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
There are other Shadowrun players here? Awesome. That game has a premise so amazing that it makes you forgive the terribad system.
Re physics:
I did my BSc in physics (astro, if we’re going to split hairs) and I am of the opinion that trying to use real-world physics to describe fictional magic is a bad idea.
See, real world physics is a single unified system. Every single particle in the universe is constantly interacting with every other particle in the universe in myriad ways. If you add or subtract anything, you end up changing everything.
For example, suppose that telekinesis spells exist. This means that magic can move things. However, movement means different things on different scales. On a macro level, the movement of things is called kinetic energy. On a molecular level, the movement of things is called heat. On an electron level, the movement of things is called electricity. On a nuclear level, it’s called radioactive decay. On a fundamental level it’s called stuff existing at all. Meanwhile on a cosmic level, stuff moving around is how we measure the age of the universe. If magic can affect the movement of things then it affects all of these things at once, which means that a telekinesis spell is also an electricity spell is also a radiation spell is also a “stuff ceases to be” spell. This makes your spellbooks astonishingly messy.
This is not a place where fiction works. Real world physics is not something you can play with. It is an astonishingly beautiful system, probably the most perfect thing in the world after mathematics itself. It is complete. It does not tolerate stuff being nailed onto it.
This is nice, because it means you can throw physics to the wind and do what you like.
Your world has a masquerade, then? I know those are common as dirt, but that really stretches suspension of disbelief.
Anyway, why work with the wizards at all? Why not set up independent research programs? Universities would be particularly inclined to do this, since they’d want to fit magic into their existing four-to-eight-year education system. Alternately, if magic has been around longer than universities, maybe universities follow the education pattern used by wizards and don’t offer four-year degrees.
If magic requires complete emotional control, some of the many alternatives to years of medication that immediately come to mind are: Lobotomy, drugs, robots, or only doing magic when you’re feeling super chill. Not that these would all work, necessarily (although drugs seem like they should), but people are sure as hell going to try them. People are always looking for shortcuts.
In any case, the government would definitely try to get involved in any way possible, since magic has potential as a weapon. They’d be trying to make magic bombs or magic-powered aircraft; hell, they’d probably try to draft the wizards and send them to Vietnam, a la Dr. Manhattan. (Experimenting on them is also traditional.)
You don’t tell what things are made of by looking at them through a microscope (I assume you mean microscope and not telescope); you tell what they’re made of by determining their physical properties. And it doesn’t really make sense to say you can’t measure such things; if you can put the object on one pan of a balance and put another object on the other pan, you can measure its weight. Whatever happens next is a result that can be studied.
And scientists would want to study it. If it resists being studied–if it slithers out of the machine or returns a different value each time or whatever–that would make it the Holy Grail of research topics: Something nobody understands. Scientists love studying things they haven’t figured out yet. See, for instance, the top quark (proposed 20 years before it was detected) or, today, dark matter and dark energy.
I’m not saying all this to be a total asshole, despite appearances; I’m saying it because this is the sort of stuff I’d be thinking about if I were reading this book, and it’s the sort of stuff that (for me) marks the difference between a world that feels immersive and well-developed and a world that feels slapdash.
Ha, EJ gave you a total physicist response and I gave you a total chemist response. Is there a biologist in the house?
You know, I actually original thought about using just one sort of “magic” for everything. Just willing something to happen and it happens. That endured in innates but pretty much all magic systems are one singular “mana” source, so I thought I’d mix it up and have different magicks for different purposes. I thought it would be interesting.
(And I didn’t steal it from Thaumcraft. I swear.)
Also, I found my cousin’s old science textbook from 3rd/4th grade. It’s only 279 pages long, not including the appendix, and has, like, size 16 type. It was published by in 1986.
My 3rd grade science textbook was, at least 300 pages with size 11 font. That’s crazy.
