Why am I stuck in magician Hell?

It's a long and dark dangerous winding road creating magic to sell to a discerning crowd of rip off hacks and complete clones. Magic is a very free form thought process. However there are a lot of closed minded gits out there sadly. Many forget that what works for real people doesn't go over well with magi's. Mind you a svengali deck gets real people. Not like it's hard. However magicians try to create stuff to fool other magicians. Others try to do something that appeases both normal people and magicians. (cuz' let's face it, magicians are NOT normal.) One such person is Mickey Silver. Man this guy has taken the retention vanish and amped it up to inhuman proportions. I saw a video of it recently and my god this thing kills. He is going to release a DVD on it soon. This is where I stop and ask "Why"? So every hack can do it and you can make a buck? Is it to further the art but adding a new piece of unknown knowledge to the sub-culture.. or do you just want yer name in the history books?

Regardless it's always the human nature of newest, shiny toy. Even if it's just a move or idea, it's still new and EVERYONE is doing it (or wants to). Gee all the better reason to stay away from it. How can you be an individual by doing everyone else's stuff. Now in the case of techniques and moves it's understandable, but find a place for it IF it fits you. Too many people create stuff that they create for them, pass it off to make a buck, and muddle the world further. Hell I think it sucks when magicians blatantly rip off other guys and there is nothing they can do. Everyone waxes poetic about Meir Yedid's "Fade Out" however no one else seems to know that Peter Duffie came out with "Wipe Out" first. The effect and handling is the same. Would Meir do this knowingly? Mr. Duffie doesn't think so and chalks it up to both of them coming up with the same idea independently. I say PUUUUUHLEEEESE!!! Not my place but I do not think it's cool. But I digress...

So let's talk about new effects that were recently seen. One of such is the Tommy Wonder/ Losander effect "Sphere". Well first off Tommy Wonder revamped the "Zombie" ball by changing the gimmick and afew other things. Looked good. Losander too this Idea and made his now infamous "Floating Table". Quite frankly it's a great effect but fooking expensive for some balsa wood. Also too many people are doing it. So they got together and made the "Sphere" which appears to me to be a self contained (Gimmick and all) zombie. Ok I am down with that. Looks good. (Looks like the sphere version of the floating table but again, I digress.) My problem is, it looks like a fooking Phlat Ball. Un-natural as all hell. You can search around for a video demo if it if you look hard enuff. I am done hunting links down for you lazy buggers. It costs way more money than I would wanna pay for something that looks more out of place than a set of nice cups and balls. Hey slap two top names on the sucker and charge out the wang for it.. whatever. It's yer thing do what you wanna do. Show me a way to make a bowling ball do it, I'll be more impressed.

Bizzaro.
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