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.
Chemists are wizards?
I mean chemistry direct predecessor, alchemy, was basically in large part magical practice attempt.
True. They didn’t make gold, but they discovered phosphorus…I think? The reducing urine one experiment.
I spend 8 hours a day gluing together spells my company purchased from a proprietary caster’s book to serve increasingly arcane (no pun intended) business needs. In my free time, I like to read about the latest advancements in corporate spellcraft, but most of the new spells are either patches of old spells or new spells that fix problems created by popular spells of the past 5 years. These new spells inevitably introduce new problems that will be “solved” in another 5 years.
Yep, that’s exactly it. I’m assuming this is software dev in a nutspell.
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.
Stop, I can only get so depressed!
Bro made fantasy stuff into a capitalist dystopia
This comment made me sad.
“If”
You realize embedded systems engineers are real, right?
And if anything qualifies as esoteric, arcane knowledge, it’s embedded systems programming
I’d say OS and driver programming is also in that category. It is the deep magic.
True, true. I have a vague idea how embedded systems work. I have no idea how you even get started with driver development.
OS development isn’t terrible though. There are numerous books to help you make your own kernel and OS
For linux driver development you can start by reading “Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition” pdf.
It is free and give you an idea about how everything works.
The real learning is by reading and using the linux kernel api doc or directly the source code of the api you want to call.
Source : i did this for a school project where i had to implement multiple kernel modules.Neat! I’ll add it to my long list of things ADHD will never let me finish!
I think the real issue with driver development is that almost nobody ever has a reason to do it. It’s a much more constrained way of programming compared to normal programs, and isn’t necessary unless you need to talk to hardware or something. So, nobody has an excuse to learn it.
… Unless you want to talk to hardware. Or something.
Yes… as I said. But, most people use hardware provided by other people, which means other people write the drivers.
“There are lots of books on harvesting your own primal power source, but most people these days make a pact with the demon Linus and simply channel his power”
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!)
Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.
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.
If explosion magic doesn’t solve your problems then you’re clearly not using enough explosion magic.
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.
Don’t be too harsh she just played Lineage 2
That’s why you let her ride around in a backpack worn by the Big Guy in the party.l, asking with a bunch of potions.
Is this a game?
Book/Manga/Anime. Also a game, yeah
*I didn’t ask how close those buildings are, I said “I cast FIREBALL” *
-Megumin, if they played D&D
Expulooooshon
How people think wizards would talk:
Behold! I have unfurled powers beyond mortal comprehension!
How wizards would actually talk:
If I hear, “why don’t you just channel the infernal essence through an ephemeral plane?” one more goddamn time from someone who hasn’t actually read the fucking rune diagrams, I’m going to lose my shit.
In other words, wizards do exist, they are just called IT specialists.
RTFR - Read the fucking runes!
They would 100% be trying to peddle ape runes inscribed with XP cost (for extra permanency) as the next big investment opportunity
The ape is merely a representational avatar! The true value of the rune lies in possessing it, for it identifies you as a member of an elite cadre of ape rune possessors.
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.”
Right, so literally computer security
Discworld wizards represent!
Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.
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
There’d be hair restoration & ED specialized wizards within a year.
Oh great wizards finasteride and dutasteride, give me back my hair!
Read as Greek names it works
Ergo, Wizards can’t be exploited by capitalism
Imagine thinking that PhD’s and postdocs aren’t exploited by capitalism.
To be fair, PhDs and postdocs can’t call down lightning from the sky or reanimate the dead to do their bidding.
Of course they can and do call down lightning; the magic spell is called “lighning rocket”.
To revive the recently deceased a spell called CPR combined with Defibrilation is used.
Some wizards dedicate their lives to researching even higher level spells
Nor can they Magick-up all their needs, or transmute gold.
It’s called a 3D printer, Amazon, and a particle collider https://glintpay.com/us/blog/modern-day-alchemy-making-gold-atoms-cern
Hmm. Too bad you need a bunch of resources for those instead of… Idk, waving your hand and saying some words.
“A bunch of resources” being a pile of ancient tomes and a cheap craptop running Linux, as opposed to a pile of ancient tomes and a runestone?
That one kind of magic would be capitalism. I mean the situation from OP post is the current state of liberal economics.
Yes
Now that’s just academica.
We have this now. Scientists and big pharma.
That’s the joke
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.
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.
I’d certainly vote if I was a citizen. Let’s maybe see about that again in say 20 years?
Just commit voter fraud. All 7 of my supporters so far are from other countries. Seriously my PP is so smol I need the military budget to gain a centimeter
Haha, look, it’s my career!
🫠
no way it’s the yomi hustle guy
Grasshopper mind sorcery
So they’d be like cobol developers? From what I know that is basically magic to keep it running
