After that last post, I realized we were probably overdue for one of these. As always with these open threads, no trolls, no MRAs (or people who bear a striking resemblance to MRAs).
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Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff: Kitten in a beanbag edition
@Jackie
What kind of world is this? I’m getting the impression that it is THIS world, just with magic.
That requires you to think some about what our world would be like if magic were in it. Early on, you say that nobody knows what magic is, even after centuries of studying. After centuries of studying, people should have an idea. Even if they don’t know precisely what it is, they should nevertheless know a ton about it. We don’t know precisely what quarks are, but we nevertheless know bunches of things about their characteristics and qualities.
We should know if magic is just a special energy inhabiting normal matter, or if it is completely different from other matter. Does it have wave characteristics, particle characteristics, or both … or somehow neither! The pseudo-medieval setting is useful for magic-using fantasy cultures, because we expect medieval-esque people to have very little understanding of science, but people today, in our world, would have had a crack at this, just as they’ve had a crack at quarks.
That’s especially true if magic has some sort of will. Even before people have had a chance to study magic completely, they might still pick up on the fact that their magic doesn’t always do the same things in every circumstance, and that the things the magic does comes in swings rather than being completely random. They might even talk about “moods” the magic is in, and have some lore behind what magic wants to do and how you need to “convince” it to do what you want.
@PoM
Oh, they have an idea of magic, but they aren’t quite sure because they still aren’t sure where magic comes from.
The book is also written for 10-13 years olds in mind, just beginning to start to learn magic, so it’s not bogged down with all the competing theories, which is why the book is only filled with known observation. Almost everything I’ve said outside of the book isn’t known to people in the universe, also.
And, yes, it is our universe, but with magic and magical creatures…a parallel one, I guess, technically.
And magic is magic. It’s matter but not like matter we know. It’s hard to observe with scientific equipment because, like I said, it has a mind of its own. What is known about magic is known because it has let us known it. We do know that magic mimics much of the same properties that our plane counterparts have, Fire is like fire, Metal is like metal, but atom and particle wise? HA! Our monitoring equipment isn’t made to observe things not on this plane of existence, and even the heavily enchanted equipment isn’t enough to really see what magic is made of.
There are beings that do know a lot about magic, because they are made of pure magic, but they’re really fucking aloof about it. Assholes, really.
(Also, I haven’t gotten that deep into the science yet.)
@Jackie
If magic has a mind of its own, then it should be viewed as a possibly-intelligent life form by at least some people. You might want to think about organizations that pursue “magic rights” like some people pursue animal rights. Most people don’t agree with it and think the idea is ludicrous, but, like animal rights, the idea is not actually ludicrous!
There are ways to study things that don’t necessarily behave predictably. The “science” of magic would be more akin to a social science than a natural science. Social sciences are real sciences, that can study real phenomenon.
Let’s say you do a study where 100 people with the same affinity do the same spell 100 times each, and chart the results. Even if magic is fickle, the results should fall into some kind of analyzable distribution. Then, someone on the other side of the planet does the same experiment. The results will either fall within the same distribution, or a different one. If it’s a different one, further experiments could nail down what causes the change.
In this way, it could be determined what “persuades” magic to do what you want, and improve the efficiency of spellcasting. Instead of a 60% expected success rate, by giving magic what it seems to want, you could potentially up that to, say, 80%. There would always be more research, producing more data and better and higher-efficiency spells.
It would not be any different from any other social experiment, where you want to persuade large numbers of people to behave in particular ways.
I’m assuming Candia is Canada ?
Also, even if your scientists don’t know exactly what it is or where, exactly, it comes from, you should.
I have to admit: Stories about modern day Earth, except with magic are intriguing to me. I’m pretty sure I’ve brought this up before, but yeah.
Like getting a good mix of technology and magic in there is something I rarely see anything of.
@PoM
Oh, no, that’s the thing though, magic’s not really alive or inanimate, it just decides to be sometimes. (Like, what’s the difference between a tree and ent half the time?) Honestly, the average magi/witch/wizard/whatever the fuck they like to call themselves (the pretentious ones like “sorcer/ess” ROLLS EYES) is not going to have contact with any sort of being of magic. That they know of.
