About The Random Magic Generator
This Helps You Discover New Ideas In Magic
Every time you hit the big green button, you get a new random idea for a mgic trick. Most of them won't make any sense at all, but that's the great thing about the human brain; it excels at seeing patterns and connecting the dots of information. The random idea probably won't be THE idea, but it may trigger the inspiration for something new.
There are no rules. Just stare at the randomness for a while, and see what happens.
Created by Ryan Pilling
For over two decades Ryan has been encouraging magicians to think creatively. He published Half-Baked; The Journal of Ideas That Aren't, home to a collective brainstorm spanning the globe.
He's still sharing his ideas and inspirations every week with his Tips & Tricks for Magicians email newsletter. If you like this project, be sure to subscribe to hear about what else Ryan is working on.
An Evolution of Ideas
The Random Idea Generator was not a random idea which popped out of nowhere. It was simply the next step in an evolution of ideas.
1944 - The Trick Brain written by Dariel Fitzkee offered a systematic way of inspiring new magic ideas. This book suggested long lists of words that would correspond to cards randomly dealt from a regular deck. The combinations of the words were supposed to incite creative thought as you piece them together.
1997 - The Electronic Grymoire, a popular email discussion group for magicians of the day, included a suggestion of combining the word list and the deck of cards into one tool. Using leftover decks, write your random inspiring words on the back of cards. Shuffle them up, and deal out groups of three or four to see what new combination of ideas are born. I used this creativity bossting tool for a number of years.
1999 - Tom Stone published an essay on Creativity. Part 5 had an idea he called "Round Table," which encouraged you to imagine magic routines performed by strong characters. He asks "What would Cups an Balls look like when performed by Max Maven?" This idea of how character can influence the creative process became another tool in my own kit.
2000 - Half-Baked Magazine began publication, and I was building a community of creative thinkers. I had the plan of turning this random idea deck into a computer program, and Andi Gladwin had the programming know-how to make it a real thing.
Issue #2 of the magazine (October 2000) announced the new downloadable EXE program which would present four random words. My biggest contribution was re-forming the random jumble of words into a sentence describing a magic performance; "The Amazing [character] Does A [effect] With A [object] And A [object]"
In the following years, as Half-Baked was an active project, I refurbished the RIG a few times and as I developed my web programming skills it became an online tool. By 2004 the Half-Baked project had wrapped up, and the online RIGs were lost to the digital dust.
2021 - Back in action with a new modern look and two decades worth of improved programming skills to be better than ever!
2023 - Artificial Intelligence content generation has a unique skill to generate random nonsense. This is a perfect match for this tool. I added a button to extrapolate the single sentance into an entire text description of a random idea, including an extra random element of a suggested style.
Original RIG Designs
circa 2000, the original RIG was an executable program
The next version became a web-based program.
The third edition, which wasn't around for very long.