But now I can figure out the format of a textbook. The only thing better then seeing all those ugly sweaters and jackets on children would be getting a child’s textbook from the 60s and see all those bell bottoms and bowl cuts on children.
Also, was it actually colder in the 80s? Because I’ve only seen one picture of someone in short sleeves. Everyone else is in longsleeves. I consider this proof of global warming.
I left the southern hemisphere in 1994. I didn’t know long trousers even existed until then.
Magic wouldn’t slither out of any machine. What did I write that would suggest magic moves on its own beyond Air magic condensing together? Magic is aware, yes, but if it’s being studied, it’s aware that it’s being studied, and wouldn’t call attention to itself by slithering anywhere or disappearing anywhere or anything like that. It would just make the instruments mess up so there would be no conclusive data beyond it making instruments mess up. Why does it do this? I don’t know. Why does Cthulhu want to rule Earth? We can’t understand the Old Ones’ motivations. You can’t understand magicks’ motivation. Cthulhu is immortal, magic is immortal. Maybe the Old Ones are made of magic? It makes sense! I am going to add a Cthulhu knockoff to my “known immortals list” because Cthulhu is awesome!
What is in the book is what people are teaching 10-13 year olds about magic. Those are the very basics about magic that people teach 10-13 year olds. You know how simplified stuff is for 10-13 year olds?
That is from a book for a 3rd/4th grader. That’s for 8-10 year olds. That’s the level of simplicity I’m trying to work at right now except written better because holy fucking hell that is horrible writing.
And about the whole “masquerade” thing, I don’t know what I want to do with it quite yet. Do I make it all Harry Potter? Do I make it Dragon Age? Do I make it…uh…aristocrats have all the magic book/movie/comic thing?
I don’t know yet, personally, mostly because my comic is about vampires, not wizards and magic. Vampires need to live in secrecy but if wizards/witches are known to exist would that blow their cover? Would the dynamics of the story of a family of vampires whose families were slaughtered by a secret organization of vampire hunters change dramatically? Would they no longer be monsters who’s side of the story you can kind of sympathize with if the world knew they existed and still tried to persecute them? Would that give them more sympathy than I want them to have? Do I make it so magic is known by people but vampires and many other creatures of the night are in a masquerade situation still? Is there a big enough population of magic users to even question all of this and does magic draw that much attention to itself?
I don’t know because the concept of this type of magic is only a few months old compared to my first draft of my comic being a year old. I didn’t think I’d be rethinking a huge chunk of the world by trying to mix up the magic a bit compared to every other fiction involving magic.
So, for now, I’m gonna concentrate on my magic textbook for 10-13 year olds and not consider the ramification of the government knowing that magic exists.
I do genuinely thank you for your questions and feedback, however. It’s made me think about things.
What would it mean to “mess up” a double-pan balance? Or a graduated cylinder?
Scientists have a term for this: lies to children. It isn’t intended as a dismissive or patronising term: the world is more complicated than we can possibly understand, so everyone needs some level of simplification. When you were taught science, you were probably taught lies to children, with the promise that when you were older, they would tell you the truth.
Unfortunately, that was a lie. It wasn’t a lies-to-children lie, it was just a lie. The thing you get taught when you’re older is also lies to children, just a more complex form of it. If you get past that, then there’s another layer of lies to children behind that.
For example, I am of the impression that inside atoms, electrons form nice neat shells around the nucleus, with two electrons in the lowest shell and then eight in each layer above. If I say this to katz, she’ll laugh like hell because that’s lies to children. She’ll then tell us all about electron valencies. That’s also lies to children, just a more advanced form of it which comes closer to the absolute truth. At the bleeding edge of research, people are gazing directly into the unfettered maw of the universe itself, and the only way they can ever communicate this knowledge to the rest of us (or indeed to one another) is by coming up with extremely intricate and mathematical lies to children. There’s no shame in it. It’s the method that humanity uses to make sense of a very, very abstract and complex world.
