sankey is not, as far as I know, a dude who’d be considered ‘of my circles.’ I have no doubt given his style of patter and his general demeanour that he might drop some casually unpleasant or thoughtless joke, because the point of patter is to disrupt your attention, meaning that they always veer towards the racy and the rude even as they involve the self-deprecating. There’s going to be use of the word ‘insane’ and ‘crazy,’ in a lighthearted way, but it’s still a lot.

There is a nonzero chance that Sankey’s channel has, somewhere in its huge pile of videos, Jay saying something that’s pretty awful, and probably pretty awful in that thoughtless, ‘didn’t even think this was a thing to care about’ kind of way. I’d love to be surprised, but to be able to vouch for him I’d need to be able to watch every single video and then also be expert enough in all the ways he makes jokes to know for sure. I just want to make sure if you’re checking him out, that this guy is not carrying a Talen Seal of Approval.

Still, it’s a good resource for a wide variety of simple, approachable tricks, and over time you will see with a fairly random assortment of tricks that look interesting, the library of ideas that tricks like these are based on. You can check out his channel here.

There’s another added bit of weirdness here. Sankey was on Penn and Teller’s Fool Us, which is a show that has a lot of weight in the magic community, and maybe I’ll talk a bit about it and what they ‘value’ in terms of magic tricks. But Sankey went on Fool Us, and he did a routine and they talked about it nicely, and he ceded, on stage, that he hadn’t succeeded at fooling them, then he left.

Then on the internet, he claimed that he had in fact, fooled them, because that was his plan all along. This … looks dumb. Penn and Teller didn’t really say anything about it, though on a podcast, Penn did cite Sankey  specifically for a type of magician who was doing very expected things, and how they had to winnow out acts that were like that, because they weren’t at risk of fooling them.

Now, lots of people who go on Fool Us are effectively just building brand. They’re making sure they get seen and they’re promoting themselves with the segment – and the praise from the magicians is important. Magicians are also extremely egotistical people, and often quite obnoxious.

Not that it matters, but if you want a ‘truth’ from me here, I’d say that Sankey almost certainly didn’t fool Penn and Teller; that the line once off-set was an attempt to build his own brand further; and that Penn and Teller do not care that much about his claims to have ‘double fooled’ them because they’re both millionaires and some of the greatest in their craft. Does this make him kind of an asshole? Kind of? But magic is, sadly, a place where most of the luminaries of the form are all Hatsune Miku.

Okay, so, story time.

You need to know two pieces in this story. The first to know is a guy called Dai Vernon. Dai Vernon was one of the Old Great Men of magic. The dude looked like Colonel Sanders or Mark Twain if their particular fields of interest was sleight of hand magic. A number of modern magicians now are people who were trained by or who were given the opportunity to learn at the tables of experts who were themeslves maybe lucky to have been taught by Dai Vernon.

Hm, okay, maybe not quite conveying it.

Dai Vernon was contemporary to, and famously fooled Houdini.

Man, fuck this guy,

JJ Abrams is a person with an overwhelming position of power in modern media. Bequeathed with positions of power and seen as a reliable director to helm projects ranging from Justice League movies, Star Trek movies, a few Stars War, and a variety of other projects, Abrams is ostensibly responsible for shaping the last decade of geek culture in a way that single individuals rarely can. His particular basic assumptions, his values, inform a host of movies that are then propogated outwards by the work of other esteemed individuals, who can choose to reinforce or resist his perspective with how they do their work.

I don’t think that he’s never made a good movie, if only because I’ve not seen them all, and I don’t think he’s fundamentally incapable of making a good movie, because hey, that’s a really silly categorical way of thinking, but it’s not his movie making that bugs me.

It’s how he talks about his movie making.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase magic box or mystery box in the past few years, chances are good it’s because of Abrams. He even did a TED talk about it, which is almost a punchline in and of itself, though, I shouldn’t be too down on TED talks because TED talks do tend to bring actual magicians out and let you see stuff they do. If you want to see some really showy stuff, check out Hannibal and Lennart Green, who’ve both done demonstrations of magic.

