Sunless Sea's and a lesson it teaches

Sunless Seas is a 2D top down ocean exploration survival game with a focus on story telling. It's a rouge like, for those unfamiliar with this term a rouge like game is one where your characters death is the end of the play-through. With each death you start over and the world changes from what it was last time.

How is this relevant to magic blog, well as I said Sunless Seas has a focus on story telling and when you die you're faced with running stories you're been through before and you die a lot. Obviously you can make different choices each time and get a slightly different story but either way by your fourth or fifth time you find your self clicking through with the words barely registering. And this can happen in performance by the time you actually get out and perform you've probably said your lines a over a hundred times, told the tale to your mirror  over and over again. Time after time, and now you gotta do it again it's so easy to be meh.

This is doubly true if you're tired or upset, I know I just gone through the motions a time or two when I really want to not and I know my performance has suffered for it. Theres no easy solution it is up to you to find what you need to revitalize a flagging performance.

Inspire Friday

I did a tree reading over the internet and this an excerpt of what the recipient had to say. Seeing as I'm not anywhere near a master of tree reading, I find it inspiring in that it shows that getting out there and doing it is important as practice.

"The reading was very accurate. Somewhat creepy in a way like he's reading through my facade." - S. Silver in response to her tree reading.

Bill Montana Penguin Live Lecture

I knew of Bill Montana from the bizarre forums I frequent, I knew him to be a stand up guy, he's just given away so much good information there. His Dark History and Pitch Book Posts are must reads. And he gave me a copy of his spirit bell book for free just because I was curious. So I was surprised to see all the negative reviews on his lecture. I checked on the cafe for reviews and found it to be a bit more balanced, definitely seems a polarizing lecture, people either loved it or hated it. So with that in mind plus my personal knowledge of the man I decided to get this lecture.

After viewing I can see why so many people hated it, but in my opinion those people are idiots. I think the biggest problem for penguin's audience is the lack of a line of standard easy to reproduce effects. Not everything he does works perfectly but seeing as he aims to be real, that's the sort of thing you have to expect from real life. A lot of what he teaches lacks the ta-da moment of the sort of stuff we normally see from penguin. What it does have is the potential for a deeper connection and impact. Take his Pulse effect, where two or more peoples heartbeats synchronize. What's more personal than your heartbeat. Take the effect away from traditional performance venue and over into say a private reading. You do enough readings on readings and you'll see the idea of doing a little something before the reading to help get on the same mental page as the sitter and in less esoteric books it's often some simple mentalism trick. Instead use pulse and at the start tell them that you need to get lined up with them then after say "Two hearts beating in unison and where the body goes the mind follows."

The lecture also came with two PDF's, The Lotus Flower and Psychokinetic Plastic. Both are wonderful ideas that we get to see in use in the video.

Demons in this day and age

This takes place back when I worked in a call center. So if you told me that there are still people that believe in possession by artifact I would think you were speaking of some back water second or third world locale. I would not think that person would be working for Apple in a state capital. But as it turns out one of the people on my team believes her niece and nephew are under the influence of a book of spells that belonged to her half sister's great*?-grandmother, who was apparently a witch (not surprisingly that an automatic bad thing ). To be fair the book is supposed to sufficiently spooky looking and the kid are doing some weird sleep walking stuff.

And two other people on the team have personally witnessed an exorcism.

And for those curious about the 2 cents I contributed, when I found her looking up what to do online, I suggested sage smudging and offered to take any witch touched items off her hands.

$100 deck of cards.

Now I've paid a lot to get a deck but never more than $20. And I know that some limited decks can sell for a $60+ online but usually those are decks that you can't buy anymore. But Ellusionist has a deck that is listed for $100 reading the page maybe you can get for $25 but that seems like alot considering you have to have their $150 membership. http://www.ellusionist.com/black-club-gold-artifice-deck.html

Thoth's 27 Messengers by Craig Browning

Thoth's 27 messengers

So full disclosure, while I find no fault with the author from a technical stand point I do feel strongly about him as a person. So my review may be harsher than it needs to be. If not for the supplier I trust, the booklet, and the mention of Philmon Vanderbeck being the inspiration I would not have purchased this item.

So lets get right down to it, this is a reading method jazzed up with 21 card trick. And it is good. But it was good the first time I read it in the supplemental OORT. More on that in a second. There is also some fascinating history about the 21 card trick, from the introduction of 7*7*7. In fact pages 6 - 18 (more than half the actual content) seems to be entirely from other works. The details of the actual method matches my supplemental OORT word for word. The difference is one of formatting. The issue I have is I was promised a work based on an idea of Philmons not an exact copy of his work.

As for the actual works of the effect, theres a small fib on the ad copy for that as well. It says it uses just the major arcana but in actuality you also need 4 aces and a blank card. (I've never had a tarot deck that came with a blank card so their existence was news to me) So its a 27 card trick. One of the things I'd liked to have seen included is a way to scale it down. Its a math trick and should be work able with any multiples of three.

As for the bits of this tome not penned by others we have most of that space filled with a sample reading. Which I found to be well worth the page space. There's also a bit on what to do if the wrong card comes up or if a dark card is the one picked.

There is also one page devoted to the booklet. The booklet is a great idea in theory, but what you're given needs a lot of work before it looks professional enough to hand out to people paying for your services.

I'm not unhappy with my purchase, I've paid more for less. In the end I feel that you're better off spending a few bucks more on The supplemental OORT which has the exact method plus so much more.

If you found this review helpful or thought it sucked let me know in the comments.

Edit to add, I've been informed that the reason it has to be 27 and not something smaller like 12 or 9 is because that is the amount that will let you spell out any name.

Slate Killers by Bob Cassidy

I'll come right out and say that I don't think this was worth $20. I think you can tell Penguin thinks so too otherwise why tie on some unrelated info to the end, more on that later.

It opens with a performance, pretty strait forward. Bob opens on the history of the items as legit tools. Then he has a participant hold the slates while another person picks a word out of the dictionary. That takes the first 10 minutes out of 50.

Then cut to Bob alone at a table. He start by explaining how to justify the use of slates. Then he shows several ways to prove the slates blank and a few sample routines including how to to properly Hindu force. Here and there he sort of mentions other idea and methods without to much detail. Then he says his good byes and the screen goes black. This is at about thirty minutes. The last twenty minutes are about a threaded dictionary and a peek wallet.

It's good info but it could have been more rather easily. I think penguin realized that it was a little on the light side info wise for the price point or why add the threaded dictionary and wallet part. The threaded dictionary is a dictionary that lets you open it to the same place a participant did. Which in this context is kind of useless. Slates are not really a find out what the participant picked and mark it up that way kind of tool. It can be done and how to do it is sort of mentioned offhandedly but they definitely couldn't say they taught how to mark the slates after you know what spectator chose.

I think I would have appreciated him showing us how to make the slates, he just says to cut them out of DVD cases about playing card size. So making nice slates takes trial and error. His look really nice, the one's I've made so far are no where near as nice or as uniform. And so far I've ruined three cases. Just finding case that I could use was a pain. Most had that recycle symbol punched into them. I also would have like more info on handlings I thought of a few obvious options watching it that could have been added. I would also have like to see some info on presenting them as spirit contact tool seance style. You know actually delivering a message. The video really just shows them a reveal for standard mentalism.

If you found this review helpful or thought it sucked let me know in the comments.