As such, if magicians are anything like scientists and the textbooks are written similarly, you have basically two options:
a) Your pamphlet is lies to children.
b) Magic, unlike science, is actually knowable in its entirety.
If you pick option (a), then there will constantly be slight adjustments to the theory, which might make the book very readable and give a real sense of history to it. For instance:
“For a long time, magicians thought that the various forms of Darkness magic were entirely separate. It was only in 1862 that a team led by Elizabeth Wong and Charles De Villiers showed that they’re all part of the same thing.”
Or:
“Until 1957, people thought that Metal was The Corrupt’s reflection of Earth magic. Some older books will still say this even though we know it isn’t the case.”
Anyone who’s ever dealt with someone who clings to discredited theories (for example, rejects quantum physics or thinks Pluto is a planet) knows what this is like, and it will be very funny both to them and also to readers who’ve read such debates. It’ll make the world seem more plausible and lived-in.
Alternatively, if magic is knowable in its entirety, then magic isn’t science so much as engineering: it’s about applying known principles in order to solve a given problem. You may want to spend time with engineers in order to see how they behave in order to write magicians.
Entirely off-topic: for those who follow video games, I present Jim Sterling’s take on how he would run E3. It is one of the finest pieces of surrealist invective I’ve read recently, even if it is written by someone who very very badly wants to be Immortan Joe.
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/06/the-perfect-e3-experience/
@pandapool – Sorry for the late reply. The weekend got hectic.
Annnnd I’m about to drive to another county to disassemble (hopefully, anyway) a basketball “system”, load it on to our truck, and drive it back here…all with the help of a toddler! (The crowd goes wild!) So I’m going to keep things short and not grammatically correct.
The 11-year-old knows a bit about addiction, both from discussions that segued from early explorations of “the talk”* (“And, while you’ll have many friends who can drink or explore drug use with few consequences, the chances are good that the same won’t be true for you – there’s a reason that you only see Mom drink an expensive craft brew once a month or so,”) and from our explanations as to why we don’t see certain members of our family more often (“We love [insert name/s], but we don’t think that it’s wise to be around them very much or for our children to be left alone around them at all. This is because s/he is addicted to [insert substance – there are several pertinent to the conversation and we’ve explained the physical effects of all]. Because of this, s/he tends to [be unnecessarily belligerent/randomly nod off/etc]. Again, this doesn’t mean that we don’t love them – we do – but it means that we don’t think that it’s healthy to be around them.”]
We have told her about some (but not all) of the abuse suffered by my husband (mostly being beaten to the point of being knocked out as a child) regarding why we’ve only seen his father in public spaces and haven’t even done that much in several years.
The 8-year-old knows quite a bit less – that so-and-so drinks too much and that’s why he’s sometimes not nice, that so-and-so takes too many pills and that’s why none of the children will ever be left alone with her, etc – but we fully intend to ease her into the grittier bits.
It’s my and my husband’s stance that anything less than a thorough education about addiction and its effects amounts to negligence given our genetic legacy.
The two-year-old, obviously, knows almost nothing except that she has a noticeable lack of grandparents in her life.
re: the game: After thinking about it some more, I’m actually more on board with it being more explicitly about dealing with addiction. I sat down with the 11-year-old and we watched the longer trailer (the one that makes the subject matter more clear). We had a quick Q&A re: what she saw. I asked if she wanted to play the game with me sometime after her sisters are in bed, and she said yes.
I think it’ll be a good thing.
Again, thanks for the heads up.
Being informed is usually better than not.
