All these stories about zoomers not knowing how to do computer stuff is making me want to write a fantasy world where magic is prevalent but most people do not bother to know how it works or question it beyond its surface applications, despite it being the basis for all military and economic might.
Well I wanted to write that, but then I realized I was talking about FMA: Brotherhood.
I mean Mad Max has a reason for that, because of the harsh setting and difficult lifestyle where everything is trying to kill you. You know… Australia.
I feel like the Empire in warhammer 40k operates on a similar premise, all there machune rituals and what not are just maintanance, but nobody understands the machines, so they’ll just reenact what was shown to someone eons ago or what have seemed to cause some effect.
just like me blowing into NES Cartridges when a game would not start :D.
In sci-fi proper that is also a plot point of Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation. The giant galactic empire collapses and all the scholars are holed up on a planet to preserve knowledge. They then go out to other planets and give technology, but everyone is so ignorant that it seems like magic and the scholars kind of roll with it.
In a similar vein is A Canticle for Liebowitz which is about an order of Monks whose goal is to preserve all technology and information after an apocalypse scenario. I think it may have been the inspiration for the Brotherhood of Steel.
It moves through time and shows how ignorance of technology can mix too easily with religious power.
What I really loved about Foundation was the sheer timescale of it. Too much Science Fiction is only on a scale of an individual doing something, and maybe it will follow a few individuals over the course of a few decades or even a couple of centuries and you’re left to fill in the blanks, meanwhile Foundation is on a timescale of tens of thousands of years
“So, like, you can just conjure up a gun out of a brick?”
“It’s more complicated than that! You have to do a bunch of math and science and draw a circle and stuff”
“Okay, sure… but then you can just create a gun. Or you can science water into wine. Or any dirty liquid into clean water. Or medicine? You can turn dust into medicine. Using nothing but your brain and a stick of chalk.”
I wanted to like that movie more, just for the novelty. I got a strong impression that the story wanted to be a book, but it was forced into movie script shapes that didn’t quite work?
That could be the least comprehensible critique I’ve ever written, but I did just wake up. If it doesn’t make sense I’ll try again when my eyes have stopped trying to close.
It’s also basically how the Adeptus Mechanicus operates in 40k. Lots of worshipping the old tech, preserving it, and there’s some limited giant machines that they could never fathom rebuilding or even fixing so they’re very protective of them
Ironically, mobile phones being digital makes them easier for many people to understand. The analog circuitry that goes into simply making an analog phone ring is surprisingly complex, let along how they actually function as phones.
Analog audio is a lot less “computer nerds programming things” and a lot more “scrapped together from some resistors that were ripped out of an old TV. We don’t even know how it turns on, let alone how it functions.” You can literally build a basic microphone with nothing but a balloon stretched across an embroidery hoop, some copper wire, a small magnet, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but it would function as a microphone in some capacity, and at least be able to detect loud noises. And the same goes for a speaker; You could build one out of a red Solo cup, a magnet, some wire, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but you could at least get a basic “sound is being emitted from this” level from it. But if you showed that scrapped-together device to someone, they’d have no idea that it was a phone.
Fascinating. I’d say the secret to analog electronics for sound is that sound is waves, electricity is waves, you can translate from one to the other with a resistor and a membrane. The end.
To me it’s much more unclear how sound is first encoded into a digital signal, transmitted as a digital signal through wires and radio waves, and then translated back into sound in a phone. I mean it’s essentially the same physics as the analog electronics, just with a bunch of extra steps added.
But maybe if one of those steps is “computer does thing” people just go like “ah yes, computer, makes sense”.
To me it’s much more unclear how sound is first encoded into a digital signal, transmitted as a digital signal through wires and radio waves, and then translated back into sound in a phone. I mean it’s essentially the same physics as the analog electronics, just with a bunch of extra steps added.
