It is not that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but that anything is indistinguishable from magic from the perspective of the sufficiently ignorant. Clarke assumes we will lose the red queen’s race with polymathy.
Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
Raildex spicy take from a magic practitioner with an engineering degree: watch Railgun all the way through and skip Magidex completely. Ignore Touma when he appears in Railgun. He has never once done anything interesting.
Search https://qz.com/1454785/a-millionaire-couple-is-threatening-to-create-a-magic-mushroom-monopoly/
Bad idea of the day: drawing a unicursal hexagram in the center of the Magic Roundabout in Hartfordshire
The Magic Leap Con https://gizmodo.com/the-magic-leap-con-1829716266
How to Suffer Well: Sympathetic Characterization in Madoka and Magical Girl Site - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kmaba2TopE
The workflow app on iOS is magic. I now have a button that asks me to select a picture, then converts it to png, resizes it, strips the metadata, scps it to my jumphost, scps it further to my gopher jail and into my paste directory, constructs the http proxy URL and opens it in safari. All without user-interaction. Now I can share my mobile life with you guys! Prepare for cat pictures!
CABINET // The Illusionistic Magic of Geometric Figuring http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/wertheim.php
Humans are natural magic-users because their cognition is grounded: Whenever they meet an ungrounded cognition (say a spirit), that spirit is grounded through them and the resulting flow of energy can be harnessed
Solar eclipses are hard to come by on Earth but common in space, so offworld magical research stations modeled after orreries offer bespoke nights, engineered syzygies, and break new frontiers in topological astrology
life hex: sick of dating sites? Instead of trusting a pickup artist, trust Furfur, Earl of Hell. Just remember to put him inside a magic triangle before asking him for relationship advice
The Lost Magic of Traditional Anime Production - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Lm5P-mJCk
The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents, and we played it - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/21/17374054/cia-collect-it-all-declassified-training-tabletop-card-game
a magic system where practitioners slowly adopt the form of whatever their mind is, because even when you form the world with your mind, you’re still part of that world and your mental habits leak
General Magic is a film about the â90s startup that imagined the smartphone - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/22/17233362/general-magic-movie-review-documentary-silicon-valley-tribeca-2018
countercomplex: Bringing magic back to technology http://viznut.fi/texts-en/magic_back_to_technology.html
The financial world and the magical elixir of confidence … https://aeon.co/essays/the-financial-world-and-the-magical-elixir-of-confidence
[…] In modern magic, mundanium (an aluminium alloy) has mostly supplanted cold iron as the go-to antimagical material. In fact, a large mass of it can be used to enchant cold iron in a setup not unlike a sacrificial anode […]
📚 Finished reading The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide) by Sarah Knight
📚 Finished reading The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide) by Sarah Knight
During new moon, the forest’s canopy is often bathed in aurora arborealis, waste magic from rituals below meeting the fog above
How The Ancient Magus Bride Makes Magic Feel Real - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJLvf1-3s_8
Frownland by Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band: Analysis - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhhB9teHqU
Magic Works: An Interview with Grant Morrision Part 1 - Mondo 2000 http://www.mondo2000.com/2017/08/14/magic-works-an-interview-with-grant-morrision/
magic, here, is not so much as flying sparks but knowledge of ancient tech and self-knowledge through hundreds of years of experience
Magic was given only to players, but nobody’s logged in in a few hundred years of game time. We run on hardware the admins have forgotten
How Mushrooms Became Magic - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/how-mushrooms-became-magic/537789/
Blood has the highest magic capacity of all materials, making it one of the best choices for magic batteries as well as a great coolant
Want to Transcribe Rare Magical Manuscripts on Your Lunch Break? - Atlas Obscura http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/newberry-library-transcribing-manuscripts
“Sure, I’ll cast a recursive spell”, next you know that spell has used up all the universe’s magic to convert it into hot expanding space
Magic 8-Ball - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_8-Ball
In industrial magic, to test whether magical equipment is cold enough to service, you blow a few soap bubbles near it. Some outcomes:
Wizards’ beds tend to be the least magical things in their towers, full of antimagic to prevent sleepcasting fireballs and nightmares
They come from wells in the mountains where earth magic leaks to the surface, and the High North where the Aurora Borealis is harnessed
Wood is the best conductor of magic and long rows of trees carry it into our cities, artificial leylines singing with barely contained power
Magic 8-balls are really awesome. Both answers are kinda perfect…
@8ball@domgoergen.com Do we need a magic 8ball for twtxt?
Confined to the ghetto, our druids adapted. They still guard the lore, but now also memorize sewer maps, teach asphalt magic on the roofs,
In the workers’ quarters, magical pollution makes snowflakes fall as tiny ice furniture while raindrops have bulbous misshapen outgrowths
Magical radiation makes the city’s houses develop cancers: Walls covered in door handles, bays protruding everywhere, atavistic buttresses
magic is reverse memory: action comes from words
“Live by the word, die by the word” - Inscription on the magical criminal court’s gate
What if there’s a rich existing toolset to deal with words that have power, right in front of us?↵What if magical thinking is actually good?
Add magic to the mix: certain symbionts grant magical powers. Wizards, to be less tasty and not be hunted down, eat disfiguring parasites
Trees form around and channel slow discharges of magic towards space, wooden lightning bolts with growth rings for equipotential field lines
Error correction algorithms proved curiously effective against magical corruption. A game changer for black magic, now nearly respectable.
The magical radiation in faerieland ruins most of our tech so there are special faerie-hardened mycocomputers made entirely of mycelium
Quills used for spell books must withstand strong magical currents, but also be magically inert unlike wandwood.