Comic for Monday, December 16th, 2019

The black robbed chap is the one talking in panel 4. I realize in retrospect that isn't that clear. When I read text boxes, I read them in different voices, so it's way more clear to me who's talking in cases like that. I think it comes from DM D&D too much" all the NPCs have different voices, you see. Unfortunately slightly harder to see in text, so in this case you just have to tell by the remarkably childish level of insults leveled at Ashvalt to tell who it is

Apologies for the unexpected week off, just been really busy.

The following is mostly just whining and life blogging"

Without getting too much into the life blogging, part of it is my fault, part of it isn't; coming back from travel I had a lot of commitments and work saw fit to pile onto the heap. I was rolled off a project while I was travelling, the week before go-live, and rolled onto a new project. Predictably the roll off never happened (because it was delusional to think they wouldn't need me full time for the go-live in the first place) and the roll on did, so I was left with two full projects for a bit. Plus I agreed to start going to the gym with a friend, and I feel bad for missing that, so I have 2 days booked to gym, 2-3 booked for D&D and board games and what not, a few hobbies, got to run at least once or twice a week, and a job that sometimes thinks it's a job and half to two jobs, and all the miscellaneous bullshit that comes up with life" just didn't have a lot of free time for awhile, at least not of the productive nature.

Clearly the only solution is axe the job from the equation. It's the only really expendable part of the schedule"

The project at work is now in the out in the wild, so it's mostly beyond my hands, which should free up some time. I sometimes think people start reaching for the sledgehammers and crowbars as I walk out the door, so leaving them mostly to their own devices for more than a week wasn't ever going to go well. And both of my projects have a fully global team, which is their code word for 24 hour schedules, meaning that you're never that far from someone, somewhere, breaking something.

Anyway, at least we are back to schedule now I think. The next few pages are in progress.

"

As for the comic, you know, I have no idea where/when the idea that they used the utter ridiculous use of magic to set the projector and screen came into the picture, but it's been part of the scene as long as I can remember. I think it just seems odd because we don't actually see people frivolously use magic a ton in the comic, but some of the Family mages absolutely use it frivolously all the time, in part because they tend to be trained to use magic a lot earlier, so to them the ability to warp the fabric of reality and bend it to their will is more of "I could stand up, but I could just magic my coffee cup over here" sort of thing.

For most people, calculating magic is pretty hard, even for a Natural Mage, so it's not really a low effort thing; there's generally thought to be so such thing as a generalist Innate Mage, but a Natural Mage can get experienced to close that gap at least partially. Of the main cast, no one really falls into the category; Kally is a Natural Mage, and while she probably could do something like this if she really wanted (she can play tennis with magic after all), it would actually not be that easy for her, as she tends to operate on a bigger and more drastic level of Eidos change; it'd be like the cracking nuts with a sledgehammer. While Tyler is also a Natural Mage, he's an Innate Mage too, so power that's not his Innate power tends to be something it takes a bit more effort to use. People like Arkady and Ashian could absolutely use magic easily for trivial things, though I don't know I'd call them part of the main cast.

Natural Mages are far more common in here than in Central though, so this sort of thing would generally not even occur to people in Central to use magic like that, but is fairly common place among the Families. Arkady using magic for a handful of stupid things was original in the outline, but most instances of it I think were cut so far" lots of stuff of the side characters gets cut" and we still end up with this" hey, I never claimed to be a concise writer, after all, you're quite a few paragraphs into reading highly tangential mostly irrelevant stuff I babbled into a text box if you've made it here, so that should be self evident.