—
Note 1 re: “the talk”: We have already started that with her. Highlights include, “In the next few years, your hormones will be out to get your pregnant. Your body still thinks that you should be a grandmother by about 30 [*gratifyingly horrified look from 11-year-old*] because it’s pretty sure that you’re going to be eaten by something or die from a tooth infection before that point. They’ll be helped by the fact that your neocortex – the part of your brain that helps you to make good decisions – isn’t really “done” until you’re in your early-to-mid-20s. [*cue going to the internet with her to look up evidence for this fact* – she’s a smart kid, she does better with data] Your body will want you to get pregnant – it will be screaming at you to go ahead and do what has to be done to make it happen – but we live in society with goals and expectations that make getting pregnant as a teen a very bad idea. Having a baby before you’re done with your education will make your life almost infinitely more difficult.” Etc, etc.
The point is that from there we can go on to talk about the biological basis for addiction – that it’s not necessarily a moral failing (and therefore something that you can avoid if you’re just “good enough/smart enough”), but that for some people – very likely her, given her family history – substance use can very easily can turn to substance abuse, and it’s not something that only happens to stupid or imprudent people. This last point is helped by the fact that my husband’s grandfather, a well-respected and widely published inorganic chemist who had tenure at a major research university, was a functional but raging alcoholic who died in his 50s from liver failure.
So, er, this wasn’t as short as I’d intended, but I guess it’s a subject dear to my heart.
And while I was writing our toddler went pee-pee on the potty while watching Team Umizoomi, so great things all around 😀
@Jackie
Don’t confuse what your characters can understand with what you can understand. You can understand magic’s motivation. You’re the creator. You’re basically God. You can say, arbitrarily, that the magic dimension is an intelligent thing (magic certainly behaves like an intelligent thing from everything you’ve described) and the little “pieces” of magic that we see are both subsets of that overarching intelligence, and simultaneously independent intelligences of their own. This may not be something that your characters ever figure out, but you can figure it out. And it’s something you might want to do. Like katz said, a world that has internally consistent rules feels much more immersive than one that is being constructed ad hoc.
@proxieme
Oh ym fucking god I am so sorry. I read what you wrote as your husband ALSO went through an abusive childhood involving alcohol, not that he was an abuser.
I feel really stupid and insensitive now. I’m so sorry.
You can tell from what I’ve written some of the motivations for magic.
From this you can see that one) magic is on this plane because it’s very crowded in its home (kinda), two) magic finds life on this plane interesting and three) it doesn’t fear death because it can’t be destroyed. (Well, no, that’s a lie.)
Do I know the motivations of magic in its entirety? No, I don’t. Mostly because I’ve been working on what magic is for about a few months. There is no author in the history of existence that knows 100% all the motivations for everything in their story in the first few months, especially when they aren’t working on them exclusively, especially when they aren’t even finished with the first draft yet.
===
Yes, that is in fact what I’m trying to go for.
Here is something I said to katz earlier.
So, yes, the books directed at 10-13 year olds is going to leave so much fucking stuff out that the grimoire is going to have that it is, in fact, lies to children.
Children are not going to learn from the book about how to make zombies with Dark magic, children aren’t going to learn where Blood magic is harvested (mostly animals with magic and the bodies of dead wizards), they aren’t going to learn that Mind is used for torture spells, or how Light is used to blind people.
They aren’t going to learn that you can suffocate someone with Air, or mummify someone with Water, or pull the minerals out of a human body with Earth and Metal.
Or that those aren’t even the names of magic because it’s all very Latin and totally not an excuse for me to hold back because I am not a Latin expert.
They aren’t going to learn about the Iridis, the plane of magic, and how wizards have theorize that the reason magic has been pouring over to our side might involve Void magic, a magic that is both magic and not magic and whose very contradictory nature destroys completely whatever it touches, including magic, which is indestructible otherwise.
So, yes, this is why I’ve been emphasizing that’s it’s for 10-13 year olds, the fact that there’s a lot not being said or taught correctly in the book.
There’s also the fact that this textbook series is the first ever of its kind. It’s the first attempt of a unified teaching practices.
So it’s going to learn a lot lot lot out because of the way wizards teach, which is something I haven’t even touched on beyond saying it’s an apprenticeship that takes 35 years to complete and it emphasizes on discipline and safety. It emphasized so much on discipline and safety that it excluded whole chunks of people with magic.