99.999% of the time, magic will stay in its “natural” form (or the form it takes outside of its own plane of existence; I’m not sure I said that already), which is inanimate. People know that magic can be “fickle” sometimes and certain people are good with certain magicks because it’s been shown that certain personalities are good at manipulating certain magicks.
Sometimes, however, a bit of magic gets bug up its bum and decides it wants to be humanoid, so it comes to out plan to do so. It doesn’t happen often, the youngest one being around 10,000 years old, or has been on our plane for at 10,000 years. There’s been maybe a hundred or two in the history of Earth. Some of the ones in the earlier days got bored and went back to their plane or went back to their “natural” form, but many have been a little more active since life began. More interesting for the.
Why do they take a humanoid form? I don’t know. They aren’t meant to be understand because they are True Immortals, beings that can never really die. You can stab them, crush them, rip them – whatever. They may lose their physical shell for a bit, but they’ll regain it after a while if they want.
Also, I know where magic comes from, I just haven’t worked out what it’s made of yet. I mean, it’s magic. It’s made of magic! Like, literally, magic is magic. I’m not sure what else magic could be made of other than magic.
http://i.imgur.com/0YfQO.gif
@gilshalos
…Yes…yes it is. *corrects*
You know, all these questions on where magic comes from and no one has ask why some people are born with the ability to manipulate magic by calling magic from inside themselves while others have to used bottle magic.
I’ll answer that preemptively: Magic. Literally, just magic. It just decides to like this person enough to form a connection to the magic plane so they can call on “rainbow” magic whenever. Or they are a creature that has fused with magic, like a vampire, so they can call magic on their that way.
@Jackie
You’re a little inconsistent there. You said it’s hard to observe with scientific equipment because it has a mind of its own, but it only has a mind of its own once every couple of thousand years?
Then we should be able to analyze it scientifically. We should be able to do physics-style natural science experiments on it. We should know if it exhibits wave/particle/both/neither characteristics. We should know whether it has more fundamental particles into which it can be broken.
If magic behaves like an inanimate lump until you stick it into a particle accelerator, and then it suddenly oozes away before you can get data, it’s acting like an intelligent life form. I don’t really see a way around this. Either it’s alive and intelligent and that’s why we can’t get scientific data, or we can get scientific data.
@PoM
No, it always has a mind of its own. It just happens to not give a shit 99.999% of the time. I mean, it’s a matter, it’ll always be there. It’s immortal and can’t be destroyed and has been around since the beginning of the universe.
And it doesn’t ooze, it just doesn’t do anything when you try to combine it. You might take some Air and you might take some Earth and smash it together and it’ll smash together to make Shade or it won’t combine at all and Air will gather itself back up and Earth will just lay there because it’s Earth and that’s what it does.
And as for observing it, it’s, like, you know how in Harry Potter, electronics don’t work around large concentrations of magic? It’s like that. The equipment has to be enchanted to be as usable as it is and the magicks don’t want to be observed so they just screw it up what little data they can get from it.
I mean, you’re asking a lot of explanation for magic, which is an Applied Phlebotinum or Magic A is Magic A in a lot of stories. I didn’t think I’d have to actual research actual physics to have a base set of rules for my comic. :/
God, I hope I don’t have to research physics.
@Jackie
LOL I’m just asking. If you don’t want to get into it in that depth, it’s not necessary. It’s helpful to ensure consistency, but plenty of successful things have been done without it. I thought you wanted that kind of inquiry to help you work things out, but if not, just ignore me.
It’s what I would do, but what I would do is not a rule for the world.
@Jackie – I’m not that familiar with magical fantasy tropes, but I like what I read so far. The writing is clear, there are funny bits that remind me a little of Harry Potter, and the descriptions of the magical elements are vivid and easy to picture. Now I want to visit magical crystal caves in Iceland, dammit!
As to the scientific-analysis part, that’ll also depend on what the setting is like. You can make the world have the same countries (as mentioned in the beginning) but keep them at a different technological level. I mean, it’s imagination, right? You can pretty much do anything, but it’s cool if it’s internally consistent. It seems that the elemental nature of it has more in common with medieval alchemy, so it’d be interesting if Earth was still pre-Industrial Revolution(s) technologically. (Of course, that’d make communication across the oceans more difficult – maybe a place for magic to step in?)
