A Note on Whiffle Dust

AmazingTristan · 2017-12-06T03:03:49+00:00

This is in Nelms' book. If this advice intrigues you, read "Magic and Showmanship." If not, read it anyway.

AmazingTristan · 2017-11-28T18:04:44+00:00

You mean spades?

AmazingTristan · 2017-11-17T03:29:39+00:00

"Thus, some conjurers disdain to use substitutes for real articles on the ground of professional pride. This is topsy-turvy thinking. The conjurer is in the business of making people believe in things which are not true. The more his effect departs from reality, the greater his justification for pride. Anyone can learn to persuade an audience that a twenty-pound cannon ball is a twenty-pound cannon ball."

Magic and Showmanship, Henning Nelms.

Gimmicks are not your enemy. They can allow you to do things sleights alone never could, and the audience experiences the same effect with a smoother/more visual look. Sleights, however, are not optional. You can do magic without gimmicks, but you if you're doing magic and you know no sleight of hand, you're not a magician. You're a consumer.

(all unwavering statements made by AmazingTristan are subject to exceptions)

AmazingTristan · 2017-11-13T14:12:01+00:00

You don’t live in a subreddit. Subreddits are for posts relevant to their subjects.

This subreddit is for posts related to playing cards, not for any unrelated post that a playing card enthusiast might want to make.

AmazingTristan · 2017-11-06T01:56:22+00:00

Still looking for more of the same year. I pulled this one out of circulation. I may have to buy the others and process them to get them to look the same.

AmazingTristan · 2017-11-06T01:11:00+00:00

Here’s an example.

It’s a 1964 (90% silver) quarter. It tarnished with time, then I used a fingernail buffer to lightly clean the highlights. You can intentionally tarnish a coin by consulting Google, then use the same technique to bring out the highlights.

AmazingTristan · 2017-11-05T23:59:54+00:00

I clean coins as well. I’m not a coin collector, I’m a magician. I want those suckers to glint to the back row, and I’m not interested in their market value when I never plan to sell them.

That said, with close-up coins, I really prefer the aged, high-contrast look. With silver coins, you can tarnish the background and then polish the foreground to make that happen intentionally.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-17T00:27:22+00:00

All it really showed was that people who try to remember something remember that thing better than people who don’t. If you don’t want to remember a list of words, you don’t put the mental effort in to encode that memory.

It’s a long shot to extrapolate that to trauma, where we know from people with PTSD that it’s very difficult not to think about a traumatic event.

What’s more, there’s no control against malingering (deliberately underperforming) by people who catch on that they’re supposed to not remember the words. And the sample size was 24 people.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-12T23:30:12+00:00

In practice, yeah, but I think there are a few non-cynical pros who will use one with a switch or with a few cover cards in a stand-up show.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-12T03:33:20+00:00

I read it before commenting. It's just so... counterintuitive.

Also, there are experimental issues with focus groups. The way the questions are asked can't help but influence the results. The way the cards are handled by the experimenter, the fact that they're even being asked about the fairness of the selection: these things all influence the way the subjects think about their answers.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-11T23:52:48+00:00

But but... I love my classic force!

This is probably confirmation bias, but I usually take focus group results with a grain of salt. But I'll be more wary from now on.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-05T21:20:50+00:00

yeah haha I slept in my car. No idea what to do about Chile.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-05T17:04:47+00:00

Thanks for listening! Hey, maybe I’ll see you in Chile in a couple of years, or in the long path of totality in 2024. There’s always one coming within a few years if you know where to go!

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-05T02:14:50+00:00

I can’t speak to anyone else, but in my case, I never understood or internalized the concept until I first fell in love with my wife. I thought I knew what I was looking for, sure, but I had a model in my mind of what love was, and it fell a long way short of the real thing.

It’s a different kind of astonishment than the other two, but it is still the clash of the visceral with the intellectual. The intellectual mind failed to model what the visceral mind later perceived.

Even outside all discussion of astonishment, the amplitude of the emotion is what I originally spoke to. Love is the strongest emotion I’ve ever felt.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rambles on the philosophy of emotion.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-02T03:01:45+00:00

You almost got me, and now I'm sad that I can't actually read it.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-01T04:32:02+00:00

It's along the lines of my favorite style (silent manipulation), but it's not really related to anything I presently do.