You know what would happen to innate children that were “undisciplined” and kicked out? They died. They died because they couldn’t control their powers when they finally got them.
Oh, yeah, the ability to manipulate magic starts happening around puberty, BTW, which is why training starts around 10-13 years old.
But, yeah, they died because they lack the discipline and control to not set themselves on fire or drown themselves or dissolve their bodies into sticky black tar. They often took many people out with them when they go. Half of learning magic is learning not to die, doubly so for people that are not born with the ability to manipulate magic.
Heh?
What’d I miss?
He’s not – after what he’s been through, I’m pretty sure he’d commit sepuku (sp?) if he ever abused anyone.
He, however, has a whole shit show on his side of the family. Mine’s not loads better in terms of addiction issues, but my childhood was significantly less filled with beating.
*goes back to read post to see if I horribly misphrased something*
*goes and hides in a corner*
You know, I just noticed a problem with my apprenticeship idea. 35 years plus many years of studying to become fairly decent at magic means that you’re gonna have 65+ old masters trying to teach for a student for 35 years. I should probably shorten that or make it so wizards have longer lives, which I guess would make sense considering, you know, magic.
Hey Pandapool, just checking: Should I shut up about this? I’m just mucking about with your ideas because they’re interesting, but I can be quiet if I’m making a pest of myself. It’s your book and you can do whatever, after all.
A society where people live incredibly long periods but have to spend the first, say, 50 years of their life studying would be an interesting thing in its own right to write about. There doesn’t even need to be magic – just looking at how that affects people would be interesting.
@katz
No, it’s fine. You guys are giving me some good things to think about, it’s just you guys kinda got hooked on some weird things, like the physics of magic. In a way, that makes sense, but also in a way that’s like asking what the density of gravity is. Magic isn’t really apart of our world so it doesn’t really follow our rules. Buuut it’s made me clarify some things.
You see, you can find magic in solid bits, but it also acts on things and can change the process and physics on an object. Earth magic doesn’t make good fertilizer because it has all the nutrients, it just makes the plant processes more efficient by changing how the plant cells works. Metal magic makes it so gold can be as hard as steel or magnetic; it does this by changing the gold’s structure but leaving all the other properties that still make it gold. It can revert these changes by being “disenchanted” from the ground and gold. The plant will not grow as efficiently and the gold will no longer be strong or magnetic.
It also doesn’t have a constant mass or volume. A piece of Metal magic can be as dense as lead or as…undense as lithium when it wants to be.
Potion making, magic casting or enchanting doesn’t require density of magic, only amount. A teaspoon of Metal is a teaspoon of Metal, regardless if it’s five pounds or floats…not that you’d get Metal to float on its own, but you get the point.
Also, Light sometimes likes to be the density of a star. Luckily the Light on Earth is aware that is would be a bad thing if it decided to be that dense.
I also added more two the “true facts” about magic:
I realized I never addressed you can’t just create things out of thin air with magic. You can’t just poof to existence an orange or a person. It is incapable of creating things from nothing, it cannot add or subtract matter that way. And it can only destroy as in it can set things on fire/crush/erode/whatever. It can improve like in the examples above. Limitedless refers to the amount of magic in the world and manipulation means magic isn’t something only a few can do, but what everyone can do.
I appreciate you guys questioning things, but realize I am one human trying to make an entire history of something. It’s taken thousands and thousands all of their lives to get to where we are today. I can’t completely replicate that.
@EJ
That’s one theory behind vampirism, that someone tried to use it to become immortal or make someone else immortal and “failed” in a way. Same with revenants and zombies, but with obviously disastrous results.