Oh, you might want to look at the magic in the His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, etc.) if you haven’t already. If I remember right, the author doesn’t explain Dust (the source of magic) in terms of what material it is, but there’s a lot of interestingness in what it does and how it connects to the multiple-worlds thing there.
@PoM
I just wasn’t sure how to end it the book, and I thought since EJ was curious, I’d post it as it was now, especially since I didn’t make it entirely clear what the rules of my magic was.
I like the feedback though. I gives me a lot of ideas I wasn’t sure I should have add to the book or not.
You see, this book is gonna be a reference to me, yes, but I’m also gonna be using it (and others) as book pages in the comic, and I’d like to be able to share the full version with anyone who wants to learn more about my world. So far, people have really liked it, so I assume others would, too.
And, you know another thing I found weird? Why no one has asked what the Grammar Guide is about. I mean, it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of it.
Well, no, I guess it does kinda say it in the book; the grammar is so strict because of the discipline needed to learn magic. If you have a student that won’t adhere to the grammar, you have a student that shouldn’t be learning.
Of course, this is problematic in many ways, which is why I made the book be set in the 1960s. I figured a less tolerant age world make sense since this type of teaching would ignore people with mental disorders and disabilities. More modern teaching styles are more lenient and emphasize safety over discipline.
In His Dark Materials, Dust = dark matter, which people are intensely investigating today. It’s difficult, and thus far there has been no success in directly detecting it, but that hasn’t stopped anyone trying. Research into dark matter is well-funded and thriving.
I just can’t imagine a world in which something as bizarre and interesting as magic is just accepted for what it is without people constantly investigating it. If it’s difficult to investigate, that just makes people more interested in trying, not less.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
Oooh, I’ve always wanted to read those books! And I did a little research about alchemy for this, but I couldn’t find a good site with enough detail that wasn’t magenta on black. 😐 I’ve been meaning to do more research, but it seems just a bit too scientific for what I’m going for…which is hilarious, actually. Alchemy, scientific! HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAhahahaaaa ah…but, alchemy has actually done a lot of things to help make science what it is. We can’t laugh at that, no.
Do containers still work around it? If so, you can measure properties like its density. Large amounts of analysis can be done with extremely simple non-electronic
You can handwave it like Harry Potter, but the thing is, all magic in Harry Potter is handwaved and treated in a very simplistic “point wand, say magic word” manner, because those books aren’t about how magic works. Your book is. Once you’ve given a detailed description of how part of it works, you can’t just handwave away all questions with “reverse the polarity”.
@katz
People, in any property, also have to behave recognizably as people. People who are intensely incurious about some important aspect of their environment always trip me up. It doesn’t jibe with what I know about human beings.
I can enjoy something that’s full of incurious people, but it disappoints me to encounter it.
@PoM
That too (indeed, it’s an issue in Harry Potter as well). That’s why pre-Enlightenment settings work so well for fantasy, because scientific investigation wasn’t a standard way of interacting with new things and people were more likely to accept them without question, particularly if they aligned with classical philosophy or could be turned into a moral metaphor.
But if you set something in the 60’s, well, scientists gonna science. And people in general are going to be thinking of things in the context of the space race and the atom bomb.
@PoM
Oh, people are constantly studying magic, it just takes so long to get the basics of it. The average age of an apprenticeship ending is 45, after all, and that doesn’t make one a master. That requires years of solitary study to do on top of 35 years of schooling. You’re lucky if an innate wizard can get 20 years of study that doesn’t involve not getting their ass burned in their life, let alone someone who needs bottled magic.
Of course, their are immortals studying it too, but they’re also preoccupied with their own conditions or just don’t care. There’s also the fact that they technology isn’t there yet. We, in the real world, aren’t even 100% sure what an atom looks like.
@katz
You know, I completely forgot that things have density, but I’m not sure that matters for magic. While hard to do, you can force magic to do things against its nature, which means it would need to change its structure and all that. I’m not even sure some of this stuff has a constant density in its “natural” form since it can be found in so many ways.
