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.
So we are back, after a slight hiatus… if anyone is still reading and cares! We have a new look, an updated version of nucleus and still some work to do to finish things off. If anyone noticed we suffered a slight hack, so for now the various external scripts (media, guestbook etc) are gone probably won’t return. Also we have comment control installed as I suffered a few thousand comment spams, and they are still coming in now, but get blacklisted automatically I hope!
Escamoteurettes: John W. LeBlanc’s new weblog, some very thoughtful posts on the world of magic and mentalism.
Download Magic Blog: Steve Fearson has a new blog with some very funny content, and excellent taste in links
Magic Broadcast: If you’ve not heard yet Ryan Pilling is starting a 24/7 Magic Radio broadcast over the Internet, tune in, or consider hosting your own show. You can listen to the sneak preview as they continue lining up presenters.
Fitzkee Trilogy: a link thats been floating around for a while to HTML versions of Fitzkee’s work, Showmanship for Magicians, Trick Brain and Magic by Misdirection.
Sam Loyd puzzle thread on Metafilter: always reminds me of reading Martin Gardner who published a lot of Sam’s puzzles. The thread on MeFi points to the famous Trick Mule puzzle, the idea being to get the jockeys to both properly sit atop a mule. You can also try it out in Shockwave. And if your really stuck check the solution. There are also links to the other fairly well know Loyd puzzle entitled Get off the Earth where one of the chinamen seemingly vanishes, you can also see this as a flash movie.
Marked Cards: Nu-Concept marked cards, using shade technology. Or check out Card Sorcerer for some classic marked decks.
Maskelyne Magic: A web site that attempts to unravel the truth behind the wartime career of Jasper Maskelyne. Originally the twenty one articles here were written for the Australian magic magazine, Geniis Magic Journal to try and correct, and I quote ‘David Fisher’s error-ridden fanciful concoction “The War Magician”(1983) and Jasper Maskelyne’s tainted ghost-written memoirs, Magic - Top Secret (1949)’.
Andy’s Playing Cards: These pages discuss in depth most topics concerning playing cards, with a particular interest for their history, and the many patterns used in different countries, the obsolete ones as well as the varieties still used. The picture galleries, organized by type and by geographical distribution, present several examples of the varieties extant, providing at the same time an extensive description, yet easily understandable also for first-timers.
H Interviews: Magic Interview site from Jonas Haglund. Read interviews from Jay Sankey, David Acer, Paul Daniels, Michael Ammar, Tom Stone, Lee Asher and many more.
Rebuilding a Mystery: Gordon Meyer’s digital grimoire, a magical blog established in December of 2003.
SVG Cards: Scalable Vector Graphic Playing Cards, based on a french pack. Download the image files that you can scale to any size as they conform to the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics Format, use the French or the English version.
Magician Express: new magic forums, get advice, and discuss card, coin, street and stage magic.
B3TA: If Magic Was Real: The new B3TA challenge, use photoshop to come up with a picture of what it would be like if Magic was real! Some very bizzare, weird, and sometimes adult interpretations, you have been warned
The Magic Revolution: new forum, discuss Magic Philosophy, Close-up, Stage, Mentalism, Comedy and read Trick, Book and DVD reviews.
Abbotts Online Get Together: new message board for Abbotts Get Together discussion. Share your Abbotts memories, suggestions and favourite tricks.
Bondoogle: Jim Bumgardner’s latest Internet creation. You fail to get the spectators card, and turn to Google for help, typing into the Image search “What is the card?” brings back images of the selected card!