Yeah, this is where sample rate and bit depth come into play. In case you’re curious, digital audio is possible due to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. The TL;DR is that you don’t record a continuous stream of audio data; You just sample the wave at regular intervals by recording the current amplitude. And then you can recreate it on the other end. The theorem states that an analog wave can be perfectly recorded and replicated, as long as you have a sufficiently high sample rate and bit depth. Since human hearing generally tops out at 20kHz, we need to sample the audio signal at least 40k times per second; Most consumer-grade audio equipment uses 44.1 or 48kHz. Phones actually use a much lower sample rate for calls, but more on that later.
Again, as long as your sample rate is at least 2x the rate of the highest frequency being recorded, you’re able to perfectly recreate the wave. For an example, here’s a gif:
The image on the left shows the wave being recorded, and the dots are samples. As you add more samples, the reproduced wave gets more accurate. By the time you have 2x the fastest frequency, there is only one possible wave that will fit every sample. Again, human hearing tops out around 20kHz, so we use a sample rate just above 40kHz.
Phone calls will often put a filter on the high and low ends, and only capture the mid-range. It gives that distinct “this is shitty phone call quality” sound, but means they can use a much lower sample rate; Since they’re lopping off most of the high end with that filter, they may only need a sample rate closer to 15 or 20kHz. Because fewer samples means less data. The intelligibility happens in the mid-range, so that’s what the phone makers (and telecom companies) focus on. This low sample rate is also why hold music sounds so fucking awful. It’s essentially being passed through a “make this sound as shitty as possible while still being intelligible” filter.
And then bit depth simply determines how detailed each sample is. If you use 8 bits per sample, that gives you 256 potential values per sample. 12 bits gives you 4096. The trade-off is that a higher bit depth means each sample takes exponentially more data; Audiophiles will generally push for higher bit depths, so each sample is more accurate. In contrast, phone calls often use lower bit depths, (again, to save data).
As for how it actually transmits the data, that’s just 1’s and 0’s. It’s a little more complicated than that, (packets, for example) but in the digital realm, as long as the 1’s and 0’s get to where they need to be, you’re good to go.
Holy shit, so I’m not just uniquely terrible at understanding people on the phone? I’ve searched so long for a phone that does high-quality phone calls, and I can’t believe I never figured that it was a problem with both the phones and the carriers.
Yup it’s also why hold music sounds terrible is the sample rate and ranges are so small there’s basically no music which would sound decent over the connection
I studied electronics and GSM was a big part of the telecommunications subject. I visited the HQ of a mobile provider, was shown around and met the cartel boss (in hindsight, I wonder how much a Luigi moment would have affected the triopoly). I also visited a museum of technology and used an early touch-click model still connected to the network (pre-DTMF so not touch-tone, and no buffer so you had to wait for the simulated dial to stop clicking).
But still, I don’t know the basics of wired phones cuz I’ve never really used them. How does voice travel both ways on a single twisted pair? How can Inspector Clouseau the telephone engineer in The Pink Panther (1978) hear a conversation from other phones in the house? How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit? Can I use voice services on rotary phones, and what if I need to press * or #? All these would be obvious to 1980s kids…
How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit?
This is the fun part: they don’t! The exchange just listens for enough tones to make up an instruction then performs what it was instructed to do. That’s why when you call places it’ll say “press 1 to speak with so-and-so” is you’ve now been connection to another exchange which is waiting for instructions on the form of dial tones generated by button presses.
Phreakers figured out ways to generate the tones needed to all sorts of fun things like play the “payment received” tone into a payphone, or to tell the exchange to connect to another exchange that it might not otherwise (and sometimes would chain them together and see how many hops they could achieve before the sheer distance of the call completely destroyed the call) and all sorts of other fun
Yes, I know about phreakers but what I mean is, phone numbers differ by length. Did the exchange wait until no more tones/clicks in a while or is there a variable length acheved by, say, making all area codes start with 0?
The thing with phones is so much is built with backwards compatibility or at least similar design principles that any question like this you have to start at the first automated phone switchboards powered by strowger switches.
