Drasvin

Kind of like greyhounds. I've seen video of a running greyhound. They are amazing, beautiful creatures. An online friend of mine owns one and it can run much faster backwards than she can run facing forward. It loves being chased but has to give the silly slow two-legs a big advantage for it to be fun.

Trying to reconstruct something I posted before the forum crash... the following is said somewhere in Europe, in some language possibly beginning with the letter F...
 

And now I'm picturing The Neverending Story being done as a JRPG.
"The Child-Like Empress needs a name, what will you name her?"
"Boobs"

He wouldn't have had to. Japan probably had monsters all of its own. It certainly did so if its mythological tradition is to be believed. I really doubt that the Japanese would have needed a Great White Savior to establish a monster hunting tradition of their own.
In fact, I hear they are pretty good at being traditionalist. That might just be a rumour, of course.

Van's a seer as well though, if Noriko is his mother, it's likely she would have used a magic analysis wand on him after he was born as well, either Van wasn't scared by the wand like Tedd was, or the wand wasn't noisy like Edward's or maybe, she must still have had some concern about Van's ability to defend himself when she first tried to teach him to cast spells and he couldn't.
However, the guilt could have come if Van gave the same results as Tedd, but later on she realized just how ever Van could resist enchantments and maybe figured out that could be the case with Tedd as well. That would make her feel guilty about the way she treated Tedd as defenseless and useless as an apprentice without giving him a chance, she'd also believe that it's too late to go back an try to reconcile things since she had started a new family.
For the most part I do agree with that reasoning for her leaving Tedd in the first place, but it was also probably the biggest conclusion jump someone could do.
Let's see, failure to realize the wand was being resisted, failure to realize Tedd could see magic, failure to realize that Tedd was empowering the watches and not some fancy technodohicky he made, failure to realized Tedd's genderfluidity...
I don't think we have enough palms.
 

"Also the Terracotta Army has come to life and is rampaging across Asia"

If Magic needs to actively suppress systems to prevent them from working, that would explain why Magus's magic and the griffins' magic(assuming their rule system is different) work in Moperville.

If Magic needs to actively suppress systems to prevent them from working, that would explain why Magus's magic and the griffins' magic(assuming their rule system is different) work in Moperville.

If Magic needs to actively suppress systems to prevent them from working, that would explain why Magus's magic and the griffins' magic(assuming their rule system is different) work in Moperville.

Magic's weak spot is understanding individuals. People in general would stop using magic. Individual ambitious would-be wizards would continue like no tomorrow. They would likely also die in droves but there would always follow more to replace them.
 
Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series and many of the following books are all excellent.
I once ran a roleplaying game with this as a premise. The idea was that the players were supposed to stop and reverse the process before it became permanent. There was a neighbouring dimension with a world much like ours and due to an overlap the world barriers became porous. Close to the rifts forming as a result the two different sets of laws clashed. Magic stopped working in the magic world and science stopped working in ours. Worse, magical phenomenae got loose in our world. The good thing, from the POV of the players, was that the science stuff they brought along while exploring the magic world worked over there.
The players won in the end though it was a tight race. I have always been a bit sorry that we never got a chance to play out the aftermath. So many people had died and so much damage had been done that much of Denmark had turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. (Thankfully for the rest of the world, the effects had not yet spread outside Denmark's borders by the time the players successfully fixed things.) It would have been really interesting to play a game where the players were part of a reconstruction effort and had to deal with lingering effects. For example, one idea I had was that magic still worked in certain areas.
My best memory from the game was when the players were chased by a huge horde of zombies. This happened to be in the city of Aalborg which we lived in at the time. There was this plaza where you could always be sure to find hundreds of bicycles parked. Bicycles still worked so my players quickly stole some and left the zombies in the dust. They turned a corner and gave a sigh of relief. Moments later, they had a huge OH SHIT moment as they saw a massive mob of zombies all on bicycles turning the corner in rapid pursuit. (We made SO MANY bad jokes about that, by the way. This happened to be while Tour de France was going on and the pursuing mob instantly got named Tour du Mort. The leading zombie was of course wearing a yellow shirt and the players argued about whether being undead counted as a form of doping... it went on and on.)

Tedd could produce one-day transformation wands with pointed ears, cat ears, cat whiskers, puppy tail, green skin, etc. (just one small transformation per wand) for vaccination purposes....we could have play groups with every grade-school child showing a different trivial transformation.

Someone call the Vatican, the Imperial Omyouji, the Van Helsing family, all the shamans, the Freemasons, the priests of all major religons, and reconvene the Round Table. And prepare to reopen the crypt of Merlin. We MIGHT have an emergency here.

I'd much rather something like Incarnations of Immortality, where magic and technology work equally well, with no cross-interference.

Greater power causing a person to see those without power as less significant is something that happens in humans as well, but only when empathy is lacking or missing all together, and there are examples of Immortals at the end of their life showing empathy. Pandora certainly did, at least when she was putting forth the effort to keep her mind coherent, and I would argue that Jerry should quite a lot of empathy towards people. Even when he made the hammer to encourage inappropriate comments(which was done when he was considerable younger), it was due to guilt from women being offended by the comments.
I doubt power is the reason for Magic's thinking and difficulty with humans as much as perspective. Every piece of magical energy across the globe is apart of the same gestalt entity. It is simultaneously a single entity, a collective of countless number, and an empty set. It doesn't perceive the world like humans do. The solid, singular, squishy bags of water that are humans are just as alien to Magic as Magic is to them.
Magic required the Seers to convince it not to make major changes, because the cycle of change and secrecy had persisted for thousands of years, since the dawn of man. It simply didn't understand why this time would be any different. Sure the world was more crowded, but from Magic's perspective that wasn't really a significant difference. The same basic patterns, just more of them. The major thing that was different this time was technology, more specifically the internet, which was something Magic had little to no knowledge of. Without that important context, the argument that secrecy is doomed to fail seems illogical. That's why Magic said the logic was insufficient. The logic it was presented simply didn't add up from its perspective.