The magicks mostly like to be used for certain things only. Blood and Dark rather like helping people live longer, although not with the best results, as you can see above. Light, which would be an obvious choice to help live longer, only likes to heal things when they are injured and aging isn’t something it considers to be an injury. And none of The Elements care to make people live longer. I’d imagine the only way magic would help someone live longer is if they use Earth and Water to produce healthy foods, Blood and Light in medicine and Mind to keep the brain sharp. It would increase life as modern medicine increases life.
*thousands and thousands of scientists ><
I felt better about my symbols for magic when I saw some actual symbols for alchemy.
The thing about real-world alchemy is that it doesn’t work, and never did, and people knew it at the time. There was no effect no matter what you did, and so you could mostly do whatever you liked. This means that people ended up doing really obscure things just to be different from one another, and came up with intentionally obscure terms and symbols for the sake of being obscure.
Things that really work, for example architecture or pharmacology, tend to have very clear and concise terms and symbols for practitioners to communicate with one another because there’s a pressure on people to avoid the nonproductive areas and go straight for the stuff that’s most effective. The symbols might be daunting to the layperson but once you’re initiated they’re obvious and straightforward.
Your magic actually works, so your symbols will probably be less of the “wantonly obscure” and more of the “functional and reliable” style. Although having said that, good clean graphic design triumphs every time.
If you really want a source which has awesome occult symbols, look up the Pseudomonarchia Daemonicum. It’s very Hermetic rather than the more Platonic magic system you’ve devised, but the language of symbols in it is deeply cool.
As an aside – I really like how you describe magic itself as having a distinct personality. It leaves open the question of whether magicians are using it or whether it’s using them.
*Goetic, not Hermetic.
Or is it? Bleh. I get confused. It’s like homeopathy to me: keeping all the subtle distinctions straight is difficult when it’s all simply fictional and written to be intentionally obtuse.
@EJ
Ooooh, esoteric texts! I remember trying to read Daemonicum back in middle school. Didn’t work out well, although the pictures were really freaky and I loved that. 😛
I found lot of the 17th/18th century symbols I found are real wacky, with, like a bunch of symbols for the same material. Then I found these old chemistry symbols from the 1800s and fell in love. I quickly made mockups of about 4-5 types inspired by them and decided the modern symbols would be based on them. It’s just so simplistic and would be so clear for potions and rituals you can’t not have them. Right now the one I like based is based on the proper names for magic, except for Umbra which I made with a modern “U” because it was literally the only Latin letter that wasn’t exactly like the modern one. Then I have one made with Greek letters because I figured some wizards in the Victorian era would want to make their stuff look much more scientific and Greek letters are used everywhere so yeah. The only thing I regret is only having 10 (okay, 12 technically) magicks to use symbols with.
(GASP. Idea: Fake magicks! A bunch of wizards or whatever I’m gonna call them pretend they’ve found new magicks way back when. Then I can make awesome new symbols! :D)
I can just imagine the kids being confused on why Fire is symbolized with an I or Earth with a T until they learn the actual names of the magicks.
I also found this neat podcast and I’ve been listening to it while I work.
http://historyofalchemy.com/
I thought it would be boring but it’s exactly the opposite. It concentrates more on the European/Middle Eastern alchemy from the Middle Ages and Renaissance eras, but it has a couple of episodes on Chinese alchemy and they talk about specific alchemists and stuff too. I’m about to start episode 3.
I can’t wait for the episodes that talk about those mysterious creatures: Ladies. There was alchemy dedicated to figuring out women.
I imagine most of these alchemist didn’t get out much.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/flmt1.gif
I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOU WOULD GET THAT IDEA, MORT–I MEAN EJ. MAGIC USING THE MORTAL PORTALS? HA HA HA HA. I HAVE MADE THE LAUGH, CORRECT? HA HA HA HA. IS THE SOUND OF LAUGHTER? CHORTLE SNORT.
It’s Hermetic. Hermes’ emerald tablet. Just remember Greek god with snakes and feathers means alchemy. Goetic is Aleister Crowley shit. I remember reading stuff about him in high school.