A rotary phone would issue a number of pulses as the dial spun. 1 pulse for 1, 3 pulses for 3, etc. Each pulse would trigger a strowger switch at local exchange, where it would start turning a dial on the switch with an equal number of turns to the pulses or receives. For a single digit dial it would just have one switch that rotates with the number of pulses of receives. For a much more common 3-4 digit number being entered it would take the rapid succession of pulses to turn the first dial, then after a sufficient pause any subsequent pulses turn the next dial, and so on. Once it runs out of dials to turn on the switch it connects the call to the line which may go to another phone or may simply go to another strowger switch awaiting additional pulses from the user dialing additional numbers.
For example user dials 5-5-5-1-2-3 with a pause between each digit as they dial. The first 5 sends 5 pulses in quick succession to the switch the phone is directly connected to (the local exchange) and that sets the first dial on the switch to 5, the user naturally pauses for a split second creating the pause the switch interprets as a completed dial then the user enters another 5 causing another 5 pulses to go to the switch at the local exchange. After the third 5 it connects to the next exchange likely without the user even knowing and the 1 is transmitted via the local exchange to the 555 exchange where a stroger switch turns to the 1 position from the single pulse, and so on. All of the switches that connect for such a call remain engaged and connected until they receive the disconnect pulse and then they kill the connection ending the call.
With the transition to DTMF tones, much of this same behavior of each switch is just waiting for exactly how many digits it expects then connects the call to the next place remained, and with modern digital and VoIP calls, they continue to emulate the same functionality of the strowger switches, where the exchange is expecting a specific number of digits to be entered, and the user will either enter the correct number of digits or receive an error and a call that doesn’t connect. There are actually still places operating analog telephone exchanges so everything is ultimately backwards compatible, and the security and design challenges of sending signaling over the same wire as voice have remained all thanks to the cost savings choices made by some dude with an amazing mustache in the 1880s. Or we can go even further back because the telephone was actually an innovation on the telegraph, originally designed as a solution for sending multiple telegraphs over a single telegraph trunk line.
Alexander Graham Bell, a pioneering audiologist who worked with deaf kids excitedly penned a letter to an individual at the Western Union Telegraph Company describing using different tones of beeps over the line to differentiate between different telegraphs, and then excitedly went on to describe how with enough different tones one could not only transmit a nearly infinite number of different telegraphs at once but one could theoretically transmit human speech! I’ve read scans of these original letters and you can just see the excitement building as Bell described that part
Discworld’s magic system is like this. The wizards often don’t know why certain parts of a ritual or spell are in place, but it works so they don’t touch it
Half of the plots of the Wizard books are about what happens when someone ignores that advice and does start poking at things better left alone. Wizards are only human after all, and the magical equivalent of a “don’t touch; wet paint” sign leaves them so very tempted.
Ridcully would see a wet paint sign, take it down, touch the paint, then demand the Bursar to do something about “all the messes they keep leaving around here.”
Hello, can I suggest the package code for LXML? I once wondered why the fuck etree.tostring() returned a bytes object instead of a fucking string and made the mistake of diving into the function. Never again. That library is cursed script condensed from the haunted cries of forgotten pharaohs and inscribed in the blood of a newborn foal onto an ancient ash tree under Venus’ vexatious gaze.
Meanwhile a research such as Miss Level asks, and keeps a log of, what subspecies of henbane works best and does it work better if collected at midnight under the full moon?
While Esmé Weatherwax eschews most magic mostly, preferring Hard Work and Headology, even against Death. Unless magic is really required, when she digs deep into the strongest magic imaginable.
As a worldbuilding enthusiast who cares a lot about making it all hang together as a rich tapestry and all (come check us out at https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding btw) it really does chafe to see someone become a billionaire by literally only making their worldbuilding serve the plot and the tone, with no effort to make it internally consistent or even coherent outside of the main narrative.
That’s a series where people learn how to use magic, not a thing about “how it works”. The series is very careful to never explain anything about the mechanics of magic, other than “incantations are a thing unless they aren’t, willpower maybe matters, and quality of the magic wand is relevant except when it isn’t”.
This is something I think about a lot, and has been done well in fiction plenty already. My adhd wouldn’t just go away in a fantasy world. Sure I might have a burst of motivation for a while, but I probably wouldn’t magically be interested in studying and research just because I might be able to do some basic magic.