Yep, #32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

Somehow, I don't see captured German pilots getting "Mirrors on the ceiling and pink champagne on ice."  However they could."..call up the captain and say 'please bring me my wine.'"  They would have that spirit there because it's before 1969...

Greater power causing a person to see those without power as less significant is something that happens in humans as well, but only when empathy is lacking or missing all together, and there are examples of Immortals at the end of their life showing empathy. Pandora certainly did, at least when she was putting forth the effort to keep her mind coherent, and I would argue that Jerry should quite a lot of empathy towards people. Even when he made the hammer to encourage inappropriate comments(which was done when he was considerable younger), it was due to guilt from women being offended by the comments.
I doubt power is the reason for Magic's thinking and difficulty with humans as much as perspective. Every piece of magical energy across the globe is apart of the same gestalt entity. It is simultaneously a single entity, a collective of countless number, and an empty set. It doesn't perceive the world like humans do. The solid, singular, squishy bags of water that are humans are just as alien to Magic as Magic is to them.
Magic required the Seers to convince it not to make major changes, because the cycle of change and secrecy had persisted for thousands of years, since the dawn of man. It simply didn't understand why this time would be any different. Sure the world was more crowded, but from Magic's perspective that wasn't really a significant difference. The same basic patterns, just more of them. The major thing that was different this time was technology, more specifically the internet, which was something Magic had little to no knowledge of. Without that important context, the argument that secrecy is doomed to fail seems illogical. That's why Magic said the logic was insufficient. The logic it was presented simply didn't add up from its perspective.

Greater power causing a person to see those without power as less significant is something that happens in humans as well, but only when empathy is lacking or missing all together, and there are examples of Immortals at the end of their life showing empathy. Pandora certainly did, at least when she was putting forth the effort to keep her mind coherent, and I would argue that Jerry should quite a lot of empathy towards people. Even when he made the hammer to encourage inappropriate comments(which was done when he was considerable younger), it was due to guilt from women being offended by the comments.
I doubt power is the reason for Magic's thinking and difficulty with humans as much as perspective. Every piece of magical energy across the globe is apart of the same gestalt entity. It is simultaneously a single entity, a collective of countless number, and an empty set. It doesn't perceive the world like humans do. The solid, singular, squishy bags of water that are humans are just as alien to Magic as Magic is to them.
Magic required the Seers to convince it not to make major changes, because the cycle of change and secrecy had persisted for thousands of years, since the dawn of man. It simply didn't understand why this time would be any different. Sure the world was more crowded, but from Magic's perspective that wasn't really a significant difference. The same basic patterns, just more of them. The major thing that was different this time was technology, more specifically the internet, which was something Magic had little to no knowledge of. Without that important context, the argument that secrecy is doomed to fail seems illogical. That's why Magic said the logic was insufficient. The logic it was presented simply didn't add up from its perspective.

While my hate level on Voltaire was fairly high to start with, he's really my number one hate target that's a fictional character right now.
 

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2461
Arthur: "Isn't  that just what we've been saying"?
... yes, it is. It's just translation.
(As we were already talking about in forum for previous comic.)
Arthur's "What" on end is also good, although I predicted facepalm.
(Commentary:) Shark's sensing magnetism is relatively normal kind of sense. Let's look at something harder: Imagine AI which only perceives world through the changes of frequency of specific words in news. (Unless you work in Google, then you don't need to imagine.) Magic might be more similar to this, having most information about world from what spells will people desire and how are they using them ... like, if there is epidemic, it doesn't see lot of sick people. It senses lot of people suddenly wanting healing spells.

Like Father, like Daughter.
She did say some new pieces of information, mainly information about human nature. Which is information that could be inferred from their previous statements or most listeners would already know, but Magic isn't good at subtlety and explicitly has a poor grasp of human nature. Tedd needed to make the implications explicit and correlate them with technology to explain why trying to keep magic hidden is a futile effort in the modern era.

Like Father, like Daughter.
She did say some new pieces of information, mainly information about human nature. Which is information that could be inferred from their previous statements or most listeners would already know, but Magic isn't good at subtlety and explicitly has a poor grasp of human nature. Tedd needed to make the implications explicit and correlate them with technology to explain why trying to keep magic hidden is a futile effort in the modern era.

People look at Canada and see a bunch of polite apologetic people, but that's what we want them the think.
 
 

The contest was the incident that sparked the war, but the war wouldn't have been anywhere as big if it wasn't for the oaths that pulled all the Greek nations into it.
The Greeks understood people pretty well, and figured their gods would be more than mere mortals, so they imagined the gods as people but more so. The gods had all the virtues and shortcomings that mortals had, but dialed up to a 'divine' scale. Larger than life, to use a popular turn of phrase. And today's celebrities are often said to appear larger than life (or at least try their best to project an appearance of being such).