Tim's Very Best Christmas Cards of 2022



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Tim sends out well over 100 Christmas cards every year, and as well as choosing an unusual card, he also encloses all kinds of optical illusions and puzzles that he has come across during the year. Not surprisingly, he receives some very entertaining cards in return. And each year his favourite cards will be added to his amazing toy collection. But before he does that, he shares them here with you, on the Grand Illusions channel.

Tim’s friend Mark Setteducati always creates unusual cards, and this year his card is based around a concept called the Magic Square. But this is no normal Magic Square!

Tim received about ten cards with a deer theme, and some of them – as he shows here – were quite unusual.

From the USA, a card that opens like a paper Christmas decoration to form… a 3D ice cream sundae!

A card with a pixelated design which is hard to see when it is close, but as it is viewed from a distance, the design becomes clearer.

A Reverse Perspective card from the artist Patrick Hughes.

A paper umbrella with a witty message added around the edge of the umbrella.

A card with a Christmas tree and a fairy, where you need to get them to align.

A hidden message in the next card. Is the UV torch that comes with the card some kind of a clue?

A Santa character on a bike, but with artwork built around fractals.

Finally a pop up card with an amazing sailing ship. As Tim says… ‘wow’.

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44 thoughts on “Tim's Very Best Christmas Cards of 2022”

  1. 2:52 You say it's unique, but obviously there are ways to swap the numbers around that maintain these properties, for instance all symmetries of the square (Dihedral group of order 4 for the nerds in the crowd). Fairly sure that some other permutations of the columns or rows work too. If I had to guess, the correct statement would be that it's unique up to these symmetries.

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  2. The shoes look like they would make deer tracks, with front and rear footfalls close enough together they can both be made by one shoe. So two human footsteps = four deer prints.

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  3. 11:46 I've heard shoes such as these were worn by moonshiners in America. The treads underneath were meant to resemble cow tracks, allowing the moonshiners to walk to and from their stills without their location being discovered by later searches of the fields or woods.

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  4. Fantastic video as always, but there is a little something I wonder: Instead of using a mirror for the first card, couldn't he just have turned it around vertically, since its transparent? 😀

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  5. The block picture effect is one of high frequency filtering and my favourite in this area is not a block picture at all, rather, a picture of Einstein that switches to a picture of Marilyn Monroe depending on viewing distance, all down to the visible frequency components. Edit: The shoes reminded me of a colour plate in the ancient encyclopeida we had 60+ years ago – try searching for "ancient platform shoes" and you will see similar example to those in the picture.

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  6. 12:26 obviously the shoes trick any viewer of the footprints into thinking a hooved animal made its way over a track of land to suppress suspicion that a human has infiltrated the presmises.

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  7. The pixel pics are ACE! Shakespeare revealed in miniature. I am relieved to learn that the reindeer get to have a good time after all that hard work Blind spot tricks also are a hoot. Hoping 2023 coming up to snuff. 🌟👍

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