Disability in fiction is always going to be fertile soil imo because it’s such a genuine aspect of the human experience. Even when fictional devices have answers for some things (a focus spell would be nice), there are still always personal struggles that are worth exploring.
I read the Dying Earth stuff. It’s writen between 1950 and the 1980is, I think. And you can fucking tell. It has rape scenes that are handed so utterly casual as if they said “and then the character got on a bus.” Got a lot of other problems along those lines too.
That said, it does give an interesting idea of how D&D Magic might look if you translate the game mechanics of spell slots etc. into how that would work and feel in a practical sense and what implications it would have for the world it is set in, in general.
But read it as a historical document, it you do so. It helps that the main protagonist is a fucking unlikeable brick.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were wild like that too. Main character has leprosy and bitches about it making him a worthless person the entire book then raped a woman that helps him and more or less shrugs it off because he thinks the fantasy world is a delusion.
I only read the first book because yikes.
Fans will still foam at the mouth about the moral complexity but those fans are always weird edgelord incels for some reason. It is meant to be a deconstruction, but it’s one written by someone that’s definitely a rapist, and in the end it’s still just an absurd power fantasy with cynicism and casual 70’s misogyny.
I love the Numenara RPG concept - haven’t had a chance to play it, but I’ve workshopped ideas with a friend who likes to write stuff in it. I’ll put that book on my radar, another lemming got me going on Glen Cook’s Black Company series currently.
It’s actually a collection of four books, which I think these days are sold in sets of two.
It’s got some fun stuff, like an author who’s convinced of his own infallibility, and fantasy-like vocabulary, except none of the words are really made up, it’s just applications of somewhat obscure latin and greek words. I’d also kind of encourage going into it blind, since there are some bits of it that are more fun to figure out as you go along.
It’s not 40k! It’s a physics professor who gets turned into a vampire, learns magic, and get isekai’d. Every book is a hard left turn from the one before, so I can’t tell you a ton about them without major spoilers, but they’re really really great. Specifically topical is magicians are different from wizards. Magicians learn spells by rote and are like phd engineers, they might only make one new spell every few years but it’s gonna be damn efficient and effective. Wizards are the magical garage tinkerers, rarely learning spells academically like magicians do but cobbling together what they need on the fly. It’s a fascinating setting because it is sort of magically learning stagnant, with the people capable of the highest feats of magic incredibly specialized in a domain not develping much new, while the innovators are the ones who are weaker and more downtrodden. I cannot recommend it enough.
Yep! Just edited my comment with a bit more info. The main series is 8 books, 40 hours in audiobook form, with an extra half length book about a side character after 7. It’s still being written.
I mean, it’s kind of a major point of Elantris, albeit inverted: Nobody knows why magic stopped working because they don’t know why it worked in the first place.
All these stories about zoomers not knowing how to do computer stuff is making me want to write a fantasy world where magic is prevalent but most people do not bother to know how it works or question it beyond its surface applications, despite it being the basis for all military and economic might.
Well I wanted to write that, but then I realized I was talking about FMA: Brotherhood.
Or Eragon, lol
Or Mad Max.
I mean Mad Max has a reason for that, because of the harsh setting and difficult lifestyle where everything is trying to kill you. You know… Australia.
I feel like the Empire in warhammer 40k operates on a similar premise, all there machune rituals and what not are just maintanance, but nobody understands the machines, so they’ll just reenact what was shown to someone eons ago or what have seemed to cause some effect.
just like me blowing into NES Cartridges when a game would not start :D.
Smearing computers with weird oils and burning sage in a server room sounds crazy now, but rather that than try your luck with a customer service LLM.
You mean an Abominable Intelligence
Lmaoo thank you for this.
This is why all my stuff is painted red. It goes faster!
Don’t forget to add some Speed Holes!
Don’t forget your purity seals!
One of my favorite examples of an Ork model was a Mekboy with some Killa Kans covered in purify seals
In sci-fi proper that is also a plot point of Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation. The giant galactic empire collapses and all the scholars are holed up on a planet to preserve knowledge. They then go out to other planets and give technology, but everyone is so ignorant that it seems like magic and the scholars kind of roll with it.
