In some fantasy, I guess lay lines, dolmens, stone circles and the like are kinda infrastructure for magic? Totally agree about the programming = magic, and in a “fantasy” world I worked on for a game the twist was that all the ‘magic’ was just programming and hacking the old advanced tech computer / satellite network.

The “mages” had some augmented reality type implant that allowed them to call up minority report style screens they could interact with, and give verbal commands. But to everyone else they’re just waving their hands through the air in strange patterns and saying gibberish words “sayday spayis slash eih tay say slash”.

The wizards had no real idea what they were doing, and researching new “spells” was basically the same as a noob trying get some feature working on a remote Linux server with only two partial and contradictory walk-throughs for an earlier version of the distro. So even if they got stuff working, they rarely understood how or why it worked.

I think it’s really interesting to think about how even though computing is generally objective / logical, if you stripped away all background knowledge and added in a bunch of uncertainty (it’s hard to communicate with the server and sometimes your commands get scrambled, so even the same command might not always work) then you’d end up in a situation quite like ancient / medieval science where people hyothosise about principles and make systems that are helpful, but don’t actually align to what’s really happening.

That’s crazy! My initial reaction was… But how do you know what your committing to, what your rights and responsibilities are etc… But after 2 seconds thinking about what I know about USA, it seems about right.

Lol

Not the op, but I think I get what they’re getting at. I have been scrolling lemmy a lot this last week and everytime I see something about the climate catastrophe, unions being fucked over, terrible politicians etc I up vote it. These are all important things, and by up voting I feel like I’m čsupporting the cause" and “raising awareness”.

But I do wonder if it’s actually very helpful, for whatever cause, for me, or for lemmy. It makes scrolling lemmy stressful and depressing, which is accurate for how the world is, but it doesn’t really make things better. I feel like I’d rather be reading something interesting or informative that might make the world a better place, whether it’s by actually making real chnage, or just me learning something meaningful.

“Starbucks fucks it’s employees!” “Trump lies about soemthing!” “the world is on fire!” are always going to drive engagement because these things upset us and we want to do a small act to make ourselves feel less powerless. But I’m not sure they’re really doing more than preaching to the choir, and leaving said choir frazzled and distracted.

I heard that child Tolkien told his mother he’d “written a story about a green, great dragon” and when his mum told him it had to be a “great, green dragon” he was so put off that he didn’t write again for years.

So maybe track down that story?

That’s interesting! I’ve heard aussies refer to that campaign/guideline a lot and I’ve always heard it as “slip slap slop”, which follows the rule but doesn’t make sense as the order of activities. I don’t know whether they reverted to the vowel order when talking casually, or if they said it right and I subconsciously ‘corrected’ it in my memory.