What Abrams likes trotting out is a Mystery Box, an item he bought at a garage sale, unopened, which is a box of magic tricks made to be bundled and sold cheaply. Despite purchasing the box, Abrams claims to have never opened it, to have never looked inside, because as long as he doesn’t do that, the box contains a mystery.

His principle, the magic box idea that he likes to trot out and treat as a revolutionary idea for storytelling, is the idea that people should have some feeling of antici

pation when they watch your movie, when they come into the movie. This is not a revolutionary concept. It is, in fact, what one might imagine a movie is about, because people don’t know what the movie is going to have in it until they’ve seen it.

The thing about this that moves it from mere self-promotional marketing deepity to actually angering me, though, is that he tries to co-opt the idea of the magician into this, with the notion of the mystery box. That him not knowing what’s inside the box is the creation of a mystery.

It’s vulgar.

It’s vulgar to me because magic isn’t about not knowing things. Magic is about controlling attention. Magicians don’t keep flummoxing and flailing to keep people fooled while they come up with new ideas on the fly. They don’t look at the box and think oh boy, imagine what’s in there. The magician is not someone who doesn’t open the box. If you’re the storyteller, if you’re the movie maker, if you’re the one who presents the box, you need to know what’s in it.

They open the box, they practice with what’s in the box, they try over and over and over again and they get better at it, they iterate on it, and they learn what people like and they overwhelmingly are the people who understand what people want and know how the trick ends.

They don’t just pull a billion dollar excuse out of their arse, then claim the reason it was unexplained and unearned was because mystery.

Is this particularly important? No.

But fuck the way this guy talks about mystery.

Around ten years ago now, good god, I got involved in what we awkwardly refer to as the atheskeptihumanist community, the online space of people who were actively interested in building a prosocial online community that present a counterpoint to religious and counterfactual organisations. During this time I listened to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of blogs and generally got a handle on the ways that I was messed up by my religious experience.

Then Elevatorgate happened, and I watched the way (now Dr) Jey Mcreight was treated by the community around them, and basically everyone involved in that space got super split along lines of ‘not a garbage human’ and ‘garbage human tolerant or adjacent’ and I became aware of just how badly ‘atheist’ was maligned as a label amongst other non-religious people. It was still an important part of who I was, but good news, a religious upbringing taught me how to keep important parts of my identity hidden from the world around me for fear of how I’d be treated.

Still, there were names during that time. People whose credentials and work I picked up that I managed to keep a hold on, even after I stopped checking the same spaces. Dr Luke Galen, for example, who researched prosociality in religious organisations, or PZ Meyers who I saw standing up for queer folks in the face of transphobia from younger members of the movement, and Brian Brushwood, a goofy street magician who did a few podcasts on how understanding how people are fooled.

Brian Brushwood, through the early days of ‘Netflix as a subscription service that mailed DVDs to your house’ and ‘everything is a domains.com sponsorship,’ ran an online video show called scam school (It’s been changed now to Scam Nation as it works on growing up a bit) which was about bar bets, magic tricks, games and puzzles that you digest in about five minutes. The channel has problems, certainly back a decade ago, when it did bar tricks to get attention from girls, and when dealing with other magicians from other spaces, there’s always that risk.

Especially when you check out his other channel, Modern Rogue, which is basically a No-Boobs Lads Mag of activities – building impromptu tools, trying to do things from movies, dangerous stunts, playing with fire, picking locks, concealing weapons, all that good stuff.

Now, okay, here’s why this channel got great though: because during the lockdown, turns out you don’t have people going to bars to do puzzles and bets and magic tricks.

But what Brian Brushwood does have is a family.

And that means that for the past few months, Scam School has been held in his backyard with his daughter, Josie. And if you’ve ever wanted to watch a magician deal with a hard audience, there is nothing so hard as an unimpressed ten year old kid. It’s lovely, it’s wholesome considering it’s talking about ‘beer bets’ with a kid?

Alright, now, one of the reasons I brought this channel up is because there’s a single trick from this channel that I do, and it’s one of my favourites because it’s a math puzzle and the trick itself is three hundred years old. Probably older, but we have proof it’s at least 300 years old. It also works as a trick you can perform for an audience of two.