In a similar vein is A Canticle for Liebowitz which is about an order of Monks whose goal is to preserve all technology and information after an apocalypse scenario. I think it may have been the inspiration for the Brotherhood of Steel.
It moves through time and shows how ignorance of technology can mix too easily with religious power.
What I really loved about Foundation was the sheer timescale of it. Too much Science Fiction is only on a scale of an individual doing something, and maybe it will follow a few individuals over the course of a few decades or even a couple of centuries and you’re left to fill in the blanks, meanwhile Foundation is on a timescale of tens of thousands of years
“So, like, you can just conjure up a gun out of a brick?”
“It’s more complicated than that! You have to do a bunch of math and science and draw a circle and stuff”
“Okay, sure… but then you can just create a gun. Or you can science water into wine. Or any dirty liquid into clean water. Or medicine? You can turn dust into medicine. Using nothing but your brain and a stick of chalk.”
“Well, yes! Isn’t it cool!”
“And what did you say your title was, again?”
“The big fucking gun alchemist, why?”
onward kinda has this, but practically everyone forgot magic
I wanted to like that movie more, just for the novelty. I got a strong impression that the story wanted to be a book, but it was forced into movie script shapes that didn’t quite work?
That could be the least comprehensible critique I’ve ever written, but I did just wake up. If it doesn’t make sense I’ll try again when my eyes have stopped trying to close.
i got the impression it was meant to be made about 10-15 years earlier with jack black and michael cera instead of chris pratt and tom holland
Haha! That’s already a way better movie tbh.
It’s also basically how the Adeptus Mechanicus operates in 40k. Lots of worshipping the old tech, preserving it, and there’s some limited giant machines that they could never fathom rebuilding or even fixing so they’re very protective of them
Also, basically my codebase at work.
To this day, I don’t understand how wired telephones worked.
I mean, I kinda do, since I watched a bunch of YouTube videos explaining it. But then I kinda don’t.
But you understand how mobile phones work?
Ironically, mobile phones being digital makes them easier for many people to understand. The analog circuitry that goes into simply making an analog phone ring is surprisingly complex, let along how they actually function as phones.
Analog audio is a lot less “computer nerds programming things” and a lot more “scrapped together from some resistors that were ripped out of an old TV. We don’t even know how it turns on, let alone how it functions.” You can literally build a basic microphone with nothing but a balloon stretched across an embroidery hoop, some copper wire, a small magnet, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but it would function as a microphone in some capacity, and at least be able to detect loud noises. And the same goes for a speaker; You could build one out of a red Solo cup, a magnet, some wire, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but you could at least get a basic “sound is being emitted from this” level from it. But if you showed that scrapped-together device to someone, they’d have no idea that it was a phone.
Fascinating. I’d say the secret to analog electronics for sound is that sound is waves, electricity is waves, you can translate from one to the other with a resistor and a membrane. The end.
To me it’s much more unclear how sound is first encoded into a digital signal, transmitted as a digital signal through wires and radio waves, and then translated back into sound in a phone. I mean it’s essentially the same physics as the analog electronics, just with a bunch of extra steps added.
But maybe if one of those steps is “computer does thing” people just go like “ah yes, computer, makes sense”.
Yeah, this is where sample rate and bit depth come into play. In case you’re curious, digital audio is possible due to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. The TL;DR is that you don’t record a continuous stream of audio data; You just sample the wave at regular intervals by recording the current amplitude. And then you can recreate it on the other end. The theorem states that an analog wave can be perfectly recorded and replicated, as long as you have a sufficiently high sample rate and bit depth. Since human hearing generally tops out at 20kHz, we need to sample the audio signal at least 40k times per second; Most consumer-grade audio equipment uses 44.1 or 48kHz. Phones actually use a much lower sample rate for calls, but more on that later.
