#magical technology

[asdaricus]

More "titanships" from Asdar

by Midjourney v6

[hompunkulus]

[deancaspinefest]

Whispers in the Wind

fic by cenedrariva  |  art by purzelndesbaeumchen

Once upon a time, there lived a zephyr named Castiel, a spirit of air who danced across the sky. One day he encountered a human named Dean, a brash young pilot. Castiel grew enchanted with Dean’s passion for flying, and sought to befriend Dean by becoming human. Alas, Castiel could find no such magic, and resigned himself to live forever unseen, until one day a fierce storm cast Dean from the sky. Desperate to save Dean, Castiel approached the mysterious Story Mage, who agreed to help. For a price...

Keep reading for a sneak preview!

Dean readied his machete, and the pistol he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage, and then went about drawing up the points of another Diamond of Protection. 

It wasn’t much later that his assailants emerged from the trees, and Dean swore. 

Hellhounds. 

Semi-invisible monsters aligned with fire, hellhounds were perfect pursuit predators that enjoyed hunting in packs. Once they got someone’s scent, they would follow it until they either died or caught them. The only things they were weak to were water, salt, and enchanted weaponry. 

Dean sent up a prayer. 

And then out of nowhere, a naked man appeared. Dropped down from the sky, more like. 

Dean felt his jaw fall open. 

Before his eyes, the unarmed man began to attack the hellhounds using powerful air magic. One hound was sent hurtling back nearly 40 feet before it hit a tree and fell to the ground. Another leapt to attack the strange man, only to be impaled on an invisible blade of some sort – tightly compressed air, Dean guessed. 

The man, his face drawn back in a silent snarl, sent another bolt of lightning straight into the chest of the leader hound, who yowled, before turning tail and running. Her packmates followed, and very quickly, Dean was left alone with the strange man. 

The man – still buck naked, of all things – turned to face Dean with a smile. 

** 

Castiel leapt into action, landing in the middle of the fight, and immediately sending one hound flying into a tree. 

The fight didn’t last long. The hounds, as lesser elementals, were intimidated by Castiel’s obvious superiority. They ran away, to hide in the undergrowth. 

Castiel turned to Dean with a smile. Dean was watching him, eyes wide and cautious. 

“Hey, uh, thanks for the assist. What’s your name?” 

“I am called Castiel,” he responded. 

Dean frowned, shifting on the spot. 

“Uh, you don’t happen to speak Common, do you?” 

Ah, that was right. He had no human voice. 

Castiel grimaced, gesturing to his throat before shaking his head. Dean smiled, and began making a hand gestures following a specific pattern. Apparently it was some form of communication, and Castiel watched carefully, but he couldn’t make any sense of the gestures. He shrugged in frustration. 

“Guess you don’t know signing either,” Dean sighed. “Look, buddy, I’m glad for your help, but fighting off a few hellhounds on my behalf isn’t gonna cut it. I won’t trust you or take down my wards without an Ally’s Oath.” 

Castiel nodded. The spell would only take if they both intended no harm to the other. Dean relaxed nearly instantly as the spell was complete. 

“Awesome. Let’s go then,” Dean said, scuffing up one of the runes to dispel the wards. Dean paused, and his eyes flicked down Castiel’s body for a second, before he began looking at the sky, his cheeks a light pink. “Uh, do you have any clothing?” 

Castiel stared at Dean in confusion. Clothes?

[Continue reading on March 13]

[clairedelune-13]

OK, but why doesn’t the game ever bring up the sending crystals?

It’s referenced once. In Trespasser, when Dorian gives it to you, either romanced or not.

But, like, they’re not mentioned anywhere else.

What do they even look like?

It’s like a magical cell phone, right?

A device one can use to communicate over long distances.

Is it like a megascope?

Why would you introduce something like this in your game and then just never bring it up again?

How rare are they? Can you only acquire one if your well connected in the imperium?

What’s the functionality?

On a separate note,, dwarves have printing presses. So, does that mean they have like typewriters? the qunari literally have gunpowder, their gaatlok.

The way Bioware designs their universe is so messy and inconsistent, it actually drives me crazy. 

Also, they are absolute shit at explaining it.

Bellara was fiddling with what looked like a tech board when she was fixing the eluvian… like, that’s so odd?

[mageofmari]

This is an Introduction Only  More May Follow Tech in a Nutshell

    Please note that some terms are borrowed from the language established for discussing tech by Omnimancers. As an outsider of their system, my uses are likely wrong in many cases, oh well.  I will first explain tech in a positive light, and indeed it is a very useful system.  At the end of the article, I will highlight some of my concerns and critiques of tech, especially when it’s practiced in isolation from broader magical/metaphysical contexts.

Why Tech is Useful (Gross oversimplifications follow)

    Spell casting generally refers to direct impositions of Will upon reality and/or astral/subtle energy. This is typically done by either using the subconscious mind to affect reality (rituals, sigils, etc.) or by merging the conscious and subconscious minds (trance work, advanced ritual work) to do so.     Constructs offer an easy way to accumulate this Will action over time for use on a single objective, making it a slightly more effective methodology in many cases. This is, of course, still ultimately subject to the limitations of the will. Egregores are, by extension, constructs with the accumulated Will of several people over time.     If a spell is a water gun, a construct is more like a water balloon, and an egregore is a reservoir. This metaphor is an oversimplification, granted, many spells will tap into large sources or prepared batteries, constructs may have a continuous flow of magical will/energy feeding it, and egregores can fuel spells blurring the lines of distinction.  The important point is that all of these are reliant on sources of Will to impact reality or the astral.     Tech works differently, which is why the system is a significant improvement over competing systems, especially in the long term. Rather than directly achieving effects using Will, tech takes advantage of reliable emergent properties of reality to affect changes. Using traits like shape, energetic composition, density, etc. (the list is endless and much stranger than this sampling implies) tech causes natural reactions to accomplish component sub tasks at any scale.  Will, in this case, only shapes the initial machinery. This machinery can be combined to create ever more complex effects, and stacked for ever larger effects. 

  This essentially mechanical effect may seem familiar to ceremonial magicians who are accustomed to working with well defined symbolic systems and tools to leverage mystical machinery laid down by their system’s progenitors or “secret masters”. It is worth noting that the only significant differences are in attitude and probable origins. Tech as a paradigm promotes scientific thinking over zealous or religious thinking (which are the more common modes of magical thinking across paradigms), which can lead to a bit more arrogance in success than, for instance, success as a result of adulation of a godhead.  The bigger difference is that of origin, though. While ceremonial systems impose human symbolism such as the tree of life, or a God, on reality, tech attempts to analyze reality in the absence of such impositions. In short, tech seeks to break magical reality down into a series of rules, whereas most systems seek to understand reality in terms the system designer brings to the table.

    What's important is that reality itself is doing virtually all the work, without requiring a constant supply of will. Once the machinery is in place it can be expected to keep operating with no significant maintenance cost to the magician.  A small amount of unconscious maintenance or an alternative entropy solution is sufficient for Tech to function for years, without conscious intervention.

Some Problems and Solutions

    Most substantial effects require the input of magical energy as a sort of fuel/work (at the very least to maintain system integrity).  The simplest way to accommodate this need is to provide a natural or artificial source of energy.  At low levels, one's self is adequate, though tapping into a ley line or natural wellspring is preferable.  Most complex tech magic requires the use of more substantial Sources though.  Linking such tech magic to the Sun and/or stars (more specifically their astral equivalents) is one of the simplest ways to ensure they are adequately powered.       Typically tech users agree on the importance of engineering tech magic at many levels of organization. Ideally, the vast majority of this kind of work is offloaded onto the unconscious mind, or ‘inner’. However, especially early on, it can prove necessary or helpful to have a conscious, hands-on relationship with these many levels of organization. Usually, a piece of tech will be made of components which are made of sub-components and so on until you reach comparatively indivisible ‘materials’.

    Developing materials is a matter of experimentation, observation, speculation, and happy accident. In many cases, you will not have the materials and subsequent components you need to accomplish a goal, and so you will unconsciously substitute Will based programming. This allows the tech magic to function but undermines the very advantages that tech magic has over constructs, making them far less efficient than they ought to be. For this reason, frequent development of materials and swapping tech and materials with other practitioners is essential to making meaningful progress with the system.

    If you are a solitary practitioner, and not able to easily swap tech with others, consider swapping with astral entities friendly to you. Angels, demons, gods, monsters, forest spirits, elves, dwarves etc. exist in a literal sense in the astral, and they all, to some degree, make use of or understand tech as a concept. This can lead to major new insights into developing tech that is not immediately compatible with your worldview and comfort zone. You do need to be more careful of the various pitfalls of astral work when working alone. It's very easy to fall prey to delusional beliefs and misinformation when relying on astral sources. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you and any others you work with develop your senses and ability to distinguish analytical overlay from raw data.

    If you have any experience with creating amps, you will immediately see how tech can be used to create very effective amps, which leads to an effective acceleration of one's degree(s) of initiation.  In this way, tech is very useful as a supplemental system, as well as a standalone paradigm.  This is what draws to many to Tech as a paradigm.

Creating your First Tech

    With the preceding theory out of the way, let us consider a specific application of the tech paradigm to a very simple bit of energy work: the creation of a ball of energy. Such a process can seem difficult to break down into smaller parts, given its simplicity.

    We can intuitively break it down into (1) the gathering of energy, (2) the shaping of energy, (3) making the new shape stable/permanent.  So our tech must accomplish all three tasks without the need for continuous Will in order to make energy balls.  

    Energy sources abound. You can easily solve step one by creating a simple link to the sun/stars, a ley line, energy node, egregores, gather ambient energy, etc. Malleable energy conforms to the shape of any vessel into which it is compressed (much as any physical fluid does). So the second step can be accomplished by creating a contained space in which to compress the gathered energy. These first two steps are very simple.

    Two common approaches exist for promoting the longevity of an energetic construct: density as a means of resisting external influences and programming as a means of conveying a semi-permanent set of instructions for the energy.  Either can be accomplished autonomously by tech, but the latter is more advanced. You can easily increase the total density of the energy ball by introducing the gathered energy under “pressure” into a very durable container. Energy from some sources will already be under some pressure (stars, for example, put out quite dense energy). However, the beauty of tech is that there are no hard limits to how to solve a problem. You could devise a pump similar to how a pressure washer functions. You could find a way to create a strong, temporary gravitational effect, you could flash magnetize your container to create a shell of especially dense energy on your ball, etc.

    There are any number of improvements that can be made to your basic system, most of them taking the form of subdividing your components into smaller more efficient, specialized components.  Some more meticulous practitioners may take an atomic-up approach to such designs, even; attempting to work from the smallest scales they can conceive of up to the useful macro scale they need effects on, to maximize efficiency.  Make no mistake, energy is plentiful, but you will still find improved efficiency to be the best way to improve your tech spells’ performance. Throwing more power at a problem doesn't solve it, it simply kicks the can down the road.

Making Progress with Tech

    Making substantial progress with Tech requires a constant stream of inspiration.  This can be found by simply considering your previous work, in an endless series of Hegelian Dialectic incremental improvements, a rather brute force approach which yields ever less dramatic improvements over time.  Most practitioners let such processes occur either in occasional batches of frenzied cross-pollination or entirely in the background.

    One may also find various astral sources of Tech available for trade or plunder. In a similar vein, one may often break down the magical actions of other practitioners into the ‘language’ of tech.  Whether someone is communing with their gods, or divining the future, by observing magical effects with your magical senses, using the inner as an interpreter, you may adopt methods very outside of the Tech paradigm.  The doors this opens can be unpredictable but are generally very rewarding.

    I’ve mentioned power and efficiency as means of improving tech, but these largely get at only the problem of surpassing performance limitations.  You will come up against far less simple problems, most of which can be solved with insight.  To achieve these insights you will need to improve your ability to observe magical effects.  This can be done through sheer practice, incrementally improving over time, but also using amps to enhance one's magical senses. Once you can understand a problem you can solve it.

    Using amps in this way can take many specific mechanical forms. The simplest ways to start this process can be thought of as flooding perceptive organs with refined, empowering energy.  More complex solutions abound, ranging from virtual lenses to entirely rebuilt sensory systems.  Pursuing these options is paramount to your success as a Tech magician.

A Few Cautions and Criticisms

    In theory, Tech is a limitless system for practical magical development and progress.  In practice, you are limited by sources of inspiration, creativity, and the lack of overarching direction.  The system requires users to have infinite motivation for development to continue.  There are also some things tech is less suited to; particularly, tech is great at accelerating magical growth of power and skill, it in no fundamental fashion necessitates the development of the magician’s wisdom.  This causes problems and can contribute to the practical limits to magical development as the imbalances, false trails, and potentially damaging unwise experimentation abounds.  

    Forming or joining a tech study group or order helps considerably with these systemic weaknesses, but it doesn’t entirely negate them (and it adds a slew of complications in the form of inter-human relationships, politics, hierarchy, and so on).  Motivation becomes troublesome even in a group environment, as the focus-fatigue of one member can derail whole meetings, retarding progress.  A hybrid approach with a loose network of allied Tech magicians or interconnected “schools” of Tech magicians something like the modern academic culture of intellectual free trade would be the most ideal.  To my knowledge, no such networks exist based in the material world, and astral networks of this sort have mixed success and failure.     Another, less easily solved, issue is that Tech isn’t ideologically compatible with many theurgic systems. The mechanical understanding of magic essentially dismisses the divine as something like a very complex and intelligent vending machine (though, to be fair, this perspective gets adjusted as one’s ability to perceive expands, and one sees that what was apparently a boundary was merely a horizon).  Many paradigms also can’t support the concept of breaking reality’s interactions into smallest possible parts, or into rules.  It’s also unconditionally assumed that energy exists and that there are rules of any kind that universally apply to it.  Chaos magicians (and various others) will be quick to point out that these assumptions about reality cannot really be taken for granted.