But I’m getting there. I’m just trying to get some basic things in this book, since it’s meant to teach basic things to 10-13 year olds. Wait until I break out the actual technical phrases in the grimoire, with the magos volatillis ignis and the Iridis and discus the Undefined magicks that the kiddie book hasn’t even touched on. Oh! The Magos indefinites! The debate around the existence of magos nullus! How can something be magic but not be magic? What is the implications of something that can destroy magic?! Not to mention all the potions and magical plants and magical creatures and golems and all the controversies like necromancy (because that’s always a controversy), and what all The Corrupt can do (because it’s really skimpy in the kiddie book ’cause there’s so much messed up shit you can do with it).
It’s gonna be great.
And I totally fucked up all the Latin. I’m sorry to everyone who knows Latin.
That implies that there is tons to know about it. It doesn’t take you more than half your life to learn a topic that begins with “nobody knows what this is.”
Does the government fund research into magic? It would be implausible if it didn’t. This is too important for the government to sit out. That means research universities are going to be competing for government funds, which means that they will streamline the learning process as much as possible in order to produce quantities of grad students and post docs, who do the bulk of the work in research projects.
In other words, I don’t understand why this is on a master/apprentice model. You could spend 45 years learning medicine from a master doctor, or engineering from a master engineer, and that’s how it was done for a long time, but we don’t do that anymore for reasons that are not arbitrary. Government funding is one such reason. Government funding, just the existence of it, industrializes research and the education that feeds into research.
We are 100% sure of what atoms look like. We even have photographs of the electron clouds of atoms, but if you discount those, we still know precisely how atoms are structured and why. There is no doubt whatsoever.
Ooooh, do sorcerers work for corporations? They do in Shadowrun – they’re called wage mages. If magic is somewhat unpredictable, companies may not want to mass-produce, say, magically-formulated energy drinks, but they might use staff sorcerers to disrupt their competitors’ operations.
This would need to be regulated, of course. Government sorcerers would have to investigate complaints of criminal magical wrongdoing on the part of companies trying to distort the market.
@PoM
There IS a lot to know, but the majority of studying involves control.
Remember: Cautela non nocet. “Caution does no harm.”
Knowing the basic doesn’t involve just being able to summon fireballs, it involves being under complete control of your emotions so you don’t accidentally cause fireballs. The magic of an innate is sensitive to their emotions. Many a student has died being unable to control their emotions. Mastery of magic is not just the mastery of skill, but of self.
In fact, the way to become a master is to rise beyond one’s faults in their personality. This takes years of meditation and study to achieve.
Not to mention, the affinity can change. They can start to get the hang of Water when they’re in their twenties but find their power over The Element waning in their thirties. They could keep studying Water, yes, but they’ll never be a master, unlike if they studied Dark, which they found they had become much more skilled in.
Also, all those years are tradition. That’s what happens when you emphasize so much on order and discipline while teaching. They’re real anal about everything, and they’re it works, it’s not broken type of people, too.
And I haven’t even thought about the government much. The only government I’ve written in my comic so far have been the police who been investigating murders of a suppose serial killer. It was only until the VHS (Van Helsing Society) came in to take over the investigation that any police got to learn about supernatural shit.
I assume the governments would be researching it in secret in conjecture with the magical societies (which is why the defense budget is so big) but I’d imagine it would be such a fucking pain because the wizards are very meticulous about things and want all this paperwork and monitoring and if they don’t do it just right they shut it down…
…
Have I mentioned that magic isn’t a large part of what I’m writing this for?
We don’t know what an atom looks like because an atom is 1/1000th the size of the wavelength of light, and since we see light bouncing off things, the concept of appearance is meaningless for things that are smaller than light itself.
I only used the atom as an example because I was being asked what magic was made of. It’s obviously not going to be any sort of actual known element (periodic kind) or follow any sort of molecule structure known on this plane. if you were gonna see what magic is made of, you’d need a very advanced telescope, and since normal telescopes can’t analyze magic as it is, you’d need a very powerful, enchanted microscope.
If humans cannot examine an atom’s structure through a telescope, they would not be able to examine the structure or molecules or whatever of magic. Especially if they use an electric-powered microscope. That is what I was saying by that.
…
I guess you could make enchanted glass out of Water, though…you know, fuck it, I’m invoking QUANTUM PHYSICS in here and say the act of observing whatever magic is made of changes it. Into kittens. Tiny kittens.
Magic is a puckish rogue like that.
Also, microscopes that can see molecule/atomic size stuff don’t use light. They use, like, inferred or something. Magnetic stuff. Not plain old light like what we use to see.