EDIT, 17/03/2021: The original version of this article deadnamed Dr McCreight. This was not intentional and has been corrected.

I do magic tricks.

My particular preferred form of magic trick are execution based, sleight-light card tricks with minimal prep. I like being able to take a random deck of cards and make it do something, like I can show you a puzzle that was hiding inside the box in a way that you didn’t know.

Part of the reason I like these tricks is because it doesn’t require anyone to question whether or not I can do sleight of hand. I can, but when you tell people that you can do sleight of hand, it makes all sorts of things you can do harder to trust. Suddenly you’re not doing a feat of memory, ‘maybe you just swapped a deck’ or ‘maybe there’s a card up your sleeve.’ It’s kind of interesting the way people react to that kind of trick, which is frustrating, because I do these tricks for reactions.

The biggest source of failure then, in my tricks, in my experience, is not failures of execution, but failures of ego. If a magician shows you the same trick a second time, and if they’re any good, they are not going to show you the same trick the same way. They’re going to be using a different technique to get the same effect. And that way, you’re going to be looking for ‘the’ trick, and never find what it is, because you’re seeing three tricks that look the same.

And if you don’t do this, if you just show someone the trick a second time because you want them to be more impressed the second time, if you need the reactions to be better, because you deserve a better reaction, you’re going to lose control over their attention. That’s what magic is – it’s a way of controlling the audience’s attention. They focus on one thing so they don’t focus on the other.

What has been an absolute beating for me has been showing magic tricks to little kids. Because nothing will do damage to your ego quite like showing a trick to people who are both rude enough to reach out and grab the cards out of your hand, and easily distracted enough that you can’t even show them two or three misdirections without them just losing it entirely.

I have twice shown my niblings a trick a second time because ‘they missed it.’ Because I didn’t think the reaction I got was good enough I mean, c’mon, they clearly didn’t get it.

And in doing it, I wasted a trick.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do that trick again, or even all sorts of things built on that trick, at least for them. Which is a shame, because I was trying to make it a special trick just for them. What happened to me, what I lost, was the reaction I got, tainted because I couldn’t have the patience to accept it, in the name of getting a reaction I wanted. A reaction I deserved.

Are you conscious right now?

That’s not a nice thing to do, I know. Some of you read that sentence and went hang on, fuck you, and I just want to reassure you that as far as I know, yes, you are, you’re reading words I wrote on a blog. But when you read that question, there’s a very good statistical likelihood that your brain did something. Your brain threw up some sort of weird routine where you could tell it checked, even if it then went on to dismiss the question.

There’s a whole wing of studying the way our brains work – not brain surgery, not that kind of stuff or neurochemistry, but studying the behaviour of brains, the way that minds operate. There’s definitely related stuff – you can think of it as the difference between researching hardware versus operating systems versus applications.

Confabulation is an old idea in the study of human mind and memory, and it’s largely been given a hard definition when examining medically divergent brain behaviour. Specifically, it’s most commonly examined in people who have memory disorders, and even more specifically, those memory disorders were often the kind induced by lobotomies or corpus collosotomy, where the hemispheres of the brain are surgically sliced apart. Rough!

Confabulation, as first developed for this was the way that the subject (a person) would make up meaningful explanations for courses of actions that they may not have had a reason to actually do. An example is that people with split brains can be fed information that one ‘half’ of the brain receives and acts on, such as picking up an object, but then the other half of the brain will claim to have a completely coherent explanation for why they did what they did. This is obviously weird and there’s all sorts of implications and then those implications run into neuroatypicalities that got a lot harder to study when we approached medical science with biases like ‘women be whacky’ and ‘easier to stick a needle in your eye to cut up your brain than treat autism and epilepsy like actual things.’

I know there are some DID friends of mine who are reading this going ‘well duhhh,’ about confabulation.

Thing is, your brain is really, really good at sense-making. It’s one of the reasons why being confused or deprived of sensory information is so fundamentally scary: Your brain is used to filling in where you have gaps, and it will start coming up with some nonsense to make sense out of the nothing. It’s also why being plunged into the dark is scary as hell for sighted folk, but unsighted folk are already pretty good at handling that, so their brains are less likely to conjure up fanciful stuff. If you find something in your hand, that you don’t remember putting there, you immediately have to conjure reasons for it.

