More Magic Practice
Goodness, this week has been busy.
I decided to cheat and use just a sleight by itself here. It took some 20 takes before I was satisfied though…
Week 3
Decided to go with a trick I’m familiar with. It involves a gaff, but most people don’t see it on the first (or second…) play through. I’m trying to get the Royal Flush finale, but some of the sleights are pretty tough to nail consistently.
Magic Week 2
I’m surprised at how powerful this trick is, and how poorly I speak English.
Some lessons from looking at this video:
- I need to execute a pinky count more accurately (you might be able to catch my mistake if you notice everything).
- I need to consider changing the handling for getting the card out of the middle; it just looks awkward.
- Pronounce the word “deck” nice and slowly.
Weekly thing? Maybe.
I recently bought a decent Logitech webcam just to make random videos like this to practice. Hopefully stuff comes out of this.
Life’s Update
I’ve been working on a few things:
- Position-based fluids for my CS5643 class, which is a pain to debug. Normally, I have tons of intuition on what numbers are suppose to be but my intuition is nil here. I’m unsure as we’re guessing the correct parameters or even the right formulas and procedure.It’s a great class, just the project are incredibly tedious. For example, my particles right now just seem to float of into the x direction and stay there. Why would it do that?
Hopefully, what ends up happening is something like the following, except less pretty.
- I finally installed Hearthstone for my Elementary OS Linux box. It was incredibly easy following this tutorial.
- In terms of research, I’ve been reading up on different ways to generate the Krylov basis for GMRES as described in this paper. I’ll probably write up and refined the old “idiot’s guide” again for this paper information (and fix the bad latex in there).
- This soundtrack (not allowed to embed).
- My card handeling has suffered :(.
Card*** Change
I’m working on the Card*** change because I gave up on another color change, and my hand’s are a tad too small for the Er***** change (at least without much more practice).
The move was pretty straightforward to learn, but it seems very sloppy at times when I do it as the 2nd card from the top tended to shift during the change. Last night, I finally figured out that I was moving my ring and middle finger alongside my pinkie, which was dragging the card below down… AND NOW IT WORKS 80%!
(The name of the changes are censored, but just enough.)
Zig Zag Milk
I spent half an hour trying to figure this trick out…
Biddle Trick Variation
I’ve been going on a card magic binge this break, going through Card College and various videos such as the Born to Perform DVD. By far the simplest, but still incredibly effective, trick was the Biddle trick as seen above. The sleights are very simple, and easy to execute. As a result, it’s great for building up the confidence to perform (I guess there’s a reason for the DVD’s title).
Still, I didn’t like how he handled the beginning. I found that using a peek control and riffling past the selected card to hold the break seems more natural for me. As justification, I say something like “are you sure you wanted that card? could’ve picked any of these fine cards!”