2 mo. ago • 98%

But if Gizbak stops maintaining his Summoning Circle tomes, the whole world of magic will fall apart

Non-Political Memes @lemmy.ml But if Gizbak stops maintaining his Summoning Circle tomes, the whole world of magic will fall apart

58 comments

Or giant megacorporations each hire 200,000+ of them to create products for the non-magic folk to consume.

After a few decades, the idea of being a wizard is synonymous with working 8+ hours a day on magic that no wizard really wants and there is so little new spells and magic being created in the world that everyone wishes there wasn't any.

Then leaks come out that the products these megacorporations create have been slowly killing the planet and they've known for decades. But since they have so much power and money, nothing can stop them until the world dies.

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- Chemists are wizards?
  
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  I mean chemistry direct predecessor, alchemy, was basically in large part magical practice attempt.
  
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- Yep. You wouldn't have adventurous magicians going out and casting spells against dragons. The variety of spells known by D&D type wizards wouldn't even be a thing. You'd have a guy who was a specialist in ritual-casting flame spells whose job consisted of continuously heating up cauldrons of metal ore so it could be smelted. If he was jumped on his commute home, he couldn't fight the attackers off with "fireball" or something. Maybe that was covered in school decades ago, but he's spent his entire career doing nothing but that one smelting spell Or, you'd have the "Gate" wizard whose entire job was to keep up a portal for their entire 8 hour shift, so that tourists could pass back and forth.
  
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- Stop, I can only get so depressed!
  
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  Bro made fantasy stuff into a capitalist dystopia
  
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- This comment made me sad.
  
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"If"

You realize embedded systems engineers are real, right?

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- And if anything qualifies as esoteric, arcane knowledge, it's embedded systems programming
  
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  I'd say OS and driver programming is also in that category. It is the deep magic.
  
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- This makes me feel so much better after spending a morning banging my head against some wild pointer arithmetic, thank you much much! (Ultimately the pointer incantations were successful, praise be!)
  
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  Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.
  
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That's literally Megumin from KonoSuba lol. She's supposed to be one of the strongest wizards around, but refuses to learn anything other than explosion magic. Explosion magic is basically useless in most situations, as it just flattens a huge area.

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- If explosion magic doesn't solve your problems then you're clearly not using enough explosion magic.
  
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  Megumin's other problem is she only specced into things that would improve her explosion's damage output, neglecting basic mage things like mana capacity and efficiency. So she can only cast one (stupidly overpowered) explosion spell before all but passing out from using more mana than she actually has. It's why no other party would take her, because even in situations where the spell would be useful she becomes a massive liability after casting it.
  
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- *I didn't ask how close those buildings are, I said "I cast FIREBALL" *
  
  -Megumin, if they played D&D
  
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- Expulooooshon
  
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If magic was real, expert magic users would not trust it at all.

"Haha yeah I mostly do transfiguration magic but I do some evocation too occasionally. No I don't eat any transfigured food or do any of that at home or anything honestly I'm surprised it works at all."

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- Right, so literally computer security
  
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Discworld wizards represent!

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- Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.
  
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- I've been slowly reading through rimworld and honestly I love how Pratchett balanced out the existence of magic by making it such a pointless persuit that wizards are basically just beurocrats
  
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There’d be hair restoration & ED specialized wizards within a year.

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- Oh great wizards finasteride and dutasteride, give me back my hair!
  
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Ergo, Wizards can't be exploited by capitalism

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- Imagine thinking that PhD's and postdocs aren't exploited by capitalism.
  
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  To be fair, PhDs and postdocs can't call down lightning from the sky or reanimate the dead to do their bidding.
  
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- That one kind of magic would be capitalism. I mean the situation from OP post is the current state of liberal economics.
  
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  Yes
  
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Now that's just academica.

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Haha, look, it’s my career!

🫠

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Grasshopper mind sorcery

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no way it's the yomi hustle guy

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We have this now. Scientists and big pharma.

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- That's the joke
  
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- Hey now, boner pills aren't useless!
  
  Could the same scientists have been working on cancer treatments? Maybe, but it's not nearly as fun to test.
  
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  Gonna need to divert the entire US defense budget for two years to researching how to make my PP bigger.
  
  Vote for me for president and I'll make it happen.
  
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