Again, as long as your sample rate is at least 2x the rate of the highest frequency being recorded, you’re able to perfectly recreate the wave. For an example, here’s a gif:
The image on the left shows the wave being recorded, and the dots are samples. As you add more samples, the reproduced wave gets more accurate. By the time you have 2x the fastest frequency, there is only one possible wave that will fit every sample. Again, human hearing tops out around 20kHz, so we use a sample rate just above 40kHz.
Phone calls will often put a filter on the high and low ends, and only capture the mid-range. It gives that distinct “this is shitty phone call quality” sound, but means they can use a much lower sample rate; Since they’re lopping off most of the high end with that filter, they may only need a sample rate closer to 15 or 20kHz. Because fewer samples means less data. The intelligibility happens in the mid-range, so that’s what the phone makers (and telecom companies) focus on. This low sample rate is also why hold music sounds so fucking awful. It’s essentially being passed through a “make this sound as shitty as possible while still being intelligible” filter.
And then bit depth simply determines how detailed each sample is. If you use 8 bits per sample, that gives you 256 potential values per sample. 12 bits gives you 4096. The trade-off is that a higher bit depth means each sample takes exponentially more data; Audiophiles will generally push for higher bit depths, so each sample is more accurate. In contrast, phone calls often use lower bit depths, (again, to save data).
As for how it actually transmits the data, that’s just 1’s and 0’s. It’s a little more complicated than that, (packets, for example) but in the digital realm, as long as the 1’s and 0’s get to where they need to be, you’re good to go.
I’ve heard that the pikachu cry in pokemon yellow has a bit depth of 1.
Holy shit, so I’m not just uniquely terrible at understanding people on the phone? I’ve searched so long for a phone that does high-quality phone calls, and I can’t believe I never figured that it was a problem with both the phones and the carriers.
Yup it’s also why hold music sounds terrible is the sample rate and ranges are so small there’s basically no music which would sound decent over the connection
I studied electronics and GSM was a big part of the telecommunications subject. I visited the HQ of a mobile provider, was shown around and met the cartel boss (in hindsight, I wonder how much a Luigi moment would have affected the triopoly). I also visited a museum of technology and used an early touch-click model still connected to the network (pre-DTMF so not touch-tone, and no buffer so you had to wait for the simulated dial to stop clicking).
But still, I don’t know the basics of wired phones cuz I’ve never really used them. How does voice travel both ways on a single twisted pair? How can Inspector Clouseau the telephone engineer in The Pink Panther (1978) hear a conversation from other phones in the house? How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit? Can I use voice services on rotary phones, and what if I need to press * or #? All these would be obvious to 1980s kids…
This is the fun part: they don’t! The exchange just listens for enough tones to make up an instruction then performs what it was instructed to do. That’s why when you call places it’ll say “press 1 to speak with so-and-so” is you’ve now been connection to another exchange which is waiting for instructions on the form of dial tones generated by button presses.
Phreakers figured out ways to generate the tones needed to all sorts of fun things like play the “payment received” tone into a payphone, or to tell the exchange to connect to another exchange that it might not otherwise (and sometimes would chain them together and see how many hops they could achieve before the sheer distance of the call completely destroyed the call) and all sorts of other fun
Yes, I know about phreakers but what I mean is, phone numbers differ by length. Did the exchange wait until no more tones/clicks in a while or is there a variable length acheved by, say, making all area codes start with 0?
The thing with phones is so much is built with backwards compatibility or at least similar design principles that any question like this you have to start at the first automated phone switchboards powered by strowger switches.
A rotary phone would issue a number of pulses as the dial spun. 1 pulse for 1, 3 pulses for 3, etc. Each pulse would trigger a strowger switch at local exchange, where it would start turning a dial on the switch with an equal number of turns to the pulses or receives. For a single digit dial it would just have one switch that rotates with the number of pulses of receives. For a much more common 3-4 digit number being entered it would take the rapid succession of pulses to turn the first dial, then after a sufficient pause any subsequent pulses turn the next dial, and so on. Once it runs out of dials to turn on the switch it connects the call to the line which may go to another phone or may simply go to another strowger switch awaiting additional pulses from the user dialing additional numbers.
