Real Magic App
Ortiz Ullery
For context: True Magic's Patreon has been an essential part of our income for many years. It covers our grocery budget (which is pretty important!), but not much else. Most of the rest always came from Co-Author D.
2. No pressure: Please don't push anyone to become a patron! Just ask them to check out the story and see if they like it. Once TM has a substantial number of readers, the optional patronage is likely to take care of itself.
My goal has always been to earn a full-time Patreon income so that I can afford to keep devoting this much time. I've also wished for a long time that I could take the financial pressure off D, after all her years of high-stress work.
Pretty stressed out at the moment, but I wanted to post something this week, even if it's just this "please check back later" message. I'll have a more detailed post soon (hopefully in the next few days).
Apparently most people's Happy Productivity Mode is in the high-alpha/low-beta range (10-20 Hz): alert, but relaxed. And if you listen to steady tones in that range, your brain naturally tends to start generating brainwaves at a matching frequency. Pretty neat.
The uploader offers several actionable tips in a way that's humorous, insightful, encouraging and heartwarming (especially the bit at the end). The time-lapse footage is pretty satisfying to watch, too, but the real value is in the narration.
Usually when I start to write any kind of post, it immediately balloons into multiple paragraphs (as you can see), and my internal editor jumps all over it: "That's way too long-winded. No one cares about that stuff. That makes me sound like a doofus."
And then the options are either (1) spend hours trying to cram the essential ideas into a few perfect sentences, or (2) delete it all and get back to work. (That's why so many recent posts have just said "Page XYZ is up!" and nothing else.)
To set up his ultimate act of revenge in The Prestige, Angier (played by Hugh Jackman) asks his ingenue Cutter (Michael Caine) to help him book a spectacular venue for Angier's new magic show, which features the trick in which Angier disappears from the stage and reappears at the top rear of the theater.
Cutter arranges a demonstration of the trick with a powerful man named Ackerman, whose attitude suggests he's seen lots of magic and is very hard to impress. Upon seeing the demonstration, however, Ackerman clearly is blown away -- he seems to grasp immediately that the trick is not just slight-of-hand but is somehow real:
How did Ackerman know that what he had just seen was not just a trick but "real magic"? (It seems unlikely the transporting trick by itself would be so impressive and novel to an expert like Ackerman, as Angier's rival Borden had been become quite famous performing a similar trick right there in London.)
The art of magic, in the sense of performance and stagecraft, is really a sort of science. Magicians can usually figure out how a trick is done, and even when they can't grasp all of the specifics, they can generally gauge that it is a trick.
Even after Angier replicates the trick, he is unsatisfied because he recognizes it's not as sophisticated as what Borden is doing in terms of actual "transportation". Angier's version is a mere illusion; Borden's appears real.
There is an irony in that Tesla actually figures out how to do it! (Although his version involves replication a opposed to mere transportation, it is, for all intents and purposes, real magic, scientific foundation notwithstanding.)
The answer to this question lies in Tesla's comment about "man's reach exceeding his grasp" and his warnings to Angier about continuing down his path. Angier wanted genuine "magic" as opposed to illusion, the trade he had dedicated himself to.
Ackerman's comment about "real magic" and his consternation at seeing the trick performed alludes to the film's universe containing other "wizards" such as Tesla who are capable of actually doing what the magicians pretend to do- something Ackerman was acquainted with and had witnessed firsthand.
What the other "wizards" had shown him and what that "real magic" consisted of remains a mystery to the audience (and likely the writers as well), but it is the mere suggestion of it that lends power to the exchange: from a narrative perspective the interaction serves to show that Angier was a mediocre magician who literally had to find a genuine flesh and blood wizard to accomplish what his rival was able to accomplish by simply existing.
Looking at Ackerman's face, we see he glances to his left, as if he is remembering something. Then Angier interrupts him and Ackerman returns the focus of his gaze center, to look at Angier. Ackerman is pretty obviously thinking about something when he says this line.
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Illusion and Reality: A lecture and demonstration on magic and the expansion of consciousness by DOUG HENNING: First Magician of the Age of Enlightenment. So read the posters that began appearing around Chicago advertising an event to be held at Northwestern University by the student meditation society. It was the late seventies, and Doug Henning, an internationally acclaimed, Winnipeg-born magician with his own Broadway show and regular television special, had not appeared in public for months. News of the event quickly traveled among the Chicago magic community, who showed up en masse to see their MIA superstar in a rare live appearance.
In the days that followed, I took myself through the TM course via an app on my phone. The filmed tutorials were led by Tony Nader, the clean-cut Lebanese neuroscientist who assumed leadership of the TM Organization after the death of the Maharishi in 2008. These were interspersed with questionnaires and short archival videos of the Maharishi, in which the guru sat cross-legged atop a gold-draped couch, dressed in white robes, behind him an arrangement of flowers laid out in front of a portrait of his own teacher. I was instructed to meditate twice a day for twenty minutes. I was told repeatedly not to share the technique with anyone, as I was not trained to do so and might inadvertently ruin their experience.
But running a charitable organization of this magnitude requires serious dough, and subscriptions only cover a fraction of our costs. For the rest, we rely on the good will of generous readers like you.
Lauren Collee is a writer and sessional academic. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life, the Sydney Review of Books, Joyland, and others. She teaches in universities across Sydney/Eora.
Well, darn. I would've liked to see another couple find happiness in this enchanted place. Indeed, Michael and I had met there only a few years prior. He, an actual magician. Me, an actual magic fan, intrigued by this handsome stranger sharing facts about the Castle while following me and my college friends around in a charming, non-stalker-ish way. Halfway through the evening, he bade our group to gather around and treated us to an impromptu show. He fanned the deck and asked me to pick a card, any card. "Now place it where I can't see it," he said. "Like under your throbbing thigh of ecstasy."
He appeared again while I was waiting for my car at the valet and invited me back to the Castle, just the two of us. A few weeks later he came over to my apartment for the first time with a kitty toy up his sleeve for my cat, an opening gesture I loved. By the time we nearly stumbled upon my first husband and the woman whose company he preferred during our last year of marriage, I'd been divorced for five years and married to Magic Michael for three.
By the time we nearly stumbled upon my first husband and the woman whose company he preferred during our last year of marriage, I'd been divorced for five years and married to Magic Michael for three.
Certainly the first part, about how my ex and I had started out as high school sweethearts, eager to get engaged despite my parents saying I was too young and not thinking straight. Right after graduation, he'd joined the Navy, coming home after boot camp to pop the question, and again after basic training to tie the knot.
Those first few years he was often out to sea. Not until he finished his service did we really get to know each other. Not until we settled into a mortgage and gainful employment did the fairytale start to fade.
I tried. I really did. But all I could see was how he and his new study partner would sit so cozy close whenever I'd join in for drinks after class. He'd start out next to me only to gravitate towards her, their heads eventually bent in quiet conversation, looking so intimate that in some ways it was worse than if someone had slipped me a grainy black-and-white photo of them getting sweaty under the covers.
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His publisher states: "Radin has spent the last 40 years conducting controlled experiments that demonstrate that thoughts are things, that we can sense others' emotions and intentions from a distance, that intuition is more powerful than we thought, and that we can tap into the power of intention (think The Secret, only on a more realistic and scientific level). These dormant powers can help us to lead more interesting and fulfilling lives. "
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