Then there’s the thing magicians already know:

This isn’t a thing limited to neuroatypical people.

This is something everyone’s brains do all the time.

When you move an object in palm, your viewer will imagine they know where it’s going because their brain is really good at constructing meaningful paths; that you can make a ball dance up your sleeve, across your shoulders and down into your other palm is a more meaningfully likely course of action than that the ball never left your other hand. People will believe they shuffled decks that you never let them shuffle, they will believe that you didn’t say something you did, they will construct a narrative of the experience in front of them that you know doesn’t gel with reality, because you know what actually happened because you did it. Who you gunna believe, me, or your lying eyes?

Hell, this runs deep. Studies of this thing the eye does, called saccades indicate that human sensory input is being fed in a great big slurry of stuff and the brain sorts it out, then tells the brain – itself – that it all makes sense.  See, your eye is not still: your eye is jiggling around in its socket and then feeding the you that ‘sees’ the image a still version composed out of all the wobbly bits. That’s also why you don’t see your nose, even though if you think about it, it’s right there in the middle of your field of view.

Magic at its root is the science of controlling audience attention. It’s about recognising the world not just as a thing you see but as a thing that your brain is interpreting for you, and your brain has a vested interest in ensuring that your brain is considered a reliable narrator on this front.

Incidentally, most of my friends are deeply apathetic about stage magic. I have a pet theory that people who live in a world that already tells them their expectations and brain operations are weird and wrong aren’t likely to be impressed by finding me do the same thing with a bloody playing card.

Hey, here’s a thing from card tricks that you should know because of how it can be used to cheat and because it’s useful for understanding the way a lot of elaborate card tricks work.

The term is forcing. In card tricks, a force is when you, the magician, present the subject of the trick with an opportunity to make a choice, but you have made the choice instead. There’s lots of different things you can force, but the most common thing is to force a card when doing a card trick.

Now, whenever you see a trick where a card teleports somewhere, or a card does something unlikely or a card is destroyed and remade, you can rely on the fact that that card was almost always the result of a force. This is something about magic that kind of transforms the way most tricks work; when you realise how many ‘impossible’ feats are the work of finessing two different props into a space so it looks like there’s only one of them, you are suddenly keenly aware of where the skill in a magic trick often lies. Sometimes a force is sleight of hand, sometimes it’s through an elaborate choice method, sometimes it’s through making a cut look nonchalant. Forces are preposterously hard to do naturally and to be good at them you need to be capable of doing a lot of them.

When you have one particular way to set up a trick, that’s it, people will see that setup is part of the trick. When you can do four or five different forces for the same outcome of a trick, though, each force invisibly hides itself in the other forces. If the first time it’s pick a card any card, fine. If the second time it’s pulling a random card out of the centre of the deck, fine. The third time you do a waterfall force, the fourth time a clock force, a control-to-the-top, a fake stack shuffle, all of these different methods, and the ‘trick’ at the end is all just following up on that earlier deceit.

This is one of the lessons of magic in general: The art of magic is the art of controlling viewer attention. The force is not there to set up the trick: The trick is there to hide the force.

The alternative to a force is a free choice. Free choice tricks are often doing something different entirely, and these are the tricks that are less likely to have elaborate displays, but may more often have elaborate props. Props can hide things like alternating components, things that can set up a trick on the fly. In general, when it comes to magic tricks, someone is doing work, and the work is usually being invested in terms of setting up a skill, a practice, an angle or just brute forcing time. Big props let you get around that.

There are a couple of common forces, so much so that you’re probably best off just going to youtube and looking up ‘types of force.’ Sometimes it’s hard to represent a force because it can be just a matter of physically practicing with your cards in your hands, sometimes it’s about doing math in your head, sometimes it’s about on-the-fly reading a person’s behaviour. It can be hard to practice forces!

As for what forces I favour? I don’t actually have a lot of good forces; I tend to favour tricks that don’t rely on them. That’s the other thing about good magic tricks. You don’t have to do everything. Do the things you can practice and in time, the ability to recognise how you’re focusing attention comes from it.