Grrl Power #961 - Easy peasy thaumaturgeezy

Hah, whoops!

Dave Barrack

Slight typo alert! You're spelling Offense one way (the American way) the first time in panel 2, then as Offence the second time in panel 4!

mepstein73

This assumes the science based version of magic, that 'magic' is basically learning to access and use the OS of the universe. And thus magic has nice neat rules to follow... even if the rules take up 1000 tomes, they are still straight forward and fixed. The common alternate is that it is belief oriented. All the hand waving, mumbling strange words, drawing glowing lines in the air, etc. is actually almost pure nonsense. The entire point of all that is to help the person focus their mind so they can channel the magic, and make it do what they want. But if they can visualize it in their mind, pull enough magic from the universe to make it happen, and do it without literally burning themselves to ash from the inside out, they can make anything happen. The true masters don't need to say anything, need no components, and barely move a muscle to throw a spell, they just will it, and it happens. But typically they are depicted as very old and powerful, if not some ancient being, perhaps even that being able to throw magic without any sort of focusing exercises is beyond the ability of mortals. The problem there is instead that the person first has to be *able* to do magic, then able to focus their mind enough to control the magic to do what they want - which is very much an individual thing, one person with self-control and a disciplined mind can start doing magic easy, while someone else will struggle to generate a small glowing ball of light. Next comes the flexibility of the mind to imagine what you want, combined with the discipline to imagine it clearly enough to manifest it. And finally is the development of handling the power without exhausting - or killing - yourself, this is often the greatest limitation as it takes time to build the ability to channel the power to last longer in a fight without becoming exhausted. and being able to throw the more powerful magics without dying.

Eric Loken

C:\>magic.exe

Tomek Kowal

I think the Myth Adventures series did a fair job of handling that. Skeeve was quite clever about leveraging what scant abilities he had, but his grasp was still pretty basic by the end of the series. At least, the series by the original author; I haven't read any of the Nye-authored stuff. Alas, Skeeve shall never reach the ripe old age of 80 in the stories because Robert Asprin has sadly left us far too early.

Jeffrey Nonken

To be fair, it takes years if not decades to be a good programmer, too. Structured learning in the modern world helps a lot. Imagine how long it would take if your Master Programmer was also using you as cheap labor, and just teaching you a little bit at a time.

Kevin Wright

That 1,000 years isn't as far off as you might have thought. Learned the syntax to Fortran in a single semester. Took 6 years to get good enough to put it on my resume. The biggest thing about those old languages: Find something someone else already wrote and just modify it for your needs. :)

Of course for Ged, the hardest thing to learn was when NOT to use magic. USING it came easy.

Louis Richards

The Wizard of Eathsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin start when the MC is a child and cover his education and by the third book he's around 55 years old and archmage

Crushogre

Or any combination thereof... ^_^

Churchill (formerly TeaBear)

Because of her top

Daniel Schinhofen

In any world where only a few people practice magic, it's always because of one or more of the following: (a) Only a few are genetically capable, (b) it requires a lot of study, (c) it's dangerous, (d) the source is hard to obtain, or (e) most people consider it evil.

Stephen Gilberg

I have read "A Wizardry Cursed" but was not able to find any of the other books. Are they still in print?

MiddKnight

There's actually a book series where magic ends up working EXACTLY like programming. It's basically an isekai with a programmer getting yoinked over and writing a compiler from scratch, resulting in being the most powerful mage in the world. Fairly amusing! By Rick Cook, starts with Wizard's Bane.

MiqoRems

Not to mention that once you do master all that stuff you become a god and vanish from mortal ken.

Marc Vun Kannon

She always makes at least two good points in every lecture.

Marc Vun Kannon

Does anyone else see Saitama when they look at Leon's face?

Paul Rendell

Hypno-boobs strike again!

JasonAW3

Just going to say it. We need more of the tigress mage master from the middle panel.

Chase the Dragon

What about the wizards of Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar? They tend to need quite some time to get the grasp of higher level spells. The warlocks are something different of course, but then they have their own limiter ...

Thomas Dorner

I feel like you need 1,000 years to master some of the older programming languages, like fortran.

Miyaa

They may just give up and start putting Magi-cillian in the morning coffee.

Justaguy

I immediately thought of Pug as well. It took him literal lifetimes to really learn what the hell he was doing, and even then Feist made it clear that Pug was still barely scratching the surface of what was possible.

Magraal

> Thanks so much for your support! I can imagine Dabbler telling that to her bra.

Carlos

He's apparently being taught magic by a succubus. Do you really think that 16 per day is going to be *enough* for the year?

James C

I would say it's a communal basket for all students. The last thing prospective mages need to deal with is a minor in healing to deal with std's.

wolfman

She keeps forgetting about their lack of training to resist such effects, which are probably part of the basic education back home for her.

Anton Schleef

Yeah, there are far too many stories with MC's who are specially gifted in magic. Some are reasonably balanced, like 'The Slayers', and some manage to be entertaining in other ways, like 'Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in The Next Life!?' (yes, that's all one title, including the punctuation), but far too many of them turn it into a crutch to make their hero The Hero and the story becomes rather bland about halfway through. 'How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord' at least has an MC who earned his power the normal way, even if it was before the series started. 'In Another World with My Smartphone' has an MC who technically doesn't learn magic faster, but has a maxed out aptitude value for all types of magic (which influences both what magics can be learned and how fast, any native with at least one aptitude equal to his does learn the corresponding spells just as fast, it's just extremely rare), and a divinely touched tool that gives him a very unfair advantage. Now, as for that basket with six thousand condoms.................you do realize that unless the ONLY thing he does for the next year or so is things that use them at a fairly rapid pace they're going to expire before he ever gets a chance to use them, right? Unless there's some kind of stasis magic on them to prevent their natural material decay, or are they being used as an incentive to teach him such a spell?

Anton Schleef

What part of "literally hypnotic" does Dabbler keep failing to remember? It was her own description!

DonnieRamesJio

Ever read any of the Riftwar Cycle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riftwar_Cycle Follows nearly a millennium of history, with generations of characters, and one mage (the titular magician of the first book) who lives through all of it. Not quite what you were talking about, but about the closest I can think of off the top of my head :P

Jesters Ghost

It is a very distracting top.

Michael Obert

Clearly Dabbler has never been to the readthedocs pages for things like PIL or NumPy. As for the handling of mana, that sounds like a problem for a hardware guy. /s

Damaged