Larry Jennings: New site from Bill Goodwin and Lee Asher, to advertise the re-print of Larry’s Up in Smoke booklet which has added bonus material and photographs. The site also contains some really great information, a full and comprehensive bibliography, some great photos and a short bio of the great card man, some unseen video footage, and a free trick. Join the mailing list as well to hear Mike Skinner talk about Larry, and to read some great comments from other well known magicians.
Yoda Origami model: [200k PDF file] instructions for folding an origami Yoda figure. Other recently discovered origami/papercraft links include Spacecraft pdf’s for building papercraft space models, and Origami folding instructions which has quite a number of links collected from all over the net.
I am trialling Flickr mainly for use over at the HMC site, but I thought I would add the badge to this site, as if it stays I plan to use it to add some of my general magic photos. Anyway you can check out all the latest additions over at My Flickr Page.
John Bannon Magic: It’s finally here, I predict that this will be (for me at least) the release of the year, and its only May! Safe to say I have pre-ordered my copy. After seeing some of the material when I saw John lecture at TSD I can tell you sight-unseen, just buy it! The Bullet Train Assembly will fast become the ultimate ace assembly, and I have already been doing Last Man Standing for a few years now, which is an outstanding triumph routine… and John’s take on Shuffle-Bored again for me is the last word on the subject… and Dave’s Game which is Dave Solomon’s take on John’s version of a Jack Carpenter trick, with a Dean Dill idea thrown in (phew!
Crazy Unicycling: a windows media video clip of some extreme unicycling. Another thing on my to-do list is to learn to Unicycle which I have mentioned before on the blog but just never got round to purchasing one, maybe this summer…
Apparently Edward Victor of EYE and Rope trick fame was also a master at Hand Shadows, whilst not totally related to magic, like all allied arts I find it fascinating. I remember seeing Raymond Crowe at FISM get a standing ovation for his shadow act. Check out some of these links: Bill Douglas Hand Shadows, Hand Shadow Illusions, Ashley’s Shadows, Performing with Hand Shadows.
Self Publishing: Tom Stone has a new shareware e-book on Self Publishing magic effects. Download it for free over at Lybrary, then if you like it enough send him $5… Tom creates some of the best looking e-books I have ever seen, and he shows you a little bit about how you might do the same, well worth the download. I think this shows you can get comparable quality in an e-book, yes it involves a heck of a lot more time and effort than just chucking something together in word and sticking it up for download, but if your material is worth it shouldn’t you make the effort?
Just updated to version 3.2 of Nucleus shouldn’t be any major worries, hoping it might let me add a few new things, looking to maybe add TrackBack and possibly Captcha for the comments to finally stop the spam once and for all… Also looking to test Flickr very shortly for the HMC site along with another lot of posts over there, so thats whats keeping me busy atm… Oh and just checked my referrers and looks like we made it into the Guardian NewsBlog linklog, which is amazing!
One Behind: digital musings on digital magic, is a new weblog from Taylor Raphael on a subject close to my heart, the convergence of technology with magic. Taylor has written his thesis on this subject and it sound like he has some really novel effects to release over time. First on his list is Agogle which is an advancement of Jim Bumgardner’s Bondoogle effect. Taylor has solved some of the little niggles I had with Jim’s effect and added in some really great extra’s, well worth a look!
Share and Share Alike: Read John W. Leblanc’s interesting piece on Filesharing and how it applies to Magic. I agree with most of what he has to say, but I do think that we are seeing a radical turn of events in today’s market, where the consumer is wanting more power in there buying decisions. For example no longer will we put up with having to pay excessive amounts for a music album that we may only want for one or two of our favourite tracks, now we can go and pick and choose the tracks we want, and even listen to previews of the tracks before purchasing.
Been busy lately, hence the slight relapse into no-post land… amongs that have been a couple of the too-rare opportunities I get to perform… One was for a local magic club, as a sort of exchange for HMC, and the other was for living breathing humans The difference was quite interesting, its fair to say I slightly messed up one of my tricks for the magic crowd (it went right every time in rehersal!
Haven’t had chance to mention this DVD which was released I believe at Blackpool. I haven’t seen a copy, but I can relate to you how it was to take part in the filming. This is probably the first and only magic DVD I may appear in, but that shouldn’t stop you buying it Basically it was filmed at Colin Rose’s on 11th December last year when he hosted a Workshop/Lecture with Alex Elmsley.
Whispering Imps on Magic Posters: Rhett Bryson’s collection of magicians posters that somehow include a whispering imp character, probably the first to do this was Kellar, the collection shows images of 125 posters.
Having just recently started to listen to MagicBroadcast, I caught Robert Baxt being interviewed by Gerald Kirchner. Robert said some great things about how to make your magic meaningful to your audience, by taking even the most simple of things and giving it a personal meaning that they could identify with. This would then take it away from being just a simple trick, to an experience that they will remember. The interview closed with a question posed to Robert about if he found himself in an impromptu setting, what card trick would he do?
Just to let people know that I have hopefully implemented a few of these ideas to stop some of the referrer spam I am getting, hopefully now we have stopped that and any comment spam, its a real shame when it comes down to this, but I won’t let them win damnit! So if you are legit and are seeing some errors or have problems getting to the site, then let me know.
Jack Parker is not a name known to many, we lucky few over at TSD have had the chance to see his creative output in the tricks and video’s he has posted there. Also you might recall a number of things he has had published in MAGIC magazine. Now its time for this UK card man to release his first e-book. This was released earlier this week, the reason it has taken me this long to post about it is that I wanted to really play around with the material and get a feel for the routines, rather than just dashing something off.
So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about selection of material, and how what I choose to do reflects my performance character, but more about that in a later post! I’ve wanted to do a version of Simon Aronson’s Shuffle Bored ever since seeing Ali Bongo’s excellent version. The only trouble is that the more I think about it the more it raises my in-securities about predictions in general. I know that Simon has raised this point before about the prediction version of this effect.
Just spent a couple of hours being driven loopy trying to get my feeds to work… past the old 0.91 RSS Feed its never worked, now after digging around on the nucleus forum for ages, I find out its the fault of the plugin I use to GZip the page output! Installed the latest version of the plugin, bingo all my feeds start working! Which means you now have the choice of a 0.