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The Magic Review: a new review site started by Matt Tarrant from Australia. He hopes to “build a complete and honest, non-biased review styled site” reviewing Effects, Cards, Local Magic Shops, Lectures and Performances. They also have a competition to launch the site, just sign-up to the site and you are entered into a draw to win some Wynn playing cards.

The Cuso I Photography Competition: Alejandro is running a magical card related photography competion over at his blog, details from him as follows:

Today the I Photography Competition begins. If you are a magician, flourisher, cardist, xcmer, poker player, sleight of hand artist, cheater, playing card collector, or you just like taking photos you have a chance to Wynn, ehmm... i mean win these cool prizes:

1st place: 12 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (6 red / 6 Blue)
2nd place: 8 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (4 red / 4 Blue)
3rd place: 4 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (2 red / 2 Blue)

I've made a deal with John (AceKing Playing Cards) and he will ship the cards to the winners once they are decided. So please give thanks to him for these great prizes (and to me for paying them! ).

These are the rules:

-Only one pic per participant.
-The pic must contain at least a playing card or a deck of cards or anything related to playing cards (symbols, court guys running around or whatever).
-Only submisions to thecuso@gmail.com with the subject My Photo will be allowed for the contest.
-Emails must include your full name and nickname/screen name (if you have).
-Deadline is 29 February 2008.

There will also be runner ups for these categories:

Funniest pic: If you think you have THE pic that would make us laugh our asses out.
Most Artistic: If your pic has the best colours, lights or photoshop effects.
Most Original: If you did Pandora while jumping off a bridge bungee style.

The 3 runner ups will get my Nebula tutorial and some other unreleased clips of me.

FISM European Championships of Magic 2008: The 6th Balkan Magic Convention in Sofia, Bulgaria on 6-9 November 2008 will be the host of the first FISM European Championships of Magic. I am certainly hoping to go, it will be a good start to the run up to China in 2009. I believe they will use these championships to send the winners to the world competition in 2009, to try and raise the standard of entry. The European FISM is the first continental division with others to follow soon.

The Magic Classifieds: Jeff Pierce has started a free Classifieds Ad site where you can post magic ads to buy, sell, trade and view your auctions.

The Cull: Tim Ellis recently culled his list of referring magic blogs, and added some new ones, two I would particularly like to mention are:

• Fun Incorporated - the new blog of Fun Inc. and the Royal Magic line talking about new products and the latest happenings at the company.


• Pursuit of Magic - a particular welcome back to Steve Pellegrino who as well as running the Ellusionist blog I mentioned in an earlier post has restarted his own personal magic blog.

Tim has kindly also linked to Watching Magic which brings me again to the topic of site updates, I read a post today on Simon Collison's blog about the state of blogging which kind of captured my thoughts, this year has seen me much more involved in the social-software side with facebook, twitter, flickr and the tumblelog, coupled with my problem of using this site for anything other than magic related posts. This may or may not change, you might start to see more unrelated general posts on here, just as a way to get me back to writing and posting again, possibly...