For example user dials 5-5-5-1-2-3 with a pause between each digit as they dial. The first 5 sends 5 pulses in quick succession to the switch the phone is directly connected to (the local exchange) and that sets the first dial on the switch to 5, the user naturally pauses for a split second creating the pause the switch interprets as a completed dial then the user enters another 5 causing another 5 pulses to go to the switch at the local exchange. After the third 5 it connects to the next exchange likely without the user even knowing and the 1 is transmitted via the local exchange to the 555 exchange where a stroger switch turns to the 1 position from the single pulse, and so on. All of the switches that connect for such a call remain engaged and connected until they receive the disconnect pulse and then they kill the connection ending the call.
With the transition to DTMF tones, much of this same behavior of each switch is just waiting for exactly how many digits it expects then connects the call to the next place remained, and with modern digital and VoIP calls, they continue to emulate the same functionality of the strowger switches, where the exchange is expecting a specific number of digits to be entered, and the user will either enter the correct number of digits or receive an error and a call that doesn’t connect. There are actually still places operating analog telephone exchanges so everything is ultimately backwards compatible, and the security and design challenges of sending signaling over the same wire as voice have remained all thanks to the cost savings choices made by some dude with an amazing mustache in the 1880s. Or we can go even further back because the telephone was actually an innovation on the telegraph, originally designed as a solution for sending multiple telegraphs over a single telegraph trunk line.
Alexander Graham Bell, a pioneering audiologist who worked with deaf kids excitedly penned a letter to an individual at the Western Union Telegraph Company describing using different tones of beeps over the line to differentiate between different telegraphs, and then excitedly went on to describe how with enough different tones one could not only transmit a nearly infinite number of different telegraphs at once but one could theoretically transmit human speech! I’ve read scans of these original letters and you can just see the excitement building as Bell described that part
Discworld’s magic system is like this. The wizards often don’t know why certain parts of a ritual or spell are in place, but it works so they don’t touch it
Half of the plots of the Wizard books are about what happens when someone ignores that advice and does start poking at things better left alone. Wizards are only human after all, and the magical equivalent of a “don’t touch; wet paint” sign leaves them so very tempted.
Ridcully would see a wet paint sign, take it down, touch the paint, then demand the Bursar to do something about “all the messes they keep leaving around here.”
Basically every day I look at weird code as a programmer
Hello, can I suggest the package code for LXML? I once wondered why the fuck etree.tostring() returned a bytes object instead of a fucking string and made the mistake of diving into the function. Never again. That library is cursed script condensed from the haunted cries of forgotten pharaohs and inscribed in the blood of a newborn foal onto an ancient ash tree under Venus’ vexatious gaze.
I got the impression that most Discworld wizards actually avoid doing magic altogether, because the way things work traditionally is way too risky.
Meanwhile a research such as Miss Level asks, and keeps a log of, what subspecies of henbane works best and does it work better if collected at midnight under the full moon?
While Esmé Weatherwax eschews most magic mostly, preferring Hard Work and Headology, even against Death. Unless magic is really required, when she digs deep into the strongest magic imaginable.
Ive seen at least one other anime that was like that, cant remember the title but the magic system was surprisingly fleshed out for a 12 episode anime
Edit: Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor
This was one of my biggest gripes with the JK Rowling Wizarding World before Rowling herself gave me other reasons to dislike it
As a worldbuilding enthusiast who cares a lot about making it all hang together as a rich tapestry and all (come check us out at https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding btw) it really does chafe to see someone become a billionaire by literally only making their worldbuilding serve the plot and the tone, with no effort to make it internally consistent or even coherent outside of the main narrative.
What fantasy world can you think of where most people bother to learn how magic works?
Harry potter, they all go to wizarding school (not that HP should be used as a reference for world building…).
That’s a series where people learn how to use magic, not a thing about “how it works”. The series is very careful to never explain anything about the mechanics of magic, other than “incantations are a thing unless they aren’t, willpower maybe matters, and quality of the magic wand is relevant except when it isn’t”.