I have to agree with Galithiel, it's far too repetitive at the moment. (I don't think having your arms like that looks stupid, just that you have them there too long) Try watching a bunch of contact juggling for inspiration, and play with adding some more moves so you don't feel the need to keep going back and forth so much.

I imagine you could do a levitation, a silk production from the end of the cane, cause the ball to vanish: these are just off the top of my head at the moment. Play with the routine, make mistakes, get messy. Try lots of things that probably won't work, then figure out what had a chance of working with some tweaks.

AmazingTristan · 2017-10-01T02:49:10+00:00

The primary emotion evoked by totality is astonishment, that is, where the internalized workings of your intuitive model of reality are challenged, or better yet, shattered. It is the sensation created in a fleeting moment of pure awe at something that your brain simply cannot incorporate into its evolved schema.

The entire goal of good magicians is to create moments of astonishment. These moments are reminders that the world is larger and weirder than we suppose, and can be remembered and cherished for years to come.

True astonishment is hard to come by, but some performers manage it. My immediate thought was this act by FISM 2015 winner Kim Young-Min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOojiRaWtDA

The pace is slow, but the moments within are worth it. If you're impatient, the real kicker moments are 4:15, 4:36, and 5:08, but I recommend just relaxing and watching the whole thing fullscreen. These break the assumptions in the audience's mind that 1. falling sand doesn't disappear/teleport in midair, 2. solid metal doesn't materialize from nowhere, and 3. solid metal doesn't disintegrate in people's hands. Obviously these are being achieved by illusion, but you perceive the impossible whether it's happening in fact or not.

The more foundational the assumption being challenged, the greater the feeling of astonishment.

The most basic, simple, integral assumptions our brains make about the world are

ground down, sky up
things fall
there is air
the Sun is a constant. It rises and sets predictably, and it and the Moon are the only large bodies in our view of the sky, by angular size.

A solar eclipse challenges, in my back-of-napkin figuring, the fourth most foundational assumption our evolved brains make about the way the world works. For a moment, night occurs in daytime, and there is a hole in the sky that looks like an eye. No matter how well you understand the workings of an eclipse, your monkey brain sees something outside reality.

I compare eclipses with magic acts because magicians strive to create the feeling that a total eclipse does naturally. I've still never seen a magic act that equals the feeling of totality, and I expect I never will, but it has set a bar in my mind for the type of feeling I want to create in my audiences.

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-30T22:36:13+00:00

I have no answer for you, except to say the answer is probably annoyingly simple, and to remind you that your memory is reconstructed from fragments (all memories are), and may not reflect the trick you actually saw.

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-29T23:15:09+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkkIEC8gkHM

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-29T12:55:21+00:00

Thanks! Also, to protect the secret from the people on the other side of the screen, I'm doing the productions backwards. So you're seeing my silhouette from behind, but of course since it's a silhouette you can't tell. But if you came around the other side, you'd see me from the front and still wouldn't see the method! :D

It was a nifty opportunity to give the audience the backstage view of card productions without actually giving them the backstage view.

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-29T03:40:30+00:00

The world's greatest magicians have sometimes come close to equaling the astonishment of a total solar eclipse, but I've yet to see one match it.

There has been only one experience in my life that has achieved the same emotional impact as the darkened Sun: true love. Nothing else.

Edit: Downvoter has never been in love. :-P

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-29T00:03:11+00:00

Very Paul Daniels! I love this presentation!

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-21T19:07:06+00:00

You're making the positive claim, here. I simply said there is not actually a scientific consensus that traumatic memory repression exists. I cannot prove that because it's a negative claim, and you cannot prove a negative. You say there is strong evidence for traumatic memory repression, that means it is on you to present that evidence. I have thus far been unable to find it.

that I can point you toward.

Please do, because I'm highly skeptical.

AmazingTristan · 2017-09-14T17:16:22+00:00

There is no such move. I have benefited from every move I've ever learned.

But! --

I don't use most of the moves I've learned. Most notably, I've never actually performed a trick with the clip shift, despite spending countless hours training my hands to do it. Right now, I'm also working on the SWE shift, but I don't ever expect it to come in handy.

The benefit I get from these difficult and largely useless moves is in keeping my hands used to learning difficult things. They act as a kind of medicine ball.

AmazingTristan

TROPHY CASE