Dustings of Woofle #5

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After some deep soul searching, consultation with my pastor, as well as with my pastor’s pastor, I have decided to go back to publishing on a regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, with the occasional non-magic post thrown in on Tuesday/Thursday. Doing shorter posts on no schedule sounded like it would be the ideal way to fit the writing of this site in around the other stuff, including performing, working on the next book, and other magic and non-magic projects. But the posts never got shorter, so it never became the sort of thing where I could say, “Oh, I’ll just write up something quick when I have a spare 45 minutes.”

So I think going back to a regular schedule will actually be easier for me. But I’m free to change my mind at any point and mix it up because I can do whatever I want. I’m the straw that stirs the drink, baby!

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I have not read (or even heard of, until recently) the book, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic. So I can’t say for sure if it’s any good. But I will say the author does have a keen sense of beautiful writing. From page 224…

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Okay, Andy, but “beautiful” doesn’t narrow down which post he’s talking about. Your beautiful writing is your calling card.

True, true. The specific post he was referencing was this one.

Magical Transformations Pt. 2

The evolution of the back of the Squishers deck.

  1. The initial drawing to show the general layout.

  2. Stasia’s sketch based on that drawing and the original Squeezers back.

  3. My adjustment to the initial image. I wanted the bottom cat to be more facing up, towards the sky, than out, towards the viewer. But I don'’t have the artistic skills to express that, so I took a toy army man and used him instead.

  4. The final product.

Here’s a free tool to create traditional style branching anagrams.

For example, let’s say you wanted to do a trick where someone could think of a word related to me, the author of this site. You would just input the most obvious words, separated by a comma:

Jerx, Andy, blog, magic, genius, beautiful, writing, well-endowed

And it would spit out this…

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And then you’re able to test the anagram or save it.

I have found some benefit in just building out the anagram yourself, manually, and I would probably recommend that if you have something specific you want to do . But this is definitely much simpler and will give you the opportunity to iterate much faster and try out different word groupings.

There’s also probably an effect based in the fact that you can create an anagram at an instant. For example you could have someone text you a list of words, and almost immediately you could call them and read their mind over the phone. It’s not a great idea, but it might be the beginning of a decent one.