The Infernal City, Greg Keyes. It’s set in the elder scrolls, where knowing a spell or two is the norm.
This is something I think about a lot, and has been done well in fiction plenty already. My adhd wouldn’t just go away in a fantasy world. Sure I might have a burst of motivation for a while, but I probably wouldn’t magically be interested in studying and research just because I might be able to do some basic magic.
Disability in fiction is always going to be fertile soil imo because it’s such a genuine aspect of the human experience. Even when fictional devices have answers for some things (a focus spell would be nice), there are still always personal struggles that are worth exploring.
[Conjure Caffeine]
You fool, I CAST:
TASHA’S HIDEOUS DOPAMINE
Kind of the inverse, but you may enjoy Gene Wolfe’s book of the new sun, and the Numenera TTRPG.
I guess Vance’s Dying Earth series, that inspired how spells work in D&D, also would fit there, though I’m not personally familiar
I read the Dying Earth stuff. It’s writen between 1950 and the 1980is, I think. And you can fucking tell. It has rape scenes that are handed so utterly casual as if they said “and then the character got on a bus.” Got a lot of other problems along those lines too.
That said, it does give an interesting idea of how D&D Magic might look if you translate the game mechanics of spell slots etc. into how that would work and feel in a practical sense and what implications it would have for the world it is set in, in general.
But read it as a historical document, it you do so. It helps that the main protagonist is a fucking unlikeable brick.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were wild like that too. Main character has leprosy and bitches about it making him a worthless person the entire book then raped a woman that helps him and more or less shrugs it off because he thinks the fantasy world is a delusion.
I only read the first book because yikes.
Fans will still foam at the mouth about the moral complexity but those fans are always weird edgelord incels for some reason. It is meant to be a deconstruction, but it’s one written by someone that’s definitely a rapist, and in the end it’s still just an absurd power fantasy with cynicism and casual 70’s misogyny.
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Yeah, I can imagine it’s kind of in the Lovecraft category, as in, clearly influential, but, uhhh, yikes.
I love the Numenara RPG concept - haven’t had a chance to play it, but I’ve workshopped ideas with a friend who likes to write stuff in it. I’ll put that book on my radar, another lemming got me going on Glen Cook’s Black Company series currently.
It’s actually a collection of four books, which I think these days are sold in sets of two.
It’s got some fun stuff, like an author who’s convinced of his own infallibility, and fantasy-like vocabulary, except none of the words are really made up, it’s just applications of somewhat obscure latin and greek words. I’d also kind of encourage going into it blind, since there are some bits of it that are more fun to figure out as you go along.
Bonus for /c/finalfantasyxiv@lemmy.world players: it has Ascians.
You would enjoy the nightlord series. First book is a bit rough though
I’ve tried to get into more 40k books, but my first ones were the Eisenhorn and Ravenor series, and then Ciaphas Cain. Kind of hard to top that.
It’s not 40k! It’s a physics professor who gets turned into a vampire, learns magic, and get isekai’d. Every book is a hard left turn from the one before, so I can’t tell you a ton about them without major spoilers, but they’re really really great. Specifically topical is magicians are different from wizards. Magicians learn spells by rote and are like phd engineers, they might only make one new spell every few years but it’s gonna be damn efficient and effective. Wizards are the magical garage tinkerers, rarely learning spells academically like magicians do but cobbling together what they need on the fly. It’s a fascinating setting because it is sort of magically learning stagnant, with the people capable of the highest feats of magic incredibly specialized in a domain not develping much new, while the innovators are the ones who are weaker and more downtrodden. I cannot recommend it enough.
Ok ok we’re talking the Garon Whited books? I’ll take a look, thanks!
40 hours per book, I mean. For reference, the stormlight archive books are about 55 hours apiece
Yep! Just edited my comment with a bit more info. The main series is 8 books, 40 hours in audiobook form, with an extra half length book about a side character after 7. It’s still being written.
Someone call Brandon Sanderson!
I mean, it’s kind of a major point of Elantris, albeit inverted: Nobody knows why magic stopped working because they don’t know why it worked in the first place.