![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis year in Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'll be posting questions from the new 2024 questionnaire that I made. If you like the questions, feel free to follow along. You can post your answers in a comment below, or make a post in your own blog and link to it in a comment.
Question 20: What is something that you believe that most other people don't? Why do you believe that?
Magic works, even in local-Earth. There's not a lot of it here, but there's enough to do some small things easily and some medium things with effort. I have on occasion seen and done some spectacular things. There are a lot of different kinds of magic, depending on culture, locale, and individual talents.
I give off magical energy like body heat, and one of the things it does is tend to fry electronics and machinery. Bothersome and only somewhat possible to get around. The keyboard I'm typing on? I've somehow melted through several of the keys. Never seen that before, and it's one of the weirder examples of burnthrough that I've seen, especially because plastic tends to be magically null. Something in the mix might've made it receptive. Usually the effects I see are like blowing out lightbulbs. More positive examples are enhancing the growth of plants and subtle senses like danger-sense.
As for belief, well, it's like believing in gravity. It's there and can be felt. Most people just don't pay any attention to it and don't know how to manipulate it. I don't blame anyone for disbelieving things that they haven't encountered. But they do tend to freak out when they're around me and reality does something "impossible." They're also quick to ask me for help if they wind up with a ghost or some other blatantly non-mundane problem in their lives.
One thing I'm watching for very closely right now is titans. A friend mentioned having seen very large lightning elementals with a distinctly humanoid shape. I find this disturbingly plausible. 1) The weather has become so violently intractable over the last decade or so that I rarely get any results from contacting it directly, and I go through the land spirits instead. 2) On a similar timescale, there's been a tendency for storms to have a wind-wall at the front, and snap off trees at the base. At least, I though it was the wind-walls doing that. 3) But I've also seen silos punched in with marks that really, really look like something hit it with Super-Strength, like you see in movies. That bit of evidence stuck in my mind because it was so weird, and when I heard about the titan sighting, I thought, well that would explain it neatly.
So, yes, I also think about magic in a scientific sense, looking for evidence and testing theories to see which is the best fit. Think of a spectrum, with magic at one end and science at the other. Bend it like a torc so the ends face each other. In the gap is quantum mechanics. It's all part of the same thing, Unified Theory of Everything. It's all just energy, forces, patterns. But you have to know that to see how the parts fit together. My tendency to do science to magic annoys other magic-users, and my tendency to do magic to science annoys other science-users. *shrug* I'm a devout empiricist, I use whatever works. I'm not going to abandon a perfectly workable tool just because someone else doesn't believe in it.
Question 20: What is something that you believe that most other people don't? Why do you believe that?
Magic works, even in local-Earth. There's not a lot of it here, but there's enough to do some small things easily and some medium things with effort. I have on occasion seen and done some spectacular things. There are a lot of different kinds of magic, depending on culture, locale, and individual talents.
I give off magical energy like body heat, and one of the things it does is tend to fry electronics and machinery. Bothersome and only somewhat possible to get around. The keyboard I'm typing on? I've somehow melted through several of the keys. Never seen that before, and it's one of the weirder examples of burnthrough that I've seen, especially because plastic tends to be magically null. Something in the mix might've made it receptive. Usually the effects I see are like blowing out lightbulbs. More positive examples are enhancing the growth of plants and subtle senses like danger-sense.
As for belief, well, it's like believing in gravity. It's there and can be felt. Most people just don't pay any attention to it and don't know how to manipulate it. I don't blame anyone for disbelieving things that they haven't encountered. But they do tend to freak out when they're around me and reality does something "impossible." They're also quick to ask me for help if they wind up with a ghost or some other blatantly non-mundane problem in their lives.
One thing I'm watching for very closely right now is titans. A friend mentioned having seen very large lightning elementals with a distinctly humanoid shape. I find this disturbingly plausible. 1) The weather has become so violently intractable over the last decade or so that I rarely get any results from contacting it directly, and I go through the land spirits instead. 2) On a similar timescale, there's been a tendency for storms to have a wind-wall at the front, and snap off trees at the base. At least, I though it was the wind-walls doing that. 3) But I've also seen silos punched in with marks that really, really look like something hit it with Super-Strength, like you see in movies. That bit of evidence stuck in my mind because it was so weird, and when I heard about the titan sighting, I thought, well that would explain it neatly.
So, yes, I also think about magic in a scientific sense, looking for evidence and testing theories to see which is the best fit. Think of a spectrum, with magic at one end and science at the other. Bend it like a torc so the ends face each other. In the gap is quantum mechanics. It's all part of the same thing, Unified Theory of Everything. It's all just energy, forces, patterns. But you have to know that to see how the parts fit together. My tendency to do science to magic annoys other magic-users, and my tendency to do magic to science annoys other science-users. *shrug* I'm a devout empiricist, I use whatever works. I'm not going to abandon a perfectly workable tool just because someone else doesn't believe in it.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2024-05-15 11:26 am (UTC)You did great, it's appreciated!💖