bearjazzthejazzbear said: A lot of it is post-production trickery. David Blaine is not the best conjurer out there. If you want some really good sleight of hand work, look at Penn & Teller’s stuff.

Some of it is set up before hand or requires another person in on the trick, but a lot of it really is slight of hand/distraction/false moves.  The good stuff are the actual card tricks which use minimal gimmicks and don’t need to be set up.  There’s two from the show I was just watching that I want to use myself, called Compression and 2 Card Monte.  They’re simple, easy, and have powerful effects.  There was one where he does a trick and then the card ends up in a beer bottle which he didn’t go anywhere near… so obviously it was planted there at some point during the trick.  I think stuff like that is cheap and meaningless.

I also dislike his number guessing tricks because they simply rely on people giving a typical response for a specific range of numbers.  You ask someone for a number between one and 100 and they’re likely to say 333… but he only seems so good at it because he probably films it with 50 people and then shows the 5 times it worked.  Don’t get me wrong, its not like you just purely fail if you use it and they don’t give the right answer… you can lead into a card trick using their number, for example take the card from the position in the deck equivalent to their number… but meh, its just so fake to me.

And with that said, Penn and Teller are fucking awesome.  And they have a pretty cool video game too haha :P

David Blaine is a creepy motherfucker.  I love his tricks, but I’m watching one of his street magic shows right now and hes just being extremely awkward lol.  He keeps doing amazing stuff and then walking away without saying anything… and then the people are like…. wtf?  And the camera stays there and watches them freak out cause its like, wait… why is he leaving now?  And why is this camera still looking at me?

What’s more though, is its interesting to me how freaked out people get when he does that.  Its like, he completely overturned their lives and I don’t think its so much the trick itself as it is his delivery.  He makes everything seem so mater-of-fact and normal that it seems so much more powerful than an illusion.  It’s interesting to me because I do a little magic myself and never get reactions like that.  The reactions I get are more like, oh thats cool… they know its a trick and its just cool.  But when he does something, people seem to forget that its just a trick.

Whatever it is though, I wish I was as good as him…  (And I hate when he does things that I can’t figure out… lol)

Super bored tonight… anyone wanna send me asks? :P  I will answer literally anything.

So, for those of you who have been around you know the whole thing that went down with my supervisor at work.  For those who are new, here’s the short version:  A month or 2 ago my supervisor said something to me that I took a lot of offense to, and reported him for basically being homophobic, mostly in the fear that if I came out as trans at work he’d make my life miserable.  Since then we’ve worked things out and it turns out he’s a good guy, just a little misguided and uninformed about LGBT stuff.

Well, today he told me that hes planning on going to a family event which his cousin (who is gay) will be at.  Which he hasn’t done for 10 years.  He’s avoided his cousin for 10 years because he is gay, and because of me he can finally face him.  It feels kinda awesome that I can be such a positive influence on someone like that, and that I’ve changed someone who had negative preconceived notions of LGBT people to be more open and accepting.