I never update my spell book and nothing bad has ever happened.

Help. Infernal imps somehow got inside my sanctum and used my scrying orb to send rude messages to the rest of the Circle.

Ugh, look, I get it. I know TJ's Lesser Action Rune of Changed Files that the Greater version does now, but TJ's price structure is bullshit and I'm not paying for Greater just because he refuses to "support" us users of Lesser. I don't even have a damn Portal, much less a Summoning Circle! Why are you so worried about a backdoor to the hells? Unless I connect this sigil to the weave nothing is going to come in or out. This sigil is only for monitoring the moisture content of my garden by way of a spell scroll attached. As we both know, scrolls and sigils use two different elements to communicate. One is gold ink and the other is silver ink. I have to use TJ's Action Rune of Changed Files to see if the document has changed due to moisture. The scroll cannot directly talk to my watering golem's receiving crystal.

My brother in Christ, why must you inform us of cool things and leave us with less free time? 🫠

Interesting. Does this provide any game balance whatsoever?

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to design magic systems when I was a teenager, but they always ended up being either way too powerful or not "rich" enough to be interesting. It's just really hard to design a simple mechanical system that stays within arbitrary human boundaries.

Hmm, I feel myself getting drawn back in. That's almost like a zero-knowledge proof, and there's lots of weird ways to implement cryptographic primitives.

That is really fucking cool!

How long until someone hopks this up to a QR code style image scanner and unleashed horrors and incredible things upon the world?

Yeah that mod is really cool. The magic writing system is fucking awesome.

Even cooler than Hex Casting in my opinion (which is already super cool).

And It's quite a bit easier to work with since it's not stack-based and that you can edit different parts of you spell/program at any point.

mood

"Thank you for playing Wing Commander"

My head canon is that creatures such as ghosts, demons, djinns, ... enter our mortal realm willingly from time to time and sometimes form a connection with a person, who they then teach how to summon them in times of need. This knowledge is then passed down.

So effectively otherworldly creatures are tourists who gave a local their number and now they get bothered by their greatgreatgreatgreatgrandkids.

The Book of Enoch says that fallen angels named Uzza, Azza and Azael taught humans originally.

I like the idea that they're not just symbols, but shapes. Get anything to be shaped like a rune, and it'll touch magic. So two rocks leaned against each other just right might create a trickle of water, or a tree that grows a twisted enough web of branches could, by chance, summon a flame. Then, like with all natural phenomenon, people figured it out! It fits well with the trope that wizards are arcane researchers and scientists, you find in settings like D&D's

Many times the code we work on is built in abstractions we don't know about from top to bottom.

So you code everything in Assembly from scratch?

So happy its getting an anime, such a gorgeous manga

Was looking for that comment

If writing software makes you some sort of magician then writing in assembly should surely mean you are a cleric or warlock.

I think it depends a lot on a person's individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there'll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something "just works", but it will no longer feel like that's what your main field is based upon.

Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a "feel" for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don't need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.

For my personal interest, I've learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn't directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it's built on a mystery.

I don't recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don't have to feel that our work is based on "magic smoke" if we really don't want to.

ADDED: If anyone's curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater's YouTube videos about "Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!" It's a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.

Vibe coders == warlocks with their patron LLM. Great idea!