Annotated 9-21
YEP, ALL JUST A GAME
HR IS DEFINITELY TELLING HIMSELF THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THIS AND THE ANSWER TO HIS RHETORICAL QUESTION IS OBVIOUSLY JUST “YES”
COMIC OVER
EVERYBODY GO HOME
PLEASE TIP YOUR SERVER ON THE WAY OUT
[Addendum: the magical effect here went through a couple of drafts. The original was wispier and more primary-colored: in retrospect, it’s hard to imagine why we didn’t ask for a purple starfield immediately.]
I don’t remember Arcanometry ever being mentioned again nor the source of HR’s powers being elaborated on really. Did you have some ideas here that were abandoned later on?
Phil and I liked to play with the word “magic computer” a lot in this phase of the comic. I think we were tantalized by the possibility of putting Phil’s comp sci knowledge into a different theoretical basis for magic, and making magic feel special again by generating a new set of rules. But that was a lot of work that we couldn’t really follow up on with the ways in which we worked (and sometimes didn’t work) together, so it got filed under “things HR knows that you don’t.”
Thanks T.
I’m guessing this is also part of why he decided to just dive right on in, later in the comic, instead of expositing more than he did?
‘Arcanometry’ has never seemed like anything other than a ‘scientific’ word for magic to me.
Yeah, now Arcanometrics, that’s where they teach the real stuff.
I thought that was Archanology?
Computer chips are just tiny crystals embedded, etched, and overlaid with specific patterns of other materials to control the flow of energy. In what way are they not magical?
While I get it wasn’t relevant to the character story being told, the fact that HR had magic and no one else did did bug me. Who taught him? Are there lots of wizards out there in the real world? Only a couple? Are they intentionally forced to be secretive? Is it a field that, by and large, it actually kinda useless and not practical way to obtain power, until HR figured out his ‘make money and power by using magic to make video games’ idea? You are allowed to have your unicorn of course, but now that the story is over and pretty much wrapped up, it’s still an interesting thing to puzzle out
I always took HRs world to be like ours, he had magic like you can study demonology from books in our world. It’s just that with the game he found a way to make it work.