Dustings of Woofle #25
/People are still sending me emails with questions about zoom magic shows. I really don’t have more to say about this. Zoom magic is/was a temporary evil. Not the new normal. At this point, it’s not forward thinking to be concentrating on that.
If you’re a professional magician and you’re putting your eggs in the zoom basket, you’re probably wasting your time (in the long run). The primary appeal of magic is seeing the impossible live and in person. If your zoom magic shows are as powerful as your in-person shows, then your in-person shows weren’t very good. This is not exclusive to magic. If you’re a prostitute and watching you stroke a banana over skype is as satisfying as getting off with you in real life, you’re a terrible prostitute.
I have a friend of a friend who started working on his zoom show when this all started. A couple months later I spoke with our mutual friend to ask how this guy’s zoom shows were going and I found out he abandoned the idea completely. The price-per-show had plummeted because now instead of competing against other magicians in the area, he was competing against everyone with a webcam all over the world.
Instead he focused on two new types of shows. The first was a magic show that he would perform outside, to people indoors, through the window—while still taking steps to make it feel very interactive. The second was a drive-up magic show where families could drive to his house, pull part-way into his garage and experience a magic show from their car. With people desperate for something to do—and him not working his normal day-job at the time—he was booked solid with multiple shows a day, and ended up making more money in six weeks than he had from performing the previous year.
I’m not saying you should adopt those ideas. I’m saying if I were a pro, I would be focused on how to bring live, in-person magic to people in the current environment rather than focused on ways of doing my act over zoom.
This chick is amazing. When she lets go of the end and it comes back to her without missing a beat? Whoa. Real magic, no tricks.
So, Hanson Chien put out an update to Tenyo’s Flash Dice. It’s called Sonic Dice. It’s essentially Flash Dice but done with a clear container with a removable opaque sleeve.
Some may say this is just a minor change, and not worth the $50 price tag. I disagree. I think it’s a significant improvement and really builds the effect from phase to phase.
I was all ready to put my order in, and then I saw this.
That’s right. This clear plastic box, which should be the most innocent, nondescript piece of magic apparatus you can think of is emblazoned with his fucking name!
It’s such a profoundly dopey decision.
Maybe there’s some rationale behind it. Maybe you need to have some sort of company information on the actual product to help protect against knockoffs or something. I have no clue. But I know it could have been done in a smarter way than this. If it said “HC Gaming Supplies,” then that would probably be ignored by a spectator.
There had to be some other option besides putting the actual goddamn magician’s name on a box that was specifically created to seem innocent and free of guile. It’s not just that the creator’s name is on the box, but because it’s a clear box, that’s the only thing there is to see on it. And don’t say, “If you’re a good enough magician, they won’t want to look at the box.” That’s what sad magicians tell themselves when their spectators are totally disinterested in what they’ve just seen. “They didn’t want to look at the deck, because they really believe I’m a magician!” The truth is, when you perform this, you’ve made the dice and the box the focus of their attention. They need to be certain those things are normal before they can get to the feeling that you did something truly impossible. You might think because it’s clear they don’t need to handle it to know there’s nothing suspicious about it, but that’s not necessarily the case. If you don’t let them handle it they might assume there’s some clever magician thing going on that they just can’t quite fathom, but if they could get a look at the box, then they’d understand.
Even if you just assume spectators will have no interest in the box and assume you are a wizard, there’s still no justification for putting the name on the box.
Perhaps there was some kind of mix-up. Maybe they were making a list of shit they absolutely shouldn’t do with their new product. And at the top of the list was, “By no means should we put the name of the magician releasing the trick on the box.” And somehow the wires got crossed and accidentally it got put on there. That must be what happened.
I’d literally rather it said, “Trick Magic Dice Box” on it. That would seem so blatantly silly that people would disregard it. But no, instead they decided to give them the best search term to use in order to find the product online.
I like Hanson’s work as a creator, but the choice to put his name on the box (and to a lesser extent, the choice to put his logo on the case the box goes in) is the choice of someone who markets magic to magicians but doesn’t perform much for real people. If he puts out version 2 without that shit, I’ll be first in line.