1w ago

Magic beyond comprehension rule

128 comments

It's like that 'What's a computer?' ad
Everything is so abstracted nowadays that even the specialists are disconnected from understanding the underlying systems
- Eventually any actual websites will be difficult to access, all information will be filtered through LLMs, centrally controlled by a handful of megacorps with the final say on the information you find.
  
  Thanks Chris!
What do you mean? He just prays to the machine spirit.
- I mean that's what I do as a programmer.
  
  Yes... but we know why we do it!
The concept of an emulator isn't even that old. Like, literally all throughout the 2000s and 2010s. How did this generation grow up so oblivious to everything? "What's an emulator?" "How do you use a computer?"
Bro, are we talking about 80 year olds or 20 year olds
- Smartphones have made tech interaction ridiculously accessible and also into a locked down blackbox kinda thing at the same time. Consider how everything is a website now, and yet many people don't know how to use a browser, as they install hundreds of apps instead.
  
  As someone who is 25 I get some weird looks when I blankly and automatically tell people I don't have nor will I use apps for store services. I'll use a website happily but the busted ass apps can go fuck themselves.
they don't understand what is an emulator?
- Something to do with these fellas, I think:
  
  ostriches ? ah, I get it. OStrich
It's affecting the older generations too. My grandma loved playing solitaire on her laptop. I asked her "did that come with the OS?" And she responded with "What's an OS". Crazy times.
If the oldest zoomers are almost 30 and the youngest are just barely teens, I guess we've reached the point where "younger" zoomers could be 18 or 20.
- Am zoomer, am 18
- It always depends on where you take the definition from, some say it started in 1996, same say it started in 2004. Saying that it probably depends on the country you reside in as well.
It just means someone set it up for her, I suppose
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  This is why all my stuff is painted red. It goes faster!
- "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?"
- 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
- 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.
  
  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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- What fantasy world can you think of where most people bother to learn how magic works?
  
  The Infernal City, Greg Keyes. It's set in the elder scrolls, where knowing a spell or two is the norm.
  
  Harry potter, they all go to wizarding school (not that HP should be used as a reference for world building...).
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
It was inevitable. Long ago you had to know a lot about cars and engines to own a car. Now only enthusiasts know that kind of stuff.
- Now sports cars have paddle shifters so people can pretend to drive manual
  
  My Forester XT has that for the CVT. I'll admit it's fun, but not as much fun as a nice 5 speed manual.
- That's how i think of it. My dad can tear a car apart. I can't wrap my head around changing the brakes. But i know how computers work, because i grew up needing to know.
  
  I always found it fascinating to learn about the things I used in my life worked, because as a kid I loved learning to take things apart, mod, and put them back together. But there never seems to be enough time to study and understand everything, because most devices we use are over-engineered (read: repair hostile), so I can't ever think about becoming a jack of all trades like my family members are.
  Electronics, yes. Mechanical, no. I have to pay someone else to help me.
  
  Same on the computer thing, but I feel that knowing how to tear a computer (or anything, really) apart reduces the "I don't think I can do this" threshold a bit. Not having a choice also helps, as in "Oh, the turbo died and all the shops say it'll cost more than the car is worth to replace? Guess I'm learning how to swap a turbo."
- Eh, there's a curiosity aspect as well. I can't do work on my car, but I can change the oil, tires, brake pads, and such. I understand the principle of how an IC engine works. I'm a computer programmer but I think it's because I'm a curious person who likes knowing how things work, and computers offer more chances to learn than anything else on the planet.
  It isn't ignorance that has ever bothered me about boomers, zoomers, or anyone else. It's that 99% of people you meet are fundamentally incurious. They don't care how things work, they don't care if they could work differently.
  
  Curiosity was always rare, and not always encouraged. We're the "make the same hand axes for hundreds of millennia" people, after all.
  
  This so much, all the information in the world one click away online and most people just doom scroll nonsense. If money wasn't an issue I'd be a perpetual student, just learning things for the heck of it.
  
  Great point, and well said.
- Reminds me about that line in World War Z (Max Brooks)
  (Paraphrasing) "Some survivors were frustrated with the assignments they were given. A lady who was a former TV exec was furious that she was assigned to a janitorial unit, led by someone who's lifetime salary she made in a month!
  For people like her, you didn't have to worry about fixing a plumbing issue or cleaning your home. She just hired someone else to do it, because she made money talking on the phone, and the more people she hired, the more time she could spend talking on the phone. After the Great Panic, nobody bothered to use phones anymore. There were no TV contracts that needed to be made, but there were toilets that needed work, and floors to clean. In a strange way, the blue collar workers outranked their "superiors" in importance to the community. We needed mechanics, engineers, HVAC workers, plumbers. We had those people of course, but there was never enough of them."
  
  Reminds me of the story of Golgafrincham from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy books:
  The planet Golgafrincham creatively solved the problem of middle managers: it blasted them in to space.
  Golgafrinchan Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives were persuaded that the planet was under threat from an enormous mutant star goat. The useless third of their population was then packed in Ark spaceships and sent to an insignificant planet.
  That planet turned out to be Earth.
- on the other hand there's bikes, which are basically unchanged and simple enough that most people can figure out how to do all the regular maintenance with some youtube videos and a couple hours.
  
  Have you encountered modern shifters? They're fairly involved.
  Electronic shifting, hydraulic brakes, liberal use of sealed cartridge bearings, carbon fiber parts requiring strict torque specs...these are definitely different than 70's friction shift ten-speed bikes.
So like, how did she get an emulator working on iOS without knowing how?
- It could have been a website. I think some let you play emulated games in a browser window.
- You can just download one from the App Store as of a year or so ago.
- A lot of emulators are just apps, but the iso itself is a bigger mystery. My guess is an older sibling or even parent helped set that up. Nobody in their right mind would bundle a licensed game with an emulator on the app store.
- I don't think it was even an emulator, it was probably the official Nintendo port called 'Super Mario Run'.
- I would assume she has a nerdy family member or friend that assisted.
  
  In the past, it could have been an emulator included in an app in secret.
  Probably just Afterplay
What's the cutoff year for this mindset? Granted, I'm an electrical engineer, but I was born in the early 2000s, and my friends had a solid grasp of computer software and hardware fundamentals.
- Yeah, I would wager that this is not really a generational thing (or at least, not a cutoff between millennials and gen z).
  I'm a millennial and I guarantee there are plenty of people my age who would have no idea what op's question means...
- It’s not an age thing so much as an “amount of interest” thing. The barriers to entry are constantly being lowered, so it takes less skill and investment to get involved in things.
  It’s one thing to download a free trial of something like photoshop, it’s another thing to spend years using it to the point where you understand the full capabilities of what you can do with it.
  As you get older you’ll see things that used to require a lot of effort to get into become easier and easier to access. It’s the march of technological progress, and it might make you feel like it’s devaluing the things you used to value. And then you’ll understand why your grandparents were always going on about “Back in my day…”
- part of it is down to exposure as well, if you grow up in a place where you can't just buy the latest iphone every year it's a lot more likely that you'll end up fiddling around with stuff and learn how it works.
  like india has a lot of this, people can't afford a new device but it's not that difficult to get some "e-waste" which is still perfectly functional (if slow), so kids are way more likely to end up fiddling around and learning.
  
  I had restrictive parents who wanted to investigate and limit every part of my digital life, so most of my motivation came from getting the most out of the devices I could access. Usually that involved manipulating software to break parental digital locks, or to install more featured homebrew to access websites (and emulators).
  Financially, my folks could have gotten me what I wanted out of my tech, but tried to hold me back because of their personal views. That was what drove me to get creative and understand more about all my devices.

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