Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Entertainment point-missing
Sticking with today's focus....
Quora randomly fed a discussion of a clever magic trick. Judging from the pictures, it's popular among street performers in India. The magician appears to be floating in air, using a fragile-looking wooden stick to stay in one place. The discussers showed how the trick works. The stick isn't fragile; it contains a steel column supporting a platform under the magician, and bracketed to a platform on the ground. The platforms and welds are hidden by "casually draped" rugs and robes.
Serious magic has always involved serious engineering.
One discusser, whose Quora credentials showed him to be a professional magician, was loudly berating the others for revealing the trick. How do you expect magicians to make money if you're going to spill our secrets?
Tell you what, dude, it's not up to the audience to keep your secrets. It's up to you. Competent magicians have ALWAYS revealed some of their own tricks. Competent magicians can produce amazement and wonderment ANYWAY.
That's the whole point of any entertainment or art.
The audience knows that a painting is just goo splashed on canvas, but a good painter can use the goo to create awe and mystery and revelation. The audience knows that an orchestra is just a bunch of wiggling strings and metal pipes, and a singer is just a bladder full of air creating a buzz between two flaps of skin and muscle. Despite that knowledge, a good musician can pull the audience out of horrible everyday life directly into Heaven.
Dude, if you think your main vocation is keeping secrets, you should be working for NSA or the Public Death Offices, not trying to entertain people. You're in the wrong job.
Labels: #defundpublichealth, AI point-missing, Entertainment
¶ 10:17 PM