    The Cognitive Dissonance such issues can cause during adoption of tech as a supplementary paradigm can be very challenging to deal with, especially for those not adept at controlling their subconscious assumptions about reality and magic.  This can be overcome, but to some, especially those relatively unmotivated to seek power, it’s simply not worth it.  This system is best suited to those with relatively compatible magical backgrounds focused on energy work.

Further Information

    The only credible source online for information on tech is, by default, www.omnimancy.com. They originally developed the system,m though it has developed in parallel in many places and times, they remain the largest worldly source of information on Tech, with centuries of collective experience in their ranks.  I may write further on the subject at a later time and will update this section if this occurs.

[blue-opossum]

Becoming Tom Cruise by Using a Small Computerized Device

        Morning of October 23, 2016. Sunday.

        In the first segment of my dream, there is some sort of unusual event relating to me wanting to pretend to have died (an association with "playing possum", an opossum, in turn, being a real-time symbol of being asleep and in the dream state). However, I am with non-lucid dream control, not consciously active lucidity (that is, I am not aware that I am dreaming). My family is not as they are in reality as it is almost like a movie of dramatic implications done only as a "test".

        I have a device that resembles a calculator. I somehow use it to leave my body as it exists in this dream (and is lying on the floor on its side) and I firstly become incorporeal, yet somehow physically oriented as I am then standing near a bed (dream sign). I use this device to create different events and features (again, even though I am not lucid). When the device is working to create something, green lines of relevant phrasing of the event or feature appear, with countdown displays on the right side (where one display counts down in seconds before actually creating what had been entered into it, the other display possibly relating to incremented progress in microseconds). If something cannot be done, a red phrase appears, giving the reason for the failed manifestation (for example, not enough detail input or an ambiguous request).

      I become aware that there are now two of me in the room. The body I had left and my present dream-self perspective, now also as an actual body. I do not want people to see two of me as they will then become confused and realize I had been tricking them with my "death".

        I randomly pick Tom Cruise to look like to throw people off. The device displays red phrases a few times, but finally has a green display with the countdowns. I apparently start to appear exactly like Tom Cruise.

        I turn around and look at myself in a full-length mirror. At first, I consider that I look just like Tom Cruise. However, I eventually notice that I am unrealistically muscular in a manner that also causes me to look top-heavy and dwarfish (even though I do not feel that different). Oddly, I have a lot of sparse hair on my chest. In addition to the hair on my chest, there is also sparse hair on my shoulders which I find a tad bizarre but I do not consider that this is all a dream. My face now only resembles Tom Cruise a little and is otherwise a bit too wide to be normal. Although I find this amusing, I eventually decide to leave the area and soon wake.

[submitabug]

The San Bernardino District Attorney told a federal judge late Thursday that Apple must assist the authorities in unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino shooters that killed 14 people in a killing rampage in December. The phone, which was a county work phone issued to Farook as part of his Health Department duties, may have been the trigger to unleash a "cyber pathogen," county prosecutors said in a brief court filing.

What.

[thelethifoldwitch]

It is known that many of the magics used in the creation of Hogwarts, as with many other magical locations, are largely lost to us now. Whether this is through poor book-keeping and teaching, or through the magics being the secret developments of each of the founders is unknown but it is certain that the Room of Requirement has never yet been quite replicated, the Sorting Hat has remained unique, and that the study into the magics used to create the Ravenclaw Doorknocker have been studied for years with no real understanding yet being reached.

The Doorknocker, created by Rowena Ravenclaw herself, is a unique piece, both of artistry and of magic, able to speak riddles and comprehend the responses, suggesting it may have a partial intelligence. There are some few books on the objects creation and construction, in the Hogwarts Library Restricted section, though unfortunately what these books say varies between clear statements and inscrutable vagueness.

These books suggest that the knocker may be based somewhat on the ancient Assyrian Shedu, large, sphinx-like riddlers, who, in stone pairs, would guard the entrances to the ancient Mesopotamian palaces. Like the doorknocker these statues would tell riddles or ask for passwords, and only part their wings to allow an individual through if they answered correctly, or were permitted in by someone from within. Over the millennia the enchantments on these statues has been, variously, dismantled by invading armies, damaged by weathering, and weakened by time, but ideas on how they might have worked can be gained from the still living creatures that Shedu were based on - the lamassu.

Though the lamassu are rare creatures nowadays, they are nonetheless great historians, and are consistently willing to share their knowledge of their histories with those who ask respectfully. Their knowledge suggests that the Founder Ravenclaw may well have researched both lamassu and Shedu in her period of travel through the world, and later used this knowledge in constructing the dooknocker. Unfortunately what knowledge she gleaned is not stored where it may be read, and no one has yet understood what it might be.

 -- Excerpt from Lost Arts in Enchanting by Perdita Snare

(Image Source)

(Piece on the Ravenclaw Knocker